Category Archives: Turkish

The Peace of Liberal Education

January 13, 2015 – 1:33 pm
The wall of Dolmabahçe Sarayı, January 11, 2015

The wall of Dolmabahçe Sarayı, January 11, 2015

The occasion of this article is my discovery of a published Turkish translation of Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis or The Map of Knowledge (Oxford, 1924). Published as Speculum Mentis ya da Bilginin Haritası (Ankara: Doğu Batı, 2014), the translation is by Kubilay Aysevenler and Zerrin Eren. Near the end of the book, Collingwood writes the following paragraph about education, or what I would call more precisely liberal education. The main purpose of this article then is to offer the paragraph to any reader who happens to stop by.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Education, Euclid, History, Istanbul, Language, Mathematics, Philosophy, Principles of Art | Tagged | Comments (2)

Bosphorus Sky

December 19, 2014 – 4:14 pm

This is about the morning of Thursday, December 18, 2014, a morning I spent by the Bosphorus, thinking mostly about poetry, and photographing the sky.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Bosphorus, Collingwood, Descartes, Education, History, Istanbul, Language, Mathematics, Nature, Nesin Mathematics Village, Philosophy, Poetry, Principles of Art, Psychology, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)

Mîna Urgan on alphabets & Atatürk

December 9, 2014 – 3:33 pm

mina-urgan-paragraf

In the news in Turkey lately (December 2014) is the vow or threat of the President to make lessons in Ottoman Turkish compulsory for Turkish schoolchildren. How realistic the threat is, I do not know. There is the Constitutional question of what the President’s powers actually are. There is also the practical question of whether it is even possible for most Turkish students to learn Ottoman. Foreign language education in Turkey is not generally very good; and as far as I can tell, Ottoman Turkish is practically a foreign language now. Two paragraphs from Geoffrey Lewis’s Turkish Grammar (Oxford, 1967, pages xx–xxi) are very interesting in this regard:

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Education, History, Istanbul, Language, Turkey | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

Graffiti grammar

September 15, 2014 – 1:32 pm

I happened to notice the words in the photograph below, written on a sidewalk box near the Özel Fransız Lape Hastanesi (the private Hôpital de la Paix), which has apparently been run by the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul since 1858. These must be the Sisters whom I occasionally see on the street.

It seems Gomidas was a patient at the Peace Hospital after his breakdown: a breakdown resulting from his deportation from Istanbul with other Armenian intellectuals in 1915. Gomidas was saved in body, not in spirit. Such is the history of the streets I walk daily.

Are the clouds descending on us?

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The words in the photo:

Buraya Gri Boya Gelecek → Geliyor → Gelemedi

To here grey color will come → is coming → could not come

It could only come so far!

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

Facts (NL IX, ‘Retrospect,’ first 6 paragraphs)

August 1, 2014 – 9:43 am

Index to this series

A certain person says,

I am not better than you or more virtuous than you. If you see me on the right path, help me. If you see me on the wrong path, advise me and halt me. And obey me as far as I obey God.

How should one hear these words: as an eminently reasonable expression of benevolent humility such as any of us might honorably make? Well, no matter how qualified, the command obey me might be a warning sign. The words are in fact from a recently published video, as quoted in the Guardian Weekly (Vol 190 No 5, 11–17 July 2014, p. 4). The speaker is the man whose nom de guerre is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, on whose head the Department of State of the United States of America placed a ten-million-dollar bounty in 2011. He now styles himself Ibrahim, Caliph of the Islamic State, a new entity that is supposed to restore the lost Muslim glory of past centuries. This restoration is to be achieved through war. War requires military discipline, with punishments meted out for infractions like insubordination, not to mention the slaughter of those perceived as enemies. So al-Baghdadi’s request to be advised and halted if seen to be in the wrong must be interpreted rather carefully.

It is difficult to know how to interpret somebody’s words. With that I pass to the transitional chapter in the first part, “Man,” of Collingwood’s The New Leviathan.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle, Categorical Thinking, Collingwood, Grammar, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato, Visual Art | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)

Cogito ne demek?

April 11, 2014 – 1:40 pm

Why the late Geoffrey Lewis’s Turkish Grammar (2d ed., Oxford, 2000) is exceptional:

At the beginning of a clause demek, demek ki, or demek oluyor ki (‘it becomes to say’) signifies ‘that is to say’: düşünüyorum, demek ki varım ‘I am thinking, which means I exist.’ (This Turkish translation of Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum is right—‘I am thinking’—and the usual English version—‘I think’—is wrong.)

I sent the foregoing to Facebook this morning, but this was not the best medium for the typographical features of boldface, italics, directional quotation marks, and indented quotations.

I had been aware that Lewis had died, Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Descartes, Facebook, Grammar, Language, Philosophy | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

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 | Tagged , | Comments (0)