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Recent Posts
Category Archives: Persons
Math, Maugham, and Man
September 1, 2019 – 7:49 am
Note added, August 28, 2023. The main purpose of this post of September 1, 2019, seems to have been to assemble some information about the etymologies of “man” and “woman,” because of ongoing controversy about what the words even mean today. I started to take up the controversy itself on December 30 of that year, in “Sex and Gender.” Meanwhile, this post suggests, or points out:
- a generic “person” may still be male in people’s minds;
- becoming a woman may be like becoming Jewish;
- there are no gendered pronouns in Turkish;
- the series freshman, sophomore, junior, senior is like pinkie, ring finger, middle finger;
- Greek does not have such an interesting series for the fingers;
- Greek mathematics includes Thales’s Theorem and Pappus’s Hexagon Theorem.
There does not seem to be any connection between the mathematics and the etymology here, except that I was studying both at the same time. I must have been reading The Razor’s Edge too, where Maugham
- places himself in a tradition founded by Herodotus;
- uses “he/him” for for somebody who can be a woman as well as a man.
More themes I took up:
- what it means to be natural;
- that I don’t consider myself ADHD;
- the etymology of “squirrel”;
- the Etymological Fallacy.
Woman, man, and dog
Friday, August 18, 2023
Altınova, Balıkesir, Türkiye
On Being Given to Know
August 24, 2019 – 5:40 pm
- What if we could upload books to our brains?
- What if a machine could tell us what was true?
We may speculate, and it is interesting that we do speculate, because I think the questions do not ultimately make sense – not the sense that seems to be intended anyway, whereby something can be got for nothing.
View from Şavşat
On Causation
August 20, 2019 – 5:10 am
Causation seems commonly to be understood as a physical concept, like being a fossil. The paleontologist seeks the one right answer to the question of when a particular dinosaur bone became part of the fossil record; likewise readers of international news seem to think there is one right answer to the question of whether Donald Trump or Ali Khamenei caused the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 on January 8, 2020.
There is not one right answer. If you are Trump, you caused 176 civilian deaths by attacking the Iranians and provoking their response. If you are Mitch McConnell, you caused the deaths by inhibiting the removal of Trump from office. If you are Khamenei, you did it by meeting Trump’s fire with fire.
Being a cause does not mean you deserve condemnation or praise: that is another matter.
NL I: “Body and Mind” Again
August 17, 2019 – 8:58 am
“We are beginning an inquiry into civilization,” writes Collingwood, “and the revolt against it which is the most conspicuous thing going on at the present time.” The time is the early 1940s.
Elliptical Affinity
April 17, 2019 – 2:21 pm
After Descartes gave geometry the power of algebra in 1637, a purely geometrical theorem of Apollonius that is both useful and beautiful was forgotten. This is what I conclude from looking at texts from the seventeenth century on.
We the Pears of the Wild Coyote Tree
April 15, 2019 – 9:12 pm
This is a preliminary report on two recent films:
- The Wild Pear Tree, by Nuri Bilge Ceylan;
- We the Coyotes, by Marco La Via and Hanna Ladoul.
The report is preliminary, not because there is going to be another, but because I have seen each film only once, and I may see one of them again.
I remember that François Truffaut liked to see films at least twice. I believe I read this in The Washington Post, and I might have guessed it was in an appreciation published when Truffaut died; however, he died on October 21, 1984, during the first semester of my sophomore year at St John’s College in Santa Fe, and I would not have been reading the Post then.
While in college, I did enjoy seeing some films twice, or a second time; Truffaut’s own 400 Coups was an example, a French teacher having shown it to us in high school.
The two films that I am reviewing now concern young adults trying to find their own way in the world, in defiance of their elders. We all have to do this. In every generation, some will do it more defiantly than others. Heraclitus can be defiant, he of Ephesus and thus one of the Ionian philosophers, whose spirit I imagine to haunt the Nesin Mathematics Village. A further reason to bring up Heraclitus will be a theme that is explicit in Pear Tree, implicit (or metaphorical) in Coyotes: gold.
A copy of The Logos of Heraclitus,
by Eva Brann,
on Marmara Island, July, 2012
Piety
March 14, 2019 – 9:33 pm
The post below is a way to record a passage in the Euthyphro where Socrates says something true and important about mathematics.
Goya, [Cronus] Devouring His Son
(see below)
The passage is on a list of Platonic passages that I recently found, having written it in a notebook on May 23, 2018. The other passages are in the Republic; here they are, for the record, with some indication of why they are worth noting (translations are Shorey’s, originally from 1930 and 1935 in the old Loeb edition):
NL XLV: The Germans
February 21, 2019 – 9:14 am
At the end of Collingwood’s New Leviathan (1942), we reach a chapter whose theme is that of my more recent articles on grammar.
By August Macke – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, Link
As history, Collingwood’s last chapter is difficult, for the reasons that trouble Herbert Read at the beginning of his Concise History of Modern Painting (revised 1968, augmented 1974). Read opens his first chapter with a passage from Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis (1924):
NL XLIV: The Turks
February 20, 2019 – 7:47 am
The last part of Collingwood’s New Leviathan (Oxford, 1942) is “Barbarism.” The first chapter of the part is “What Barbarism Is”; the remaining chapters describe examples of barbarism in turn. The fourth and last example is the one that Britain is fighting as Collingwood writes.
Polytropy 