War and Talk

June 18, 2017 – 7:41 pm

This is a foray into the mystery of how things happen, based the 164th of the 361 chapters of War and Peace. This chapter contains, in a one-sentence paragraph, a summary of Tolstoy’s theory of history:

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Aristotle, Causation, Collingwood, Criteriological Science, Harper’s, History, Istanbul, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Plato, Principles of Art | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (13)

On Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad, Book III

June 5, 2017 – 8:39 am

Index | Text

The Iliad is about the feud between Achilles and Agamemnon, a feud that occurs during the Trojan War. Book III of the Iliad has nothing to do with Achilles, a little to do with Agamemnon, and everything to do with why the whole war is happening at all.

Note added August 19, 2024: The war is happening because Paris is God’s gift to women. By his own account, he is excellent in the “gifts of peace,” and these are “as little to be scorn’d, / As to be wonne with strength, wealth, state …” It is good to recognize that some things cannot be obtained by “strength” or force. Achilles recognizes this in Book I when he refrains from killing Agamemnon. However, Paris scorns not only strength, but also wealth and state. I suppose it is “state” that lets Hector and Agamemnon come to an agreement about a duel between Paris and Menelaus that will end the war. Paris breaks the agreement by running away to visit the prize of his excellence, namely Helen. Homer has Venus spirit Paris away, but I take this to be a poetic embellishment, agreeing with Eva Brann in Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (Paul Dry Books, 2002; pages 41–3):

But the gods’ face-off effects nothing; at least nothing happens that could not happen without them. And so it is always; Zeus himself disclaims responsibility for human fate right at the beginning of the Odyssey …

To be sure, as I said above, nothing is ever done that could not have been done by the humans themselves …

Photo of the tower of books used for this article

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By David Pierce | Posted in Homer, Plato | