Category Archives: History

NL V: “The Ambiguity of Feeling”

February 17, 2014 – 4:48 pm

Index to this series

Feeling differs from thought. Thought is founded in feeling; thought is erected on feeling; thought needs feeling. Thought needs feelings that are strong enough to support it. But thought itself is not strong (or weak); it has (or can have) other properties, like precision and definiteness. Thought can be remembered and shared in a way that feeling cannot.

The New Leviathan is a work of thought. One might say that a work of thought cannot properly explain feeling. Collingwood himself says this, more or less, in Chapter V, even in its very title: “The Ambiguity of Feeling.” Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle, Collingwood, Descartes, Fowler, Grammar, Logic, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Plato, Principles of Art, Psychology, Science, T. S. Eliot | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7)

Burgazada

February 14, 2014 – 3:36 pm

Pressure

Istanbul is a crowded, paved city. Consider the graphic below, showing public green space in Istanbul, London, New York, Berlin, Hong Kong, and Paris. The green space of Istanbul is almost invisible.

cities-green Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Gezi, Istanbul, The Islands, Tourism | Tagged | Comments (0)

NL IV: “Feeling”

February 3, 2014 – 11:44 am

Index to this series

Contents of this article:

  • The Fallacy of Misplaced Argument. Do not argue about what is immediately given to consciousness
  • Feeling and Thought. An analysis of feeling is not immediately given to consciousness
  • Summary of the chapter, as analyzed into nine parts

    Continue reading →

    • By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, Collingwood, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Plato, Principles of Art, Science | Tagged , , , , | Comments (11)

    NL III: “Body As Mind”

    January 25, 2014 – 7:17 am

    Index to this series

    In Chapter I of The New Leviathan, we stipulated that natural science, the “science of body,” must be free to pursue its own aims. But we ourselves are doing science of mind, and:

    1. 85. The sciences of mind, unless they preach error or confuse the issue by dishonest or involuntary obscurity, can tell us nothing but what each can verify for himself by reflecting on his own mind.

    All of us can be scientists of mind, if only we are capable of reflection: Continue reading →

    By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Conic Sections, Descartes, Education, Euclid, Mathematics, New Leviathan, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Plato, Principles of Art, Psychology, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

    NL II: “The Relation Between Body and Mind”

    January 20, 2014 – 11:39 am

    Index to this series

    I continue making notes on The New Leviathan of R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943). Now my main concern is with the second chapter, “The Relation Between Body and Mind”; but I shall range widely, as I did for the first chapter.

    Preliminaries

    Some writers begin with an outline, which they proceed to fill out with words. At least, they do this if they do what they are taught in school, according to Robert Pirsig:

    He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught in all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving Quality they had a purpose.

    That is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, chapter 17.

    Does anybody strictly follow the textbook method of writing? Continue reading →

    By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, Categorical Thinking, Collingwood, Descartes, Education, Logic, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Ontological Proof, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Pirsig, Plato, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (13)

    The Tradition of Western Philosophy

    September 10, 2013 – 1:41 pm

    Note added October 16, 2018: Here I compare two projects of re-examining the philosophical tradition named in my title. The projects are those of

    • R. G. Collingwood in An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford, 1933);

    • Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan at St John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, beginning in 1937.

    I review

    • how I ended up as a student at St John’s;

    • how Collingwood has been read (or not read) by myself and others, notably Simon Blackburn;

    • how Collingwood’s Essay is based on the hypothesis of the “overlap of classes.”

    Continue reading →

    By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, Collingwood, Descartes, dialectic, Education, Euclid, Logic, Mathematics, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Pirsig, Plato, Principles of Art, Science, T. S. Eliot | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (11)