Category Archives: Nature

Taksim in Limbo

December 10, 2014 – 5:03 pm

This is a personal report on the current condition of Taksim square. I visited Taksim recently (early December, 2014) on a rare sunny day.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Gezi, History, Istanbul, Tourism | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

The Istanbul Seaside

December 3, 2014 – 11:00 am

The original purpose of this article was to display and explain two photographs by me: one of a seaside park, the other of an abandoned car. I do this, and I talk about the stresses and compensations of the big city. I continue with the theme of Freedom from an earlier article of that name.

It is now early December in Istanbul, 2014. We have hardly seen the sun for weeks. Some rain falls almost every day. One has to learn to go out when one can. Last Saturday was cloudy, but dry, so we walked down to the Tophane-i Amire—the “Cannon Foundry Imperial.” The name is romantic, because it dates from Ottoman times, and because, like Koh-i-Noor, it is in a Persian grammatical form that is obsolete in Turkish. Today’s name of the cannon foundry would be Amire Tophane.
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By David Pierce | Also posted in Bosphorus, Causation, Collingwood, Gezi, History, Istanbul, Philosophy, Pirsig, Psychology, Tophane, Tourism, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)

Latest rise of the old moon

October 22, 2014 – 4:10 pm

Recent mornings, looking out my window before dawn, I have seen the moon wane narrower and narrower. I suppose today was the last morning it will be seen for a few weeks. Time on the first photo is 6:26, daylight savings time in Istanbul, a few minutes after the prayer call from the mosque down the street.

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

Precautions

September 8, 2014 – 4:39 pm

On Monday morning, September 1, 2014, the car that was to take us to Atatürk Airport for a flight to Tbilisi for the Caucasian Mathematics Conference was late. The dispatcher said there had been a breakdown, but he was sending another car. To wait for this was frustrating; but the new car did come, and we made it to the airport in plenty of time. Indeed, our driver said the roads would be clear (and they were), because a lot of traffic had been tied up on the Bosphorus Bridge. This had been closed, because of a threatened suicide.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Istanbul, Psychology, Turkey | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Freedom

August 4, 2014 – 12:31 pm

How do our thoughts age?

Having written recently that natural science was not history of nature, I looked back at Collingwood’s posthumous Principles of History for his arguments about this. I read his discussion of freedom as what distinguishes history from natural science. I recalled that his earlier writing was more concerned with removing distinctions than drawing them.

This is something that I investigate here. I occasionally encounter denials that we have “free will.” I find such denials bizarre; but evidently some people believe them, or at least believe they are worthy of consideration. I find Collingwood’s own account of freedom to be worthy of consideration. But then, considering this along with the rest of his œuvre, I have to conclude that everything is free. This conclusion is not really new to me; I drew such a conclusion as an adolescent. It may be a common thought. Wordsworth seems to have had such a thought, according to his Ode:

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Education, Facebook, Freedom, History, New Leviathan, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Pirsig, Plato, Principles of Art, Science | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (13)

Istanbul, August 1, 2014

August 1, 2014 – 11:52 am

This is my first full day in Istanbul for three weeks, and I have four observations, on the color of the sky, on the habits political rulers, on public treatment of space, and on the value of art. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Istanbul, Turkey, Visual Art | Tagged | Comments (0)

June in the New World

June 20, 2014 – 2:21 pm

This is about our first visit to the US since the death of my mother. The visit culminated in a memorial observance on a wooded hillside at my cousin’s place in West Virginia. Before going there, Ayşe and I stayed with friends in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington. We made some visits to my mother’s currently unoccupied house in Alexandria. Unfortunately we had little time for much else; at least we could not plan on anything else. I have no intention of recounting the whole trip, but will have some things to say about the photos below. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Visual Art, West Virginia | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (8)