Amity is equality, as Rackham translates it:
ΦΙΛΟΤΗΣ ΙΣΟΤΗΣ.
That’s what they say, anyway (§ v.5). Aristotle only refines it (§ viii.5):
ἡ δ᾽ ἰσότης καὶ ὁμοιότης φιλότης.
equality and similarity is amity.
Of eight readings on amity, or friendship, or love, or philia, we are in our second, comprising chapters v–viii of Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Tarabya Marina
Sunday, March 10, 2024
Friendship is natural to most animals, especially human beings, and that’s why we praise the philanthropist. You will see, if you travel, that all of us are family and even friends.
Something like that is what Aristotle says, in this first of eight readings on friendship. I have trouble imagining where the Philosopher is going to go with his subject; or perhaps I am troubled to imagine what may be in store.
Crows in a tree
in the morning mist by the Bosphorus
Kireçburnu, Sarıyer, İstanbul
Sunday, March 10, 2024
At the beginning of the first post “On Dialectic,” I raised the question of why I put so much into such posts. I propose now a couple of answers.
I want to collect all evidence for what I am investigating – currently dialectic in Plato’s Republic. As Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) has Sherlock Holmes say in A Study in Scarlet (1887; Wordsworth Classics, 2004),
It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.
And yet in Religion and Philosophy (1916), Collingwood states “the fundamental axiom of all thinking,”
namely that whatever exists stands in some definite relation to the other things that exist.
Thus “all the evidence” is everything in the world.
I am engaged in such self-defense as a certain Islamic philosopher is, by the account of Strauss in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952):
Fārābī avails himself then of the specific immunity of the commentator or of the historian in order to speak his mind concerning grave matters in his “historical” works, rather than in the works in which he speaks in his own name.
View from our balcony
Sanatçılar Sitesi, Tarabya, Istanbul
Saturday, July 8, 2023
Book XIX of the Iliad is all talk. This annoys Achilles, but is important for Agamemnon and Odysseus, and they should know better—Odysseus even says so.
Achilles gets ready to fight while Patroclus lies dead
(or, one of two well-fed street-dogs goes through the motions of defense)
Şalcıkır Parkı, Tarabya
Sarıyer, Istanbul
Sunday morning, March 26, 2023
Book VII of the Iliad shows us the paradox of men at war who can still work together.
Cock and cat on a village street
near a stream channelled between concrete walls
Tarabya, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Wednesday, January 11, 2023
Tarabya Marina, Sarıyer, Istanbul
January 1, 2023
“As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity,” says Glaucus to Diomedes in the Iliad (Book VI, line 146, in Lattimore’s translation). However, leaves are normally studied biologically; humanity, historically. I touched on the distinction in the previous post; now I want to say more. I shall be looking again at R.G. Collingwood’s notion of biological history as a kind of mistake. Collingwood does not mention astrology, but it would seem to be an analogous mistake. A correlative mistake could be called historical biology and be a kind of social constructionism (unfortunately the Wikipedia article on the subject currently [January 8, 2023] “needs attention from an expert in Sociology,” and I am not one).
Yeniköy (Νιχώρι) on the Bosphorus
Sarıyer, Istanbul, December 11, 2022
The Paphlagonians must have passed by here
on their way to join the Trojans
as they did according to Iliad II.851–5
as mentioned in the Wikipedia article “Cytorus”
created by me in 2010
In Book III of the Iliad, we learn about Menelaus, Paris, Hector, Helen, and Priam. Having learned about Agamemnon, Achilles, and Patroclus in the first two books, now we know all of the players in the following summary of the epic.
This post uses work of Hannah Arendt, Augustine, R. G. Collingwood, Tom Holland, Somerset Maugham, and Ved Mehta.
Ortaköy, December 27, 2021
In the first post of this series, I gave some reasons to read the Republic, and one of them was the problem of how our political leaders were not always the best. Plato had not solved that problem, since we still had it; but that meant nobody else had solved it either. Plato had at least taught us that people with great worldly power could nonetheless be more miserable than their subjects. In the Republic, Plato has Socrates teach that lesson
In adolescence, when I started visiting art museums in Washington for my own pleasure, I would visit also the museum shops, hoping to be able to take home a souvenir. Eventually, my own memories were enough to take home.
That is what I remember observing about myself, perhaps around the time when my body stopped growing taller. That time may be used to demarcate adulthood, although in kindergarten, it had made no sense to me that our bodies could ever stop growing.
Cycads outside Selenium Twins
in the valley above Ihlamur Kasırları
on the way to Beşiktaş
December 27, 2021
I have not been to a museum since the advent of Covid-19, but I often want a souvenir when I am reading now. The souvenir may be in the form of pencil marks in a book, or pen marks in a magazine, or various interventions in an electronic file. To be able to make such interventions, I save webpages, usually with a browser’s print function or with Print Friendly.
I may also respond to what I read by writing blog posts. This is why I now have eighteen of those on Plato’s Republic: one for each of the fourteen parts in which the dialogue was divided for an online discussion, and four more for when I had an abundance of ideas.
Where has all of that left me?
This is mostly about avoiding things. An early theme of Plato’s Republic is avoiding the deprivations of solitary life through politics. Some of us would rather just avoid politics. Such persons include Henry David Thoreau, Gilbert Ryle, and the inventor of the h-index (he is a physicist called Jorge E. Hirsch, but I know nothing else about him). I mentioned these persons in my last Plato post, “Badiou, Bloom, Ryle, Shorey.” I have some more to say about them here. In “Civil Disobedience” (1848), for example, Thoreau writes, “it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel”; but measures like the h-index are used to hide the human factor in the equations used to judge us.
All photos are from Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 21–3, 2021
Polytropy 