Category Archives: Language

NL VI: “Language”

February 27, 2014 – 3:37 pm

Index to this series

This is about the first section of Chapter VI, “Language,” of The New Leviathan. The whole chapter can be ana­lyzed into five sections, with §N consisting of those paragraphs numbered 6. N or 6. NX. I summarize the sections as follows:

  1. Language is an abstraction from discourse. Discourse is an activity together with what is meant by it. (¶¶6. 1–19)
  2. Through language, we become conscious of our feelings. Becoming conscious of our language is another step, which is taken by artists. (¶¶6. 2–29)
  3. A feeling is not “mediated” by the language we use for it. (¶¶6. 3–36)
  4. Hobbes discovered that language is prior to knowledge. (¶¶6. 4–47)
  5. Those who dispute this finding over­look that not all language is rational. (¶¶6. 5–59)

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Education, Istanbul, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato, Principles of Art, question and answer | Tagged , | Comments (4)

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, History, Logic, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Plato, Principles of Art, Psychology, Science, T. S. Eliot | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7)

Learning mathematics

May 14, 2013 – 11:23 am

This is mostly reminiscences about high school. I also give some opinions about how mathematics ought to be learned. The post originally formed one piece with my last article, “Limits.”

I learned calculus, and the epsilon-delta definition of limit, in Washington D.C., in my last two years at St Albans School, in a course taught by a peculiar fellow named Donald J. Brown. The first of these two years was officially called Precalculus Honors, but some time in that year, we started in on calculus proper.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Archimedes, Calculus, Education, Euclid, G. H. Hardy, Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy of Mathematics, Strunk and White | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (5)

Strunk and White

June 19, 2012 – 12:30 pm

The following is a lightly edited concatenation of some emails I wrote several years ago, in response to “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice,” Geoffrey K. Pullum’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 17, 2009). [I returned to Strunk and White in March 2018; I supplemented the present post in July 2018.] Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Education, Grammar, Strunk and White | Tagged | Comments (8)

Aristotle on Heraclitus

June 6, 2012 – 11:14 am

Along with various fellow alumni of St John’s College (Annapolis and Santa Fe), I am currently reading Eva Brann, The Logos of Heraclitus (Paul Dry Books, 2011). This may inspire some incidental posts, such as the present one, which considers the same sentence about Heraclitus by Aristotle in three languages, mainly because of the oddity of a published Turkish translation. The oddity is in the treatment of opinion and knowledge. The distinction between them is important in, for example, Plato’s Republic; but I shall not really have anything to say here about the distinction as such.

Miss Brann spends III.A (pages 15–19) considering Fragment 50 (by the Diels reckoning):

οὐκ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle, Philosophy, Plato, Turkish | Tagged , | Comments (1)