Category Archives: Philosophy

Prairie Life

September 3, 2025 – 6:16 pm

I’m going to make some comparisons here, even some likenings, mainly between

  • Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), especially chapter 2, and
  • Wendell Berry, “Conservation is Good Work” (Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1993; reprinted in Essays 1993–2017, Library of America, 2019).

Pirsig recounts a motorcycle trip west from Minnesota across the prairie. The riders pass through Yellowstone National Park, but Pirsig does not like it. At least his former self did not like it. This is in chapter 12 of ZAMM:

The guided-tour attitude of the rangers angered him. The Bronx Zoo attitudes of the tourists disgusted him even more … It seemed an enormous museum with exhibits carefully manicured to give the illusion of reality, but nicely chained off so that children would not injure them.

For Berry, such parks set the wrong standard for what should be conserved:

Right at the heart of American conservation, from the beginning, has been the preservation of spectacular places. The typical American park is in a place that is “breathtakingly” beautiful or wonderful and of little apparent economic value. Mountains, canyons, deserts, spectacular landforms, geysers, waterfalls – these are the stuff of parks. There is, significantly, no prairie national park.

I do see that Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve was created in Kansas in 1996.

A number of roses in three groups on canes sharing a root, against ground covered with pine needles; the shadow of a tree trunk divides the scene diagonally

Roses in the garden
Altınova, Ayvalik, Balıkesir
September 2, 2025

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Pirsig | Tagged , , , | Comments (9)

Omniscience

September 2, 2025 – 6:10 pm

I have been working on a post that could have been the result of the following prompt:

Write on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and AI, using such thinkers as

  • Yuval Noah Harari (b. 1976),
  • William Deresiewicz (b. 1964),
  • Annie Dillard (b. 1945),
  • Roger Penrose (b. 1931),
  • Robert Pirsig (1928–2017),
  • George Orwell (1903–50),
  • E.B. White (1899–1985),
  • Michael Attaleiates (c. 1022–80), and
  • Plato (fl. 4th cent. b.c.e.).

Not until I had finished a first draft did I actually know that all of those people would feature. My real prompt had been more like,

In the style of David Pierce, write on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and AI, as discussed by Roger Penrose in his “Précis of The Emperor’s New Mind.”

So instructed, could an LLM have come up with the connections that I did? Well, sure. Anything that has happened, could have happened, even in some other way. The real question is whether I would want AI to write my next post.

The present post consists of things I wanted to say at the beginning of that other post, after I had a first draft.

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Note added September 27, 2025. The next post after this one was

  • “Prairie Life,” comparing Robert Pirsig and Wendell Berry, because I was reading them both.

After that came the two posts that the draft mentioned above turned into:

After those came

  • “The System,” on what was bothering Pirsig; this led me to the resurgence of fascism today.

I was trying to work all of this out in the place in the photo below.

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Two tall bushes, lit up by the sun, rise in front of a low wall, next to a pine trunk; crowns of pines behind

Laurels in the garden
Altınova, Ayvalik, Balıkesir
September 2, 2025

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Harper’s, Pirsig | Tagged , , , | Comments (4)

Courage

August 21, 2025 – 1:05 pm

Below is my essay on courage, first drafted in April of last year (2024). A reason to think of it now is a recent pair of essays, coming from the United States:

The latter takes up all of the virtues that Socrates does.

Plato didn’t get everything right, but he remains one of the most widely studied philosophers in western history for a reason. In Book IV of The Republic, he discusses the four cardinal virtues. Hope didn’t make the list.

Here they are:

  • Wisdom (or prudence)
  • Self-control (or temperance)
  • Fairness (or justice)
  • Fortitude (or courage)

These four virtues feed a healthy society. We’re supposed to teach them to our young and practice them every day. Hope stems from an insufficient knowledge about the world, but fortitude grows out of wisdom.

We’re long on hope, but short on fortitude.

