Category Archives: Collingwood

Concerning the philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943). Many if not most of my posts concern Collingwood somehow, so this category may not be of much use. See Articles on Collingwood for some articles by other persons

Nature

October 8, 2021 – 10:29 am

Index to this series

Can Socrates really “find a natural support for justice,” as Allan Bloom says he must? It is strictly impossible, I say in “Bloom, Badiou, Ryle, Shorey.” Inevitably there is more that can be said, and I shall try to get some of it said here.

Sand, sea, mountains, sky
Anatolian sand, Aegean sea, Lesbian mountains
Uranus over all
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 24, 2021

There’s a lot in this post. I drafted the final part first, while I was still at the beach; I’m not there now, and I have to move on. Here in Istanbul, I have added the initial part (and brought pieces of the early draft forward), largely to look at the relations between the thoughts of

  • Leo Strauss, Bloom’s teacher;
  • R. G. Collingwood, my teacher, through his books (he died twenty-two years before my birth), and the subject of some of Strauss’s criticism.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, Aristotle, Homer, Leo Strauss, Midgley, Plato | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (8)

On Plato’s Republic, 5

September 26, 2021 – 9:35 am

Index to this series

Our fifth scheduled reading in the Republic is Book IV (Stephanus pages 419–45). Socrates speaks

  • with Adeimantus, through the completion of the construction of the city in speech;
  • with Glaucon, after he insists (427d) that Socrates join in the search for justice in the city; they find it and map it back to the individual.


Intellect, spirit, and appetite
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 13, 2021

Before proposing a general summary, I shall note the following highlights of the reading. At the end I make some further remarks on one of these, the Law of Contradiction.

Highlights

  1. Common [they are,] the things of friends, κοινὰ τὰ [τῶν] φίλων (424a). Aristotle refers to this in Book II, Chapter 1 of the Politics, 1260b–1a:

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle, Contradiction, Homer, Philosophy, Pirsig, Plato, Thoreau | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (13)

Politics

September 24, 2021 – 5:10 pm

Index to this series

This is mostly about avoiding things. An early theme of Plato’s Republic is avoiding the deprivations of solitary life through politics. Some of us would rather just avoid politics. Such persons include Henry David Thoreau, Gilbert Ryle, and the inventor of the h-index (he is a physicist called Jorge E. Hirsch, but I know nothing else about him). I mentioned these persons in my last Plato post, “Badiou, Bloom, Ryle, Shorey.” I have some more to say about them here. In “Civil Disobedience” (1848) for example, Thoreau writes, “it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel”; but measures like the h-index are used to hide the human factor in the equations used to judge us.

Regarding Thoreau, I shall be looking in addition at Thoreau’s essays “Walking” and “Slavery in Massachusetts.” Other sources for this post will include

  • R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis and An Autobiography;
  • 101 Zen Stories;
  • Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour;
  • Robert Wright, “Ending war via algorithm”;
  • Danielle Carr, “The Politics of Viruses”;
  • Patricia Fara, “It leads to everything.”


All photos are from Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 21–3, 2021

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Contradiction, Maugham, Thoreau | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

On Plato’s Republic, 2

August 30, 2021 – 1:52 pm

Constituting the latter part of Book I, the second of the Republic readings features the only sustained contribution of Thrasymachus, who argues that, if it can be pursued perfectly, injustice is superior to justice.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Philosophy, Plato | Tagged | Comments (9)

On Being Human in the Age of Humanity

August 9, 2021 – 11:48 am

This is about an essay called “Agency in the Anthropocene: How much choice do you actually have?” (Daily Philosophy, August 4, 2021). I fall in the gap in age between the author and Jeff Bezos, who (the author says) is three years her senior.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, Criteriological Science, Freedom, Midgley, Philosophy of History | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

Hostility and Hospitality

June 15, 2021 – 4:06 am

After seventeen weekly posts of readings with my annotations, the Pensées of Pascal join two other works that I have blogged about systematically, chapter by chapter or book by book:

  • R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, or Man, Society, Civilization, and Barbarism (1942);

  • Homer, the Iliad, in George Chapman’s translation.

Do three authors belong together, for any other reason than that I have spent time with each of them?

  • For Pascal, the Torah is history, but the Iliad was written too late to be that, and is just a novel (S 688 / L 436 / B 628). It has no concept of law, he says (S 691 / L 451 / B 620), but later Greeks took this and other things from the Jews. I discussed this in “Judaism for Pascal.” For example, Philo Judaeus thinks that when Heraclitus says, “We live their death and we die their life,” this is the death wrought by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis.

  • Pascal and Collingwood both come to terms with a world of contrariety. Collingwood calls it “a Heraclitean world,” alluding to how Plato has Socrates tell Hermogenes in the Cratylus (402a, Loeb translation by Harold North Fowler),

    Heracleitus says, you know, that all things move and nothing remains still, and he likens the universe to the current of a river, saying that you cannot step twice into the same stream.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Homer, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

To Be Civilized

May 27, 2021 – 9:26 am

A fellow mathematician called Robert Craigen told me in a tweet last October (2020),

I’m quite comfortable with the definition and usage of the term [“civilization”] in the work of Niall Ferguson.

Ferguson’s work then is going to be my concern here. I had asked Craigen in July,

Have you got a theory of civilization, to explain what is being destroyed? I admire (and have blogged about) Collingwood’s theory, worked out in The New Leviathan (1942) in response to the Nazis.

This was in response to his saying,

If you listen closely to those pushing all these things, destruction of civilized society is an explicitly articulated goal.

He was talking about a thread of tweets by Peter Boghossian. I am not going to talk about those tweets as such, but here they are for the record:

How to destroy civilization in 10 easy steps:

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By David Pierce | Also posted in New Leviathan, Philosophy of History | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Abraham and Gideon

March 31, 2021 – 2:49 pm

The general question of this post is of the relation between

  • Pascal’s thinking in the Pensées and
  • the thinking of himself and his contemporaries about the physical and mathematical worlds.

The specific question is why Pascal juxtaposes Abraham and Gideon in two fragments of the Pensées.

A simple answer to the specific question is that

  • God demands a sacrifice of each man, and
  • the sacrifice is followed by a miracle.

A bald bearded man holds the head of a boy in his left hand, a knife in his right. He looks to another young man on his right, who points towards the ram on the man’s left.

Caravaggio, Sacrifice of Isaac, 1603, Uffizi

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By David Pierce | Also posted in New Leviathan, Philosophy | Tagged , | Comments (3)

Pascal, Pensées, S 183–254

February 25, 2021 – 9:00 am

By the account of Martha Nussbaum, philosophy is one of two things:

  1. A form of inquiry pursued through conversation among equals.

  2. An activity of “a lonely thinker of profound thoughts.”

Nussbaum prefers the first, though having appeared in a film that promotes the second.

I watched and enjoyed the film, which is by Astra Taylor and is called Examined Life (2008). I first found it through a touching fragment, featuring a stroll in San Francisco by Judith Butler and Taylor’s sister Sunaura. Because they have a conversation at all, and on the theme that we all need one another’s help, the film becomes less subject to Nussbaum’s charge:

Portraying philosophers as authority figures is a baneful inversion of the entire Socratic process, which aimed to replace authority with reason.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in “God is a circle …”, Philosophy | Tagged , , , | Comments (12)

Reason in Pascal

February 23, 2021 – 9:05 am

In some of the Pensées, Pascal contrasts reason with instinct, passions, folly, the senses, and imagination.

Here I investigate Pascal’s raison, after one session of an ongoing discussion of the Pensées that is being carried out on Zoom.

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