Category Archives: Descartes

Nature and Death

March 10, 2017 – 7:31 pm

Thoughts on mortality and the evolution of the universe, occasioned by a funeral and by Collingwood’s Idea of Nature and Plato’s Phaedo

Cebeci, Ankara, 2016.05.17

When the husband of my second-grade teacher died, I wanted to pay my respects. My father took me to the funeral home, where I hid behind him as he greeted the family of the deceased. My teacher was not among them. When invited to view the body, I looked over and saw it, lying off to the side in an open casket. I had never seen the man when he was alive. I declined the opportunity to gaze at his lifeless form. Until I came to Turkey, this was my closest approach to the materiality of death—except for a visit to the medical school of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. There, as part of the laboratory program at St John’s College in Santa Fe, students viewed dissected human cadavers.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Leo Strauss, Nature, Philosophy, Plato, Principles of Art, Stoicism, Turkey, West Virginia | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Bosphorus Sky

December 19, 2014 – 4:14 pm

This is about the morning of Thursday, December 18, 2014, a morning I spent by the Bosphorus, thinking mostly about poetry, and photographing the sky.

Seagulls against clouds and a brighter sea

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Archimedes, Bosphorus, Collingwood, Education, History, Istanbul, Language, Mathematics, Nature, Nesin Mathematics Village, Philosophy, Poetry, Principles of Art, Psychology, Tourism, Turkey, Turkish | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

Cogito ne demek?

April 11, 2014 – 1:40 pm

Why the late Geoffrey Lewis’s Turkish Grammar (2d ed., Oxford, 2000) is exceptional:

At the beginning of a clause demek, demek ki, or demek oluyor ki (‘it becomes to say’) signifies ‘that is to say’: düşünüyorum, demek ki varım ‘I am thinking, which means I exist.’ (This Turkish translation of Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum is right—‘I am thinking’—and the usual English version—‘I think’—is wrong.)

I sent the foregoing to Facebook this morning, but this was not the best medium for the typographical features of boldface, italics, directional quotation marks, and indented quotations.

I had been aware that Lewis had died, Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Facebook, Grammar, Language, Philosophy, Turkish | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

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 Aristotle, Collingwood, Fowler, Grammar, History, Logic, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Plato, Principles of Art, Psychology, Science, T. S. Eliot | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7)

NL III: “Body As Mind”

January 25, 2014 – 7:17 am

Index to this series

In Chapter I of The New Leviathan, we stipulated that natural science, the “science of body,” must be free to pursue its own aims. But we ourselves are doing science of mind, and:

1. 85. The sciences of mind, unless they preach error or confuse the issue by dishonest or involuntary obscurity, can tell us nothing but what each can verify for himself by reflecting on his own mind.

All of us can be scientists of mind, if only we are capable of reflection: Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Conic Sections, Education, Euclid, History, Mathematics, New Leviathan, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Plato, Principles of Art, Psychology, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

NL II: “The Relation Between Body and Mind”

January 20, 2014 – 11:39 am

Index to this series

I continue making notes on The New Leviathan of R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943). Now my main concern is with the second chapter, “The Relation Between Body and Mind”; but I shall range widely, as I did for the first chapter.

Preliminaries

Some writers begin with an outline, which they proceed to fill out with words. At least, they do this if they do what they are taught in school, according to Robert Pirsig:

He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught in all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving Quality they had a purpose.

That is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, chapter 17.

Does anybody strictly follow the textbook method of writing? Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, Categorical Thinking, Collingwood, Education, History, Logic, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Ontological Proof, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Pirsig, Plato, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (13)

NL I: “Body and Mind”

January 13, 2014 – 2:35 pm

Index to this series. See also a later, shorter article on this chapter

The Chapter in Isolation

“Body and Mind” is the opening chapter of Collingwood’s New Leviathan. The chapter is a fine work of rhetoric that could stand on its own, though it invites further reading. In these respects it resembles the first of the ten traditional books of Plato’s Republic, or even the first of the thirteen books of Euclid’s Elements. The analogy with Euclid becomes a bit tighter when we consider that each chapter of The New Leviathan is divided into short paragraphs, which are numbered sequentially for ease of reference.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, Collingwood, Criteriological Science, dialectic, Education, Euclid, Logic, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato, Principles of Art, Psychology, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (19)

The Tradition of Western Philosophy

September 10, 2013 – 1:41 pm

Note added October 16, 2018: Here I compare two projects of re-examining the philosophical tradition named in my title. The projects are those of

  • R. G. Collingwood in An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford, 1933);

  • Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan at St John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, beginning in 1937.

I review

  • how I ended up as a student at St John’s;

  • how Collingwood has been read (or not read) by myself and others, notably Simon Blackburn;

  • how Collingwood’s Essay is based on the hypothesis of the “overlap of classes.”

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By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, Collingwood, dialectic, Education, Euclid, History, Logic, Mathematics, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Pirsig, Plato, Principles of Art, Science, T. S. Eliot | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (11)