There is a lot about R. G. Collingwood on this blog. Apparently that is why I had the opportunity to write the text below. Something close to it was included in Turkish last year with the Turkish translation of R. G. Collingwood’s Religion and Philosophy.
On the day recounted in Book VIII of the Iliad,
I wrote a fuller summary in 2017. Because I was reading it, I also talked about Huysmans, Against Nature, and the belief of the main character that the prose poem could
contain within its small compass, like beef essence, the power of a novel, while eliminating its tedious analyses and superfluous descriptions.
Now I shall find reason to bring up Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Thoreau, and Freud, and especially William James and Collingwood on the subject of emotion.
Waters of the Bosphorus, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Wednesday morning, January 11, 2023
In Book I of the Iliad, Achilles restrains an impulse to run a sword through Agamemnon.
That may be the greatest act in the whole epic. I say so, having recently completed a reading of Njal’s Saga, which features a lot of impulsive killing. Now I am embarking on the Iliad again, a book at a time. Here I take up Book I, some comparisons with the saga, and some connections with Plato, Augustine, and Collingwood.
I wrote here about Homer’s epic, book by book, between April, 2017, and September, 2019. I was reading Chapman’s Elizabethan translation. In my account of Book I from then, there are details that do not otherwise stand out to me now, when
Sarıyer, Istanbul (European side)
Loeb Iliad, volume I
November 25, 2022
In the first creation myth in the first book of the Hebrew Bible, God is always looking back at what he has been doing, to see whether it is any good. It always is, but he cannot have known in advance that it was going to be, and this is why he has to check his work.
So it seems to me. In any case, when we create things, part of the job is checking our work.
The new Turkish translation of Collingwood’s Religion and Philosophy
with introduction by yours truly
Executive summary. An experiment has been performed to detect whether we are living in a simulation. The experiment is to tell Abraham to sacrifice his son. Whatever he does, he breaks a law. Thus there is more to the world than can be understood by natural science.
Altınova, Ayvalık, Balıkesir, Türkiye
Looking towards Lesbos, Greece
September 20, 2022
This is inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. After reading this 1853 novel a second time in the summer of 2018, I put some passages I liked into a LaTeX file. I added some commentary and came up with a document more than 90 A5 pages long. I recently reread it and was reminded how much I had enjoyed the novel. I thought some of my commentary could be adapted to stand alone as a blog post—this one.
“The Sower,” 1850
Jean-François Millet (French, 1814–1875)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Here is an annotated transcription of a 1981 manuscript by Charles Greenleaf Bell (1916–2010) called “The Axiomatic Drama of Classical Physics.” A theme is what Heraclitus observed, as in fragment B49a of Diels, LXXXI of Bywater, and D65a of Laks and Most:
We step and we do not step into the same rivers, we are and we are not.
ποταμοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐμβαίνομέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐμβαίνομεν, εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν.
Bell reviews the mathematics, and the thought behind it, of
In a postlude called “The Uses of Paradox,” Bell notes:
Forty-five years ago I decided that when reason drives a sheer impasse into an activity which in fact goes on, we have to think of the polar cleavage as both real and unreal.
I like that reference to “an activity which in fact goes on.” In youth it may be hard to recognize that there are activities that do go on. We do things then, but that they will get anywhere may be no more than a dream. In any case, Bell himself goes on:
… that is a job as huge and demanding as Aristotle’s, and for me at 70, just begun.
“Look,” my friends say, “Bell’s been doing the same thing since he was 25. About that time he had a vision of Paradox as paradise, and he’s been stuck there ever since.”
The back of Bell’s Five Chambered Heart with
the front of the OCT of Aristotle’s Physics
In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates frequently mentions τέχνη (technê), which is art in the archaic sense: skill or craft. The concern of this post is how one develops a skill, and what it means to have one in the first place.
This post concerns the Association for Mathematical Research, or AMR. A number of people are upset by its existence. I am not exactly one of them, but am suspicious, mainly because I do not know why a new organization would be needed, when we already have
The Twitter account of the AMR is dated to April, 2021. The website of the AMR supplies a list of founding members, but no account of when, how, or why they became founders. The site has a brief mission statement:
THE MISSION of the AMR is to SUPPORT MATHEMATICAL RESEARCH and SCHOLARSHIP
Are those other organizations not doing a good job? Continue reading
Polytropy 