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.
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.
By character count, the bulk of this post, in the third and final part, is my notes on
There are things I already thought, owing to philosophers such as Robin George Collingwood, Mary Midgley, and Robert Pirsig, if not Henry David Thoreau.
This post is based on recent readings, often on or through Twitter, especially of
Lilith Saintcrow on “Domestic abusers, white supremacists, and religious bigots”;
C. S. Lewis on gulling the educated, and objectivity as a dubious value;
Marilynne Robinson on consensus as concealing the objectively true;
Neil deGrasse Tyson on objectivity as a good value;
Plato on seeming wise, without being so;
Mark Vernon on imagination in William Blake;
whoever wrote an “Open Letter Concerning Transphobia in Philosophy,” signed by many professional philosophers;
Kathleen Stock, the subject of the “Open Letter”;
Agnes Callard on how philosophers shouldn’t be signing petitions;
Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, on the incoherence of the notion of gender identity;
Aaden Friday, on what’s wrong with Reilly-Cooper and other such women;
Brian Earp, on declaring pronouns;
John Steinbeck, on being a man;
Christa Peterson, on what gender identity might be.
I have edited and augmented this essay since originally posting it on January 9, 2021; the current version is from January 19.
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:
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.
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.
Being hosted by WordPress.com, thus using the WordPress.org content management system, this blog has posts, pages, and media. This directory is for the pages and the verbal media (namely pdf
files).
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.
Here is another in the recent spate of mathematics posts. I take up now, as I did in my last post, some material that I had originally drafted for the first post in this series.
Whenever it has been designated for its own post, material can grow, as has the material of this post in the drafting. Large parts of this post are taken up with
the notion (due to Collingwood) of criteriological sciences, logic being one of them;
Gödel’s logical theorems of completeness and incompleteness.