Why did Plato write the Republic? I give here not an answer, but elaborations on the question. I drafted these during the latter of two readings of the Republic, engaged in with two different groups of people in the last two years with the Catherine Project.
Village whose name I don’t know
between Yeniköy and Tarabya, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Behind me is a gated community
where every house has a swimming pool
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
Consider this a meditation on being from Generation X and growing up before the internet. Having watched a number of video accounts of bicycle trips along the Potomac River, I decided to dig up my own account; it is from twenty-eight years ago and is entirely verbal. I originally wrote it day by day with ballpoint pen in a composition book.
I had no plans for what I wrote, beyond informing myself for future trips. Nonetheless, my Uncle Bill used to talk about his friend Barry, whose failure to keep a diary may have kept him from writing a good book, at least in Bill’s judgment. The topic would have been the Presidential campaigns that Barry had covered for CBS News. They had all been losing.
This post contains images from one of the walking tours that I have learned to make from our flat on the European side of Istanbul.
When the Covid-19 pandemic got going, and there was nowhere in particular to go, I would wander aimlessly, just for the exercise. Then I figured out that, in about two hours, I could walk down to Ortaköy (“Middle Village,” Μεσαχώριον) by one route, coming back by another. I could also pass through the wall around the garden of one of the Ottoman sultans, then exit by another.
The particular route below takes in as much greenery as possible, including several named parks:
Ihlamur Parkı is different from the nearby Ihlamur Kasırları, “Linden Pavilions.” Though it contains two Ottoman stelae, the park does not seem to have a name posted on the ground; its name on the list above links to the Twitter account of a group formed to resist its being built over.
Ayşe and I walked the route below, Sunday morning, August 2, 2021, during a heat wave.
Here are some photos from our recent tour (July 21–29, 2018), in chronological order. More then ten times as many photos, along with a verbal account, not always in chronological order, are on a page of this website (as opposed to a post, like the present one); the page is called Karadeniz, which is the Turkish for Black Sea.
When I lived in Ankara, I tried to build up a collection of photographs about life in different cities. I was exercised by the Ankara mayor’s utter disrespect for pedestrians, as shown for example in his narrowing of sidewalks (by widening roads) so that bus shelters would have to block them, and the sidewalks themselves might disappear into the walls surrounding the adjacent embassies. I took photographs of such situations and started putting them on my webpages (I didn’t have this blog then). I looked for similar situations when we visited Europe. Such visits were usually for conferences, and I prepared webpages about Barcelona, Besançon, Berne, and Istanbul.
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.
Ayşe and I toured the northern part of the old walled city of Istanbul—including the religiously conservative district of Çarşamba—with our student Abdullah and his brother Yusuf on Sunday, April 8, 2018. At another site I documented a similar tour in March, 2015. Now I do not try to be so thorough. I did not try to document the whole trip photographically, but here is a selection of pictures that I did take. We saw Byzantine and Ottoman structures. For the former, I have since found a comprehensive reference: The Byzantine Legacy.
At the end of Shakespeare’s romance called The Tempest, Prospero plans to retire to Milan, where “Every third thought shall be my grave.” I remember these words from reading the play in school and college. I also have thoughts of my grave, and their frequency may increase as the years pass. However, for each of those thoughts, I seem to have more thoughts that are based on memories of youth and childhood.
During a mathematics conference, I visit the ruins of a monastery on a remote island in an inland sea. This moves me to consider the relation between introversion and, if not mathematics, then monasticism. On the origins of Christian monasticism, I look at several sources, notably Gibbon (see the References); also Maugham, who writes of a hermit on an island of the Torres Strait. Since the monastery on the island was Armenian, in what is now Turkey, one should consider also the treatment of minority populations here. I only acknowledge the issue, suggesting Wikipedia pages (linked to presently) as a starting point for research. On this subject, old books on my shelves are not much help; my own experience is not much more help, at least not in a way that lends itself to being written of here. I do know that Turkish politicians will treat imputations of their own Armenian ancestry as an insult.
We visited Ahtamar Island for a second time on Wednesday, August 23, 2017. Thus we saw again the remains of the Church of the Holy Cross. This Armenian church was consecrated in 921 and presumably desecrated in 1915, if not earlier; now, since our last visit, though officially a museum, the church would seem to have been reconsecrated, to judge by the new altarpiece, featuring an icon of the Madonna and Child.
Altarpiece, Church of the Holy Cross, Ahtamar Island
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
My question has two particular instances.
At a mathematical conference, can theorems “speak for themselves,” or should their presenters be at pains to help the listener appreciate the results?
When the conference is in Greece, even at one of the country’s greatest archeological sites, does this enhance the reading of ancient Greek texts, or is it only a distraction?
Polytropy 