It would be good if we had more fortitude. As Wildfire writes more recently, in “Fighting Fascism at The End of The World: What nobody wants to say” (August 20, 2025),

It’s gotten popular to tell people to physically throw themselves in front of ICE agents to stop arrests. Allow me to pose a rude question: If someone won’t even wear a piece of cloth on their face for a few hours a day, are they going to get thrown in jail to protect someone they don’t even know?

For Aristotle at least, there is a distinction between the two qualities that could be meant by fortitude and courage respectively. The distinction is a theme of my own essay below.

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Crisp translation; behind it calm water, with wooded bluffs dotted with houses beyond

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
I usually read Rackham’s translation in the Loeb edition
sometimes along the Bosphorus, as here

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle, Homer | Tagged , | Comments (2)

On Kant’s Groundwork

July 5, 2025 – 12:12 pm

Below are some notes (by me) on Immanuel Kant’s 1785 treatise, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. This is the work that introduces the categorical imperative. My notes are in sections corresponding to Kant’s, but with my own titles (after the preface):

  1. That there appears to be a moral law.
  2. What the moral law must be.
  3. Whether there can be a moral law.

The English title of the treatise is Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Apparently the first word can also be Grounding or Foundation or even Fundamental Principles, and the ensuing preposition can be of. Also, in imitation of the German, Metaphysics can be made singular in form.

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Book, bottle, &c. on picnic table; through the trees beyond, water with a passage to open sea

One place I have been reading Kant is Çamlık Parkı, Erguvantepe, Kireçburnu, Sarıyer, İstanbul, here on Wednesday, July 2, 2025. Çamlık = pine grove; erguvan = Judas tree: tepe = peak; kireç burnu = lime point (source for the construction of Rumeli Hisarı, a fortress used in the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, which led to the conquest of the city in 1453); sarı yer = yellow place, perhaps so named for the soil in some part of today’s borough.

The view is of the Bosphorus as it opens to the Black Sea. Jason would have passed through the opening with the Argonauts, and Xenophon with the Ten Thousand. Now the third Bosphorus Bridge crosses it

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By David Pierce | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7)

Astronomy Anomaly

June 27, 2025 – 8:44 am

Aristotle was the subject of the last three posts on this blog:

“Perception Deception”
The Philosopher asserts in De Anima that the eyes cannot be in error about color; Josef Albers contradicts this.
“Imitation Limitation”
In the Poetics, Aristotle seems to use mimêsis as a differentia of poiêsis among the technai. Arts not poetry are nonetheless imitative, but perhaps artists are to be distinguished for imitating themselves.
“Purity Obscurity”
Does catharsis clean the emotions, or wash them away?

Two more posts might have taken up the latter half of the Poetics, but they never materialized.

I turn now to the work held under the arm of Aristotle’s teacher, at the center of Raphael’s School of Athens.

Small book atop a pile of rubble on a beach, sea beyond

Altınova, Balıkesir, Monday, June 16, 2025

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Mathematics, Plato | Tagged , , , , | Comments (5)

Purity Obscurity

April 19, 2025 – 3:30 pm

The covers of the books named just below, showing a stern bearded face (Aristotle), a wrench like a flower on a stem among leaves (Pirsig), a dirt road lined with brick buildings (Eliot)
Books taken up in this post:

Aristotle’s Poetics,
George Eliot’s Middlemarch,
Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle | Tagged , , , | Comments (5)

Imitation Limitation

April 16, 2025 – 6:36 pm

I alluded to this post in my last one, “Perception Deception.” There I questioned the gnomic assertion of its title.

The questioning then consisted of little more than quoting De Anima, where Aristotle points out that a sense cannot be deceived by its proper object. In particular, sight detects color infallibly.

Can of Coca-Cola held in a hand
I do not recall the source of this particular image, which I saved on March 29, 2024. The concept, at least, is apparently due to Akiyoshi Kitaoka.

