Category Archives: Art

Samatya Tour, July 2018

July 5, 2018 – 7:40 am

This is about a solo walking tour on Sunday, July 1, 2018. I was mostly around the Seventh Hill of the old walled city of Constantinople, ultimately in the quarter called Ψαμάθεια in Greek, and in Turkish Samatya.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in History, Istanbul | Tagged | Comments (0)

On Knowing Ourselves

March 3, 2018 – 4:47 am

In a 2012 post in this blog, I criticized a 2009 essay called “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice.” The putative advice was that of Strunk and White; but their advice was not in fact grammatical. They wrote not the elements of grammar, but The Elements of Style. They gave style advice by precept and example. The advice is good, if well understood. The critic should recognize that, as I wrote, “Rules of style are supposed to induce thinking, not obedience.”

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Archeology, Books, Collingwood, Philosophy, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

The Tree of Life

February 12, 2018 – 3:19 pm

My two recent courses at the Nesin Mathematics Village had a common theme. I want to describe the theme here, as simply as I can—I mean, by using as little technical knowledge of mathematics as I can. But I shall talk also about related poetry and philosophy, of T. S. Eliot and R. G. Collingwood respectively.


An elaborate binary tree, with spirals

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Psychology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Some Say Poetry

November 6, 2017 – 5:00 pm
Potted palms with plaster farm animals on hillside behind

Kuzguncuk, 2017.11.05

I originally set out to preserve here, for future reference, a poetry review that I liked. A remark on being a student had drawn my attention:

In My Poets, a work of autobiographical criticism with occasional ventriloquial interludes, McLane recalls two “early impasses in reading,” freshman-year encounters with Charles Olson and Frank O’Hara. She writes about not “getting it” but wanting to get it, about a desire to get it that was left wanting by code-breaking and analysis and satisfied by hearing and feeling.

I shall try to say more about learning and creating, in poetry and also in mathematics, after quoting the review in its entirety. It constitutes the second half of a “New Books” column by Christine Smallwood, in the Reviews section of Harper’s, July 2017.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Books, Collingwood, Education, Midgley | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

NL XIX: Two Senses of the Word “Society”

September 1, 2017 – 4:15 am

Executive summary (below) | Index to this series

After a break of half a year, I return to reading Collingwood’s New Leviathan. Being on holiday at an Aegean beach gives me the opportunity. While here, I may also return to Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad. Last winter I finished Part I of the New Leviathan, the part called “Man.” Here I continue with the first chapter of “Society.” I have reason to look at what Mary Midgley and Albert Einstein say about science. Collingwood’s investigation suggests a way of thinking about prejudice and discrimination.

Part II of the New Leviathan is “Society,” and the first two chapters of this, XIX and XX, concern the distinction between society proper and two more general notions. In Chapter XX, the more general notion will be community. In Chapter XIX, the more general notion has not got its own proper name, and so Collingwood denotes it by writing “society,” in quotation marks.

A “society” of chairs at the beach (Altınova 2017.08.31)

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Midgley, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Science | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (6)

Hypomnesis

July 30, 2017 – 6:35 pm

When is a help a hindrance? The Muses have provoked this question. They did this through their agents, the cicadas, who sang around the European Cultural Center of Delphi, during the 11th Panhellenic Logic Symposium, July 12–5, 2017.

     Cicada, European Cultural Center of Delphi, 2017.07.15     
Cicada, European Cultural Center of Delphi, 2017.07.15

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Archeology, Books, Collingwood, Education, Language, Mathematics, Philosophy, Travel | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Edirne

May 6, 2017 – 6:35 am

This is about a May Day trip to the second Ottoman capital from the third. In the latter, the government has been suppressing May Day demonstrations in Taksim Square since 2013. That year, the suppression may have helped provoke the Gezi Park protests, as I suggested in “May Day One Month Late.” I reported on the following year’s suppression in “Madness, Stupidity, or Evil?” This year (2017), labor unions held a legal May Day demonstration in Bakırköy, further west in European Istanbul, as reported by the Anadolu Agency (which as far as I know is owned by the Turkish state). My wife and I just got out of town.

Selimiye Mosque, 2017.04.30

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By David Pierce | Also posted in History, Travel, Turkey | Tagged , | Comments (1)

36th Istanbul Film Festival, 2017

April 18, 2017 – 3:35 am

This is about seeing six films in the Istanbul Film Festival, which began this year (2017) on Wednesday, April 5.

Kazimer Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918 (MoMA)

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Istanbul | Tagged | Comments (1)

Victor Vasarely

March 26, 2017 – 5:48 pm

Tophane-i Amire
Tophane-i Amire, 2017.03.25

Last week I wrote about the Turkish Impressionist Feyhaman Duran, born in 1886. Now my subject is the Hungarian-French Op Artist born twenty years later as Győző Vásárhelyi. His “Rétrospective en Turquie” is at the Tophane-i Amire Culture and Art Center in an Ottoman cannon foundry.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Books, Collingwood, Education, Istanbul, Mathematics, Midgley, Pirsig | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Feyhaman Duran

March 19, 2017 – 7:08 pm

Born on the Asian side of Istanbul in Kadıköy in 1886, İbrahim Feyhaman was orphaned nine years later. His father had been a poet and calligrapher. His mother’s dying wish was that Feyhaman attend the Lycée Impérial Ottoman de Galata-Sérai; his maternal grandfather, Duran Çavuş, saw that this happened. Some time after graduation, headmaster Tevfik Fikret had Feyhaman come back to Galatasaray to teach calligraphy.


Garden of Aşiyan, September 10, 2015

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By David Pierce | Also posted in History, Istanbul, New Leviathan | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)