Pacifism is properly pacificism, the making of peace: not a belief or an attitude, but a practice. Mathematics then is pacifist, because learning it means learning that you cannot fight your way to the truth. Might does not make right. If others are going to agree with you, they will have to do it freely. Moreover, you cannot rest until they do agree with you, if you’ve got a piece of mathematics that you think is right; for you could be wrong, if others don’t agree.
This article gathers, and in some cases quotes and examines, popular articles about R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943).
By articles, I mean not blog posts like mine and others’, but essays by professionals in publications that have editors.
By popular, I mean written not for other professionals, but for the laity.
This concludes the series that began with “An Indictment” and continued with “A Defense.”
Ayşe and Meriç her lawyer
This is a preliminary report on two recent films:
The report is preliminary, not because there is going to be another, but because I have seen each film only once, and I may see one of them again.
I remember that François Truffaut liked to see films at least twice. I believe I read this in The Washington Post, and I might have guessed it was in an appreciation published when Truffaut died; however, he died on October 21, 1984, during the first semester of my sophomore year at St John’s College in Santa Fe, and I would not have been reading the Post then.
While in college, I did enjoy seeing some films twice, or a second time; Truffaut’s own 400 Coups was an example, a French teacher having shown it to us in high school.
The two films that I am reviewing now concern young adults trying to find their own way in the world, in defiance of their elders. We all have to do this. In every generation, some will do it more defiantly than others. Heraclitus can be defiant, he of Ephesus and thus one of the Ionian philosophers, whose spirit I imagine to haunt the Nesin Mathematics Village. A further reason to bring up Heraclitus will be a theme that is explicit in Pear Tree, implicit (or metaphorical) in Coyotes: gold.
A copy of The Logos of Heraclitus,
by Eva Brann,
on Marmara Island, July, 2012
Here is the defense (savunma) of Ayşe Berkman before the 36th Heavy Penalty Court (Ağır Ceza Mahkemesi) of Istanbul, January 10, 2019, against the charge of making propaganda for a terrorist organization (terör örgütü propagandası yapmak).
The crowd from the courtroom when the session was over.
From a tweet of the Peace Academics
This is an attempt at a dialectical understanding of freedom and responsibility, punishment and forgiveness, things like that. My text is a part of the Gospel, though I attribute no special supernatural power to this. I shall refer also to the Dialogues of Plato.
The Antitheses are the six parallel teachings, delivered by Jesus of Nazareth in the Sermon on the Mount, as recounted in Chapter 5 of the Gospel According to St Matthew, starting at verse 21. I summarize:
Do not kill people; do not even get angry with them.
Do not commit adultery; do not even fantasize about it.
In divorce, follow the established procedure; do not even divorce.
Do not forswear yourself; do not even swear.
Keep retribution commensurate with the crime; do not even seek retribution.
Love your neighbor; love even your enemy.
Free speech continues to matter for this blog. Here in Turkey, the “Academics for Peace” are signers of a petition calling for an end to what the petition calls a “deliberate and planned massacre.” On July 17, 2018, three more of these Academics were given suspended sentences of fifteen months for “propagandizing for a terrorist organization.” There is a story on this by Tansu Pişkin on Bianet. A suspended sentence means the convicted person is on probation for some years. When I met up recently with a Peace Academic who had already been given a suspended sentence, he laughed it off.
The bill of indictment (iddianame) for each Peace Academic is 14 pages long. Continue reading
Concerning a proposal (not by me) to make a “strategic withdrawal” from public life in order to restore the imagined virtues of the Middle Ages.
What in the 1960s was a commune is now an intentional community. I lived in one in the mid-1990s, when I was in graduate school.
On Thursday, February 16 of this year (2017), at Bosphorus University, a talk on the subject of freedom of speech was given by a Guardian columnist who was a history professor at Oxford. This was Timothy Garton Ash, who observed that freedom of speech and of the press had been severely curtailed in Turkey. For a defender of the regime, the accusation might be belied by the speaker’s freedom to make it. Academics can still come from abroad and give their critical talks. However, as Professor Garton Ash detailed, many Turkish academics have been fired from their positions; many journalists have been imprisoned; other journalists cannot get their articles published.
Fulya, Şişli, Istanbul
Friday evening, January 6, 2017
Summary added January 29, 2019, revised May 8, 2019. Practical reason is the support of one intention by another; theoretical, one proposition by another. Reasoning is thus always “motivated reasoning”: we engage in it to relieve the distress of uncertainty. Reason is primarily practical, only secondarily theoretical; and the reason for saying this is the persistence of anthropomorphism in theoretical reasoning: by the Law of Primitive Survivals in Chapter IX, we tend to think even of inanimate objects as forming intentions the way we do.
Reasons for adding this summary of Chapter XIV of Collingwood’s New Leviathan include
Says Burkeman, whose “problem” is apparently motivated reasoning itself,
One of the sneakier forms of the problem, highlighted in a recent essay by the American ethicist Jennifer Zamzow, is “solution aversion”: people judge the seriousness of a social problem, it’s been found, partly based on how appetising or displeasing they find the proposed solution. Obviously, that’s illogical …
On the contrary, how we reason cannot be “illogical,” any more than how we speak can be “ungrammatical.” Logic is an account, or an analysis, of how we do actually reason; grammar, of how we speak. Of course we may make errors, by our own standards.
Rogier van der Weyden (Netherlandish, 1399/1400–1464),
Portrait of a Lady, c. 1460, oil on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington; Andrew W. Mellon Collection
There was a rumor that Collingwood had become a communist. According to David Boucher, editor of the revised (1992) edition of The New Leviathan, the rumor was one of the “many reasons why [that book] failed to attract the acclaim which had been afforded Collingwood’s other major works.” Continue reading
Polytropy 