Aristotle sets the example that Thomas Aquinas follows in the Summa. We are reading chapters viii and ix of Book IX of the Nicomachean Ethics. The Philosopher makes the best case against two positions that he ultimately argues for:
In “Sanity” I used a photo of the same skeletal building from the other side
Does this sound like Aristotle?
It might seem like it’s easier to love others than to love yourself, but it’s tough to build healthy relationships if you don’t love yourself first.
The sentence is from a WikiHow page, “How to Love Yourself: Treat Yourself Like Your Own Best Friend.” Back in in the 1970s, I thought something like it was an excuse for self-indulgence.
Atatürk City Forest
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
The miracles recounted in the Gospels are not violations of the laws of nature, because the Evangelists had no conception of those laws in the first place. So I argued in a post of June, 2022. Having encountered resistance to the argument, I return to it now.
One person did swim in the Bosphorus
here at Kireçburnu on New Year’s Day, 2024
In what I have found, perhaps the most important point is made by God in the Hebrew Bible, at the beginning of Deuteronomy 13, here in the King James Version:
1 If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder (σημεῖον ἢ τέρας),
2 And the sign or the wonder (τὸ σημεῖον ἢ τὸ τέρας) come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them;
3 Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
4 Ye shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him.
At the beginning of the first post “On Dialectic,” I raised the question of why I put so much into such posts. I propose now a couple of answers.
I want to collect all evidence for what I am investigating – currently dialectic in Plato’s Republic. As Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) has Sherlock Holmes say in A Study in Scarlet (1887; Wordsworth Classics, 2004),
It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.
And yet in Religion and Philosophy (1916), Collingwood states “the fundamental axiom of all thinking,”
namely that whatever exists stands in some definite relation to the other things that exist.
Thus “all the evidence” is everything in the world.
I am engaged in such self-defense as a certain Islamic philosopher is, by the account of Strauss in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952):
Fārābī avails himself then of the specific immunity of the commentator or of the historian in order to speak his mind concerning grave matters in his “historical” works, rather than in the works in which he speaks in his own name.
View from our balcony
Sanatçılar Sitesi, Tarabya, Istanbul
Saturday, July 8, 2023
In Book I of Plato’s Republic, Socrates distinguishes between two ways to respond to a disagreement. The two parties can:
The latter would seem to be dialectic, although Socrates does not call it that. I said this last time, when I also noted that Socrates does refer to dialectic as such in Book V; but I deferred investigation of the passage till now.
Saturday, June 24, 2022
Atatürk Kent Ormanı
Tarabya, Sarıyer, İstanbul
This is about dialectic in Plato’s Republic and today. There’s a lot here, and in another post I may investigate why that is; meanwhile, I note words of Serge Lang (1927–2005) in the Foreward of Algebra (third edition, 1993):
Unfortunately, a book must be projected in a totally ordered way on the page axis, but that’s not the way mathematics “is”, so readers have to make choices how to reset certain topics in parallel for themselves, rather than in succession.
The word “dialectic” has the air of a technical term. It intimidated me in the eighth grade, when I chose communism as my topic for a paper in political geography, and I found myself consulting a big book on dialectical materialism. My main source ended up being the Communist Manifesto, which says nothing of dialectic as such.
The Manifesto may take up dialectic implicitly, as by saying in the beginning,
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
Perhaps one would refer to the ongoing fight between oppressor and oppressed as dialectical. However, dialogue being conversation, I take dialectic to be the art of conversing; fighting is something else.
Saturday, April 16, 2022
Muvezzi Caddesi, Serencebey, Beşiktaş, İstanbul
I continue to review and revise some notes I made during a recent reading of Plato’s Republic. The reading was with a group of people on four continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America), meeting weekly, by means of Zoom, from June, 2022, till May, 2023; I joined only in August.
Şalcıkır Parkı, Tarabya, Istanbul
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
My last post included a summary in some detail of Books I–VII, with a terser summary of the remaining Books VIII–X. I asked what Plato hoped to accomplish with the Republic, because if he meant to inspire dictators, he seemed to have succeeded with Ruhollah Mostafavi Musavi (a.k.a. Ruhollah Khomeini, 1900–89), Saloth Sâr (a.k.a. Pol Pot, 1925–98), and the like. But then is Plato to be blamed if such men did not pay attention to Books VIII and IX, where even the best state is shown to devolve into tyranny?
Here I look at a passage in Book IX that struck me when I read it in Robin Waterfield’s 1998 translation in the Oxford World’s Classics edition. This is at 572e–3a, in the account of how the son of the democratic father becomes tyrannical:
When these black magicians, these creators of dictators, realize that there’s only one way they’re going to gain control of the young man, they arrange matters until they implant in him a particular lust, to champion the rest of his desires which are too idle to do more than share out anything that readily comes their way. And don’t you think this kind of lust is exactly like a great, winged drone?
Waterfield is interpreting, but justifiably, I think. I’ll look at the Greek later, along with a number of other translations.
Meanwhile, the passage has me thinking that desire is not normally able to satisfy itself. It is a barnacle or anemone, sitting and waiting for nutriment to come to it.
Şalcıkır Parkı again
Friday, June 2, 2023
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
Tarabya Marina, Sarıyer, Istanbul
January 1, 2023
“As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity,” says Glaucus to Diomedes in the Iliad (Book VI, line 146, in Lattimore’s translation). However, leaves are normally studied biologically; humanity, historically. I touched on the distinction in the previous post; now I want to say more. I shall be looking again at R.G. Collingwood’s notion of biological history as a kind of mistake. Collingwood does not mention astrology, but it would seem to be an analogous mistake. A correlative mistake could be called historical biology and be a kind of social constructionism (unfortunately the Wikipedia article on the subject currently [January 8, 2023] “needs attention from an expert in Sociology,” and I am not one).
Polytropy 