NL I: “Body and Mind” Again

August 17, 2019 – 8:58 am

Index to this series

“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.

Human tourists photographing sculptured supine blue ape with chrome testicles outside the Intercontinental Hotel, Prague Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in absolute presuppositions, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Plato | Tagged , , , , | Comments (11)

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.

By David Pierce | Posted in Conic Sections, Descartes, Exposition, Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (8)

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 book, whose cover shows a bonfire, sits on a rock dampened by waves of the sea, which laps on the sand beyond
A copy of The Logos of Heraclitus,
by Eva Brann,
on Marmara Island, July, 2012

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By David Pierce | Posted in Film, Freedom, Philosophy, Plato, Thoreau, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

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.

Crude depiction of bug-eyed figure grasping the torso of, and putting into his mouth the arm of, a smaller figure
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):

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, dialectic, Homer, Mathematics, Nesin Mathematics Village, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato, Strunk and White | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (6)

NL XLV: The Germans

February 21, 2019 – 9:14 am

Index to this series

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):

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By David Pierce | Posted in Education, Grammar, New Leviathan | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

NL XLIV: The Turks

February 20, 2019 – 7:47 am

Index to this series

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.

Sun behind mosque on cover of The Ottoman Centuries (Lord Kinross, a.k.a. Patrick Balfour) Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Causation, History, New Leviathan, Turkey | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1)

A Defense

January 12, 2019 – 1:27 pm

Here is the defense (savunma) of Ayşe Berkman before the 36th Heavy Penalty Court (Ağır Ceza Mahkemesi) of Istanbul, January 10, 2019, against the charge of making propaganda for a terrorist organization (terör örgütü propagandası yapmak).

Crowd of mostly smiling people outside a courtroom

The crowd from the courtroom when the session was over.
From a tweet of the Peace Academics

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By David Pierce | Posted in Causation, Freedom, Turkey | Tagged , | Comments (9)

Logic of Elliptic Curves

January 6, 2019 – 8:49 pm

In my 1997 doctoral dissertation, the main idea came as I was lying in bed one Sunday morning. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Aristotle, Exposition, Hitchens, Mathematics | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1)

On Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

December 15, 2018 – 8:43 am

This is an appreciation of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem of 1931. I am provoked by a depreciation of the theorem.

I shall review the mathematics of the theorem, first in outline, later in more detail. The mathematics is difficult. I have trouble reproducing it at will and even just confirming what I have already written about it below (for I am adding these words a year after the original publication of this essay).

The difficulty of Gödel’s mathematics is part of the point of this essay. A person who thinks Gödel’s Theorem is unsurprising is probably a person who does not understand it.

Next to a slice from a tree trunk, a worn copy of the book Frege and Gödel: Two Fundamental Texts in Mathematical Logic, edited by Jean van Heijenoort

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By David Pierce | Posted in Archimedes, Categorical Thinking, Descartes, Euclid, Exposition, Hitchens, Mathematics, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mathematics, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (16)

Antitheses

December 13, 2018 – 10:18 am

This is an attempt at a dialectical understanding of freedom and responsibility, punishment and forgiveness, things like that. My text is a part of the Gospel, though I attribute no special supernatural power to this. I shall refer also to the Dialogues of Plato.

In front of a house, a concrete gatepost features an embossed number plate and spray-painted superimposed letters P and X
What is the spirit of the letters here? Encountered in Tarabya, Istanbul, on Wednesday, October 19, 2022, they could be the Latin XP or the Greek Chi Rho. Probably the former are meant, by way of discouraging parking (in Turkish park etmek, “to make a parking”). However, nearby is a Christian shrine, built over a holy spring by a great plane tree: the Ayia Kiriaki Ayazması, ΑΓΙΑΣΜΑ ΑΓΙΑΣ ΚΥΡΙΑΚΗΣ, pictured and described in the post “On Kant’s Groundwork” in connection with my question of just what Kant thought of Christianity

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, dialectic, Freedom, Galileo, New Leviathan, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Plato, Science, Stoicism | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (36)