If you see red in the image above, you are not mistaken, even if none of the pixels is of a kind called red.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle, Art | Tagged | Comments (2)

Perception Deception

April 11, 2025 – 9:56 pm


John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIX
(on the last line, “make” should be “ſhake”)

This post involves:

  • “the” philosopher –
    • Aristotle;
  • two mathematicians –
    • Euclid,
    • David Hilbert;
  • three persons associated with Black Mountain College –
    • Josef Albers,
    • Dorothea Rockburne,
    • Max Dehn;
  • one person (in addition to myself and Dehn) associated with St John’s College –
    • David Bolotin.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle, Euclid | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4)

Machinations

February 3, 2025 – 6:00 pm

Sources for this post include the following.

  • On recent events in the US:

    1. Seth Masket, “Friday Night Musk-acre” (February 1, 2025).
    2. Olga Lautman: “Why has Musk gained access to our data?” (February 2, 2025).
    3. Timothy Snyder, “The Logic of Destruction: And how to resist it” (February 2, 2025).
    4. Heather Cox Richardson, “February 2, 2025.”
    5. Malcolm Nance, “In The Trump ‘White’ House: No Spies Matter” (February 7, 2025).
    6. “An Uproar as Trump and Musk Wreak Havoc” (New York Times, letters, February 7, 2025).
    7. Elad Nehorai, “Elon Musk Isn’t a White Nationalist. He’s a White Globalist” (February 7, 2025).

  • On technological fantasies and what they may do to students:

    1. Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries, and Joe Slater, “ChatGPT is bullshit” (2024).
    2. John Warner, “AI Boosters Think You’re Dumb” (February 2, 2025).
    3. Seth Bruggeman, “A Crisis of Trust in the Classroom” (January 14, 2025) – students either cheat with technology, or do little of anything.
    4. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) – perhaps students motivated only by grades should drop out.
    5. Steve Rose (interviewer), “Five ways AI could improve the world: ‘We can cure all diseases, stabilise our climate, halt poverty’” (Thu 6 Jul 2023) – Ray Kurzweil thinks “Our mobile phone … makes us more intelligent,” and since we already have nukes, AI is “not really making life more dangerous”; anyway, “More intelligence will lead to better everything.”
    6. Rachel Uda, “In Such a Connected World, Why Are We Lonelier Than Ever?” (February 6, 2023).
    7. Hanna Rosin interviewing Jonathan Haidt, “The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right” (March 21, 2024).

  • On a particular fantasy of effortless learning:

    1. Wikipedia, “Decoded neurofeedback.”
    2. Adam Hadhazy, “Science Fiction or Fact: Instant, ‘Matrix’-like Learning” (June 21, 2012).
    3. Takeo Watanabe and others, “Perceptual Learning Incepted by Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback Without Stimulus Presentation” (9 December 2011).
    4. Kevin Le Gendre, “Steel pan virtuoso Leon Foster Thomas: ‘Some people don’t think it’s a serious instrument’ ” (February 24, 2023).

  • Works leading me, somehow, to all of that:

    1. Northrop Frye, The Double Vision (1991).
    2. Peter Jukes, “In a rare interview, Philip Pullman tells us his own origin story, and why the great questions are still religious ones” (13 January 2014).

Towering over tourists are stone figures that have “the body of a bull, wings of an eagle, and the crowned head of a bearded men”
At Persepolis, outside Shiraz, Iran, Tuesday, September 4, 2012, this is the Gate of Xerxes – the Xerxes whose failed invasion of Greece is recounted by Herodotus

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Education | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4)

Removal

January 26, 2025 – 8:56 am

This is about metaphor.

Handwritten sign in shop window: ΜΕΤΑΦΕΡΘΗΚΑΜΕ …
Shop window in Athens, Monday, July 10, 2017:
ΜΕΤΑΦΕΡΘΗΚΑΜΕ
ΔΙΠΛΑ ΣΤΟ 46Α
→
ΤΑΚΗΣ
Μεταφερθήκαμε is the first-person plural passive aorist of μεταφέρω. I guess the meaning of the sign is, “We moved next door to 46A – Takis.” I took the photo, just so I could use it at a time like this. I didn’t try to talk with Takis.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)