This is about the bread that I baked on Sunday, March 17, 2024. It’s in the photo below. You can see that the rising was a bit uneven; otherwise, I don’t know how the bread can be any better than I am able to make it now. That is why I am writing things up.
Two loaves, just out of the oven. Ingredients: whole einkorn flour, sourdough starter, water, rolled oats, and salt. Pans greased with coconut oil
I write this now while many are suffering. Unfortunately that is always true.
What I am supposed to be focused on is virtue in the use of money. I shall get to this.
In the first creation myth in the first book of the Hebrew Bible, God is always looking back at what he has been doing, to see whether it is any good. It always is, but he cannot have known in advance that it was going to be, and this is why he has to check his work.
So it seems to me. In any case, when we create things, part of the job is checking our work.
The new Turkish translation of Collingwood’s Religion and Philosophy
with introduction by yours truly
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.
Below is a text (in black) of the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, with
The Prologue tells the frame story of a pilgrimage from London to the shrine of the “holy blissful martyr” at Canterbury; along the way, the pilgrims will tell the tales that make up the rest of the collection.
Chaucer was born around 1340; the dramatic date of his Prologue may be 1387. The martyr in Canterbury is Thomas Becket, assassinated in the cathedral there in 1170 by agents of King Henry II of England.
The Black Death was 1346–53.
Reasons to read Chaucer include testing Collingwood’s assertion in the Prologue of Speculum Mentis (1924),
Chaucer and Dante are no shallow optimists, but their tragedies are discords perpetually resolved in the harmony of a celestial music. The fundamental thing in Chaucer is the ‘mery tale’ of human life as a heartening and lovely pageant … The medieval mind feels itself surrounded, beyond the sphere of trial and danger, by a great peace, an infinite happiness.
Those clauses are from this paragraph, elaborating on medieval happiness:
Simon Stevin, “La Spartostatique”
Les Œuvres Mathematiques (1634)
See S 667 below
The reading is Sellier 651–79, which is Lafuma 432, 504–14, and 799–829, thus:
Pensées diverses VII (SÉRIE XXIX): 10 fragments (S 651–60, L 799–820)
Pensées diverses VIII (SÉRIE XXX): 6 fragments (S 661–6; L 821, 432, 822–825)
Pensées diverses IX (SÉRIE XXXI): 1 fragment (S 667–8, L 826–9)
Géométrie-Finesse I (SÉRIE XXI): 1 fragment (S 669, L 509–11)
Géométrie-Finesse II (SÉRIE XXII): 2 fragments (S 670–1, L 512–3)
Règle de la créance (SÉRIE XX): 8 fragments (S 672–9, L 504–8)
Labels are
Sellier–La Guern–Lafuma–Brunschvicg.
How does one come to believe or understand?
Il y a trois moyens de croire :
La religion chrétienne, qui seule a la raison, n’admet point pour ses vrais enfants ceux qui croient sans inspiration
I learned about Peter Turchin recently through his profile in the Atlantic by Graeme Wood. I had learned about the Atlantic article from historians on Twitter such as James Ryan, who does “Turkish history and other stuff,” according to his own Twitter profile, and who tweeted in response to Wood’s article,
This is really interesting research, but, uh, it is only history in the way that a particle physicist does history.
In response to that, a thread began:
Needless to say, no historian would find this “approach” acceptable. There’s a reason we spend so much time on historiography when new historians are trained; we have complex, rich debates that have continued for longer than any field except philosophy on how to approach history.
That was by Axel Çorlu, living in the US, but “Born in Izmir, Turkey, to a Levantine (Italian/Greek/French/Armenian) family” according to his Academia page.
This directory has the following sections.
The links in the sections are sometimes to posts of this blog, but mostly to pages and media (especially pdf files).
Posts, pages, and media are what this blog has, because it uses the WordPress.org content management system, by virtue of being hosted by WordPress.com. You are now reading a post, as you can tell from its having an initial publication date both in its address and somewhere at the end of its body. The contents of any post can always be edited. I shall be editing this post in order to make available, or highlight, pages, verbal media (namely pdf files) and some series and categories of posts.
In principle, all of my posts can be seen at polytropy.com, in reverse chronological order. I have them listed in forward order, by year, on my About page. As I explain there, I try to keep track of posts with tags and categories. Moreover, if one post revisits a theme of another post, I try to link to that post. Every post shows (at the bottom) which other posts are linked to it.
A dream, never to be realized, would be to have all of my ideas as well-organized as in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
I don’t know how the random visitor can find my pages, although search engines find at least some of them. Much less do I know how one would find my media, although the media allowed by WordPress now include pdf files. I have uploaded a number of these, and created a number of pages.
It would be possible to have all top-level pages included automatically in the menu which now forms a horizontal list at the top of each post and page.
The directory proper now begins.
The About page mentioned above
“The Armeno-Turkish Alphabet” (I think this needs more work)
“Karadeniz” (more on the 2018 trip summarized in “Eastern Black Sea Yayla Tour”)
“A Season on a Farm” (the “season” was the summer and fall of 1988)
“Van 2003” (an example of travel writing that I used to put on a page hosted by my department, before I had this blog)
Poetry, in the broad etymological sense of something made; call it conceptual art, or whatever you like, but it’s all referred to in the post “Discrete Logarithms”:
a Turkish translation of Claude Closky, “first thousand numbers classified in alphabetical order”
“Cartesianism” (the pdf file described in “An Exercise in Analytic Geometry”)
A proof of Dirichlet’s theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions, in pdf and html format (as discussed in “LaTeX to HTML”)
“Classification of regular polytopes (pdf file)
Pages describing (as well as listing) categories of posts
There are series of posts about particular works of prose and poetry. I could make each one into a category, but so far I have not. One post in the series may serve as an index, or else a page may serve.
Collingwood, The New Leviathan (January 2014 to February 2019)
Homer
Iliad in Chapman’s translation (April 2017 to September 2019)
Odyssey (begun November, 2019)
Pascal, Pensées (all of them; February 16 to June 8, 2021)
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (a selection; July 5 to September 14, 2021)
Plato, Republic (begun August 15, 2021)
For my courses I normally prepare pages on my department’s server; but since I cannot access this from home, I may also use the blog.
Kümeler Kuramı (“Set theory,” including my attempts to summarize in html the contents of a course in axiomatic set theory for which I have also written a full text in LaTeX. For the summary of fall 2019, I had not yet discovered the usefulness of pandoc as described in “LaTeX to HTML”)
Analitik Geometri Özeti (“summary of analytic geometry,” for a course in spring 2020; as the Covid-19 lockdown took hold, the page just became the course page)
Ordinal Analiz (“ordinal analysis,” that is, set theory with emphasis on the ordinals as a structure analogous to the linearly ordered set of real numbers studied in so-called real analysis; the post “Ordinals” also takes up the analogy; I made the page for a course in Şirince, in case I wanted to change the page while I was there, though in the event I didn’t; notes from the second week, in English, are on a departmental page, along with the syllabus for a summer course in 2020 that was cancelled)
Öklid (Resources for the course Öklid geometrisine giriş, “introduction to Euclidean geometry,” fall 2020)
Topoloji (homepage for a graduate topology course, fall 2020, with links to weekly notes in English. The notes are mostly in pdf format, for A6 paper in landscape orientation; but one week I used html)
Ayşe Berkman’ın yedek sayfasıdır (for her spring 2020 course during the lockdown)
Sometimes annotated by me:
Charlotte Brontë, Villette, quotations and commentary:
Kenneth Gale Crawford (my maternal grandfather), The Crawford Saga: For the Information of Progeny and Progeny’s Progeny.
R. G. Collingwood
“Causation” from An Essay on Metaphysics (as described in the post “On Causation”)
chapters, including “Monks and Morals,” on a visit to Santorini in The First Mate’s Log
John Donne, “The Undertaking” (to accompany the post that I wrote about it)
Adam Garfinkle, “The Erosion of Deep Literacy” (referred to in “Reading shallow and deep”)
John Goldthwaite, pages on C. S. Lewis and Narnia from The Natural History of Make-Believe (referred to in “Return to Narnia”)
Euphemia Lofton Haynes, “Mathematics—Symbolic Logic” (supporting “What Mathematics Is”)
Homer, Iliad (some of the books, in Chapman’s translation, to go with my commentaries on this)
Somerset Maugham, “Romance,” from On a Chinese Screen (accompanying my own “Romance” and showing how Maugham plagiarized Herbert Giles)
Plutarch, “Life of Timoleon”
Poetry sent me in a lockdown “poem exchange”
Raymond Smullyan, “Is God a Taoist?”
Papers about Thoreau, mentioned near the beginning of the post “Feminist Epistemology” of January, 2021:
Laura Dassow Walls, “Walden as Feminist Manifesto,” 1993. 8 pages
Alice de Montigny, “I Discover Thoreau,” 1992. 3 pages
Arnold Toynbee, “A Turning Point in History” (referred to in “What It Takes”)
Herman Wouk on psychoanalysis (Chapter 42, “A Game of Ping-pong,” of Marjorie Morningstar)
Updated January 3, 2023
Polytropy 