Category Archives: Turkey

The Academic Battery Cage

January 22, 2015 – 4:42 pm

The purpose of this article is to record a couple of paragraphs by Mary Midgley about academia today and its judging of people according to numbers of papers published. I have become something of a fan of Midgley. Her field is philosophy, though I think her complaint applies to mathematics or anything else:

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Istanbul, Mathematics, Midgley, Nature, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Inurement

January 15, 2015 – 8:00 am

This is about getting used to things, and things one should not get used to.

There is a free-speech crisis in Turkey now, brought on in part, but not exclusively, by the murders at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris. See an editorial of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) for a list of issues.

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

The Peace of Liberal Education

January 13, 2015 – 1:33 pm
The wall of Dolmabahçe Sarayı, January 11, 2015

The wall of Dolmabahçe Sarayı, January 11, 2015

The occasion of this article is my discovery of a published Turkish translation of Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis or The Map of Knowledge (Oxford, 1924). Published as Speculum Mentis ya da Bilginin Haritası (Ankara: Doğu Batı, 2014), the translation is by Kubilay Aysevenler and Zerrin Eren. Near the end of the book, Collingwood writes the following paragraph about education, or what I would call more precisely liberal education. The main purpose of this article then is to offer the paragraph to any reader who happens to stop by.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Education, Euclid, History, Homer, Istanbul, Language, Mathematics, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Principles of Art, Turkish | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)

Interview with Mustafa Kemal

December 26, 2014 – 3:23 pm

Below are transcribed the words in the image above by the founder of the Turkish Republic.

When I first visited Istanbul, in 1998, I was too late to see old American cars used as dolmuşlar. Perhaps there were still a few around, but I did not see them. They had been described in a book published the previous year:

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

Istanbul in the Sun

December 12, 2014 – 5:13 pm

The first Saturday in December promised to be cloudy, like every other day in recent weeks; but it would probably be rainless, so I spent it outside. Sunday was supposed to be rainy, so I planned on doing mental work indoors. In fact there were showers at dawn, but there was also orange light in the clouds. The clouds eventually cleared up, and I saw that I had better go out again. I returned to the seaside park where I had been the previous weekend; but this time I brought a proper camera.

I took some photos on the way to the park; these have now been incorporated in another article, ”Taksim in Limbo.” They serve to illustrate the previous article, “The Istanbul Seaside,” on that earlier park visit; so do the photos below.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in History, Istanbul, Nature, Tourism, Visual Art | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Taksim in Limbo

December 10, 2014 – 5:03 pm

This is a personal report on the current condition of Taksim square. I visited Taksim recently (early December, 2014) on a rare sunny day.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Gezi, History, Istanbul, Nature, Tourism | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Mîna Urgan on alphabets & Atatürk

December 9, 2014 – 3:33 pm

mina-urgan-paragraf

In the news in Turkey lately (December 2014) is the vow or threat of the President to make lessons in Ottoman Turkish compulsory for Turkish schoolchildren. How realistic the threat is, I do not know. There is the Constitutional question of what the President’s powers actually are. There is also the practical question of whether it is even possible for most Turkish students to learn Ottoman. Foreign language education in Turkey is not generally very good; and as far as I can tell, Ottoman Turkish is practically a foreign language now. Two paragraphs from Geoffrey Lewis’s Turkish Grammar (Oxford, 1967, pages xx–xxi) are very interesting in this regard:

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Education, History, Istanbul, Language, Tourism, Turkish | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (5)

The Istanbul Seaside

December 3, 2014 – 11:00 am

The original purpose of this article was to display and explain two photographs by me: one of a seaside park, the other of an abandoned car. I do this, and I talk about the stresses and compensations of the big city. I continue with the theme of Freedom from an earlier article of that name.

It is now early December in Istanbul, 2014. We have hardly seen the sun for weeks. Some rain falls almost every day. One has to learn to go out when one can. Last Saturday was cloudy, but dry, so we walked down to the Tophane-i Amire—the “Cannon Foundry Imperial.” The name is romantic, because it dates from Ottoman times, and because, like Koh-i-Noor, it is in a Persian grammatical form that is obsolete in Turkish. Today’s name of the cannon foundry would be Amire Tophane.
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By David Pierce | Also posted in Bosphorus, Causation, Collingwood, Gezi, History, Istanbul, Nature, Philosophy, Pirsig, Psychology, Tophane, Tourism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)

Latest rise of the old moon

October 22, 2014 – 4:10 pm

Recent mornings, looking out my window before dawn, I have seen the moon wane narrower and narrower. I suppose today was the last morning it will be seen for a few weeks. Time on the first photo is 6:26, daylight savings time in Istanbul, a few minutes after the prayer call from the mosque down the street.

DSC01672
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By David Pierce | Also posted in Istanbul, Nature | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)