This document contains fragments
edition of Pascal’s Pensées, in modernized French and the following sections:
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.
To this post, I am adding this introduction in July 2021. I have returned to some of the ideas of the post, and I see that I left them in a jumble. They may still be that, but I am trying to straighten up a bit.
Beyond this introduction, the post has three parts. Part III takes up more than half of the whole post and consists of my notes on
In Anderson’s article I see – as I note below – ideas that are familiar, thanks to my previous reading of philosophers such as Robin George Collingwood, Mary Midgley, and Robert Pirsig. Henry David Thoreau may not exactly be one of those philosophers, but he is somehow why I came to write this post in the first place.
Here is a table of contents for the whole post:
This post is based on recent readings, often on or through Twitter, of the following writers.
Having originally posted this essay on January 9, 2021, I edited and augmented it, on January 19 and December 19 of that year. I return to it now, on June 22, 2023, having posted “On Dialectic,” two days ago; this one is another post that quotes lots of people, and I want to check how it reads. It reads fine, to me, although I did have to correct occurrences of “behavior” spelled as “behavor.” Moreover, although I had forgotten what was here, I recognized it instantly as I read; another reader would not experience this recognition.
What stands out most to me now is Christa Peterson’s suggestion,
A representation of our own gender … could … be a means of picking out people as who we are co-gendered with …
As the essay already suggests, if you replaced “gender” with “race,” then the resulting speculation could get you called a racist, and that is supposed to be something bad. However, if we replace “gender” with “sex,” we obtain a proposition that is fundamental to contemporary biology, as I understand it, because evolution is
I think this is why Nina Paley can say, in a blog post called “Why I Don’t Use ‘Preferred Pronouns’,” which I referred to also in “Imagination,”
Like most mammals, I can’t help but identify someone’s sex with +99% accuracy. (… Women, I think, are better at identifying sex than men, either due to instinct or conditioning for survival …)
We know that there are two sexes, and we know who is of which sex, the way we know that some foods are good to eat. However, Peterson seems to think of this knowledge a bit differently:
Trans people’s dignity and legitimacy does not depend on the success of any one attempt to conceptualize their experience. But the most common way, in terms of “gender identity,” is perfectly functional. The commitments of the popular notion are minimal: people have an internal sense of their own gender that can come apart from their knowledge of their assigned sex, and is generally fixed, and certainly not revisable in the way ordinary beliefs are.
What is the word “assigned” doing here? Does whether you are trans depend on whether somebody made a mistake when checking one of the boxes marked “male” and “female” at your birth?
A lot of old PSA’s about drugs are on YouTube and the Web Archive, and sometimes they are linked to by articles that ridicule them. There is one that I have not been able to find, perhaps from around 1970, in which parents confront their teenager with the drug paraphernalia that they have found in his room. The boy storms out of the house, saying, “You don’t understand!”
There’s a lot that I don’t understand. I must not, since it seems childish, but is coming from adults. Some of these adults stormed the US Capitol the other day; others encourage them; still others are professors of philosophy.
“Human egg and sperm cells.”
Asimov’s New Guide to Science (1984), page 600
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.
Etymologically speaking, the asıl of a thing is its root. The Arabic root of the Turkish word means bitki kökü, “vegetable root,” according to Sevan Nişanyan’s Turkish etymological dictionary.
In the Iliad, why is Achilles so affronted by Agamemnon as to refuse to help the Greeks, even as their attack on Troy is becoming a defensive war, at the wall that they have erected about their own ships? If the answer is to be found through study, then Book IX of the Iliad is what to study.
One day during the Trojan War, Apollo and Athena decide to give the combatants a break. The general conflict is to be replaced with a one-on-one. The Olympians induce Helenus to tell his brother Hector to take on whichever of the Greeks is up for it.
Day or night?
Sunset over Lesbos
From the Anatolian mainland
Tuesday, August 1, 2023
Pacifism is properly pacificism, the making of peace: not a belief or an attitude, but a practice. Mathematics then is pacifist, because learning it means learning that you cannot fight your way to the truth. Might does not make right. If others are going to agree with you, they will have to do it freely. Moreover, you cannot rest until they do agree with you, if you’ve got a piece of mathematics that you think is right; for you could be wrong, if others don’t agree.
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 is supposed to show automatically (at the bottom) which other posts are linked to it.
I have expressed the dream, never to be realized, 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.
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”:
For Courses, see also below. Most of my mathematics is somewhere on my deparmental website, but the Covid-19 Pandemic restricted my access for a while. Here on the blog are some things I have written, perhaps only for my own amusement.
pdf file described in “An Exercise in Analytic Geometry”)pdf and html format (as discussed in “LaTeX to HTML”)pdf file)Pages describing (as well as listing) categories of posts
There are series of posts about (and sometimes including the texts of) particular works of prose and poetry. I could make each series 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.
For my courses, I normally prepare pages on my department’s server. Since I could not access that server from home for the first part of the Covid-19 Pandemic, I used this blog for the following.
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”)pdf format, for A6 paper in landscape orientation; but one week I used html)Sometimes annotated by me:
Updated December 17 and 18, 2024
This article gathers, and in some cases quotes and examines, popular articles about R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943).
By articles, I mean not blog posts like mine and others’, but essays by professionals in publications that have editors.
By popular, I mean written not for other professionals, but for the laity.
Polytropy 