Category Archives: Aristotle

War and Talk

June 18, 2017 – 7:41 pm

This is a foray into the mystery of how things happen, based the 164th of the 361 chapters of War and Peace. This chapter contains, in a one-sentence paragraph, a summary of Tolstoy’s theory of history:

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Causation, Collingwood, Criteriological Science, Harper’s, History, Istanbul, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Plato, Principles of Art | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (13)

Freedom to Listen

February 26, 2017 – 6:51 am

“It’s a free country, so shut up!”

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.

Nocturnal scene of city buildings under snow, loomed over by towers displaying the crescent and star of the Turkish flag in colored lights
Fulya, Şişli, Istanbul
Friday evening, January 6, 2017

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Education, Freedom, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Turkey | Tagged , , | Comments (5)

How to Learn about People

November 13, 2016 – 4:19 am

A chance encounter with a Medieval definition of God, used as the title of a sculpture, leads to an ancient plane tree and to more consideration of what can go wrong with public opinion polls.

Ancient plane tree of Bayır, Marmaris Peninsula, September 9, 2010
Ancient plane tree of Bayır, Marmaris Peninsula, September 9, 2010

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Archeology, “ceases to be a mind”, “God is a circle …”, Collingwood, Nesin Mathematics Village, Philosophy, Psychology, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (8)

Equality Is Not Identity

January 26, 2015 – 3:20 pm

I want to record here an account by Collingwood of Aristotle’s theory of knowledge. The passages quoted below are relevant, both to something I have learned from reading Euclid with students, and to the considerations of consciousness that led to my recent article “Body and Mind.”

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Euclid, Mathematics, Nature, Philosophy, Plato, Science | Tagged , | Comments (2)

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 New Leviathan.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Categorical Thinking, Collingwood, Grammar, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato, Turkish, Visual Art | 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 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)

Science and anti-science

November 21, 2012 – 12:34 pm

I published most of the following as a Note on Facebook, Wednesday, October 3, 2010.

Is there an ongoing or perhaps an increasing antipathy to science, and if so, are scientists to blame? The passage below treats this question, but was written 75 years ago, in December, 1935. The author could remember the war of 1914–1918, a war that he described in his Autobiography as “an unprecedented disgrace to the human intellect”, but “an unprecedented triumph for natural science.” Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Facebook, Philosophy, Science | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Logic (notes on the finger-wagging Cratylus)

June 8, 2012 – 10:45 am

The senior essay that I wrote at St John’s College was called something like ‘An account based in Aristotle of the Law of Contradiction’. I do not know now what the point was. I had read the Metaphysics in a preceptorial, so I decided to spend even more time with this book in writing my essay. I remember noting ultimately that humans could indeed be self-contradictory. Hector was an example. To Andromache he described two incompatible expectations: that their son would win renown, and that the boy would die as an infant when the Greeks took Troy. Continue reading →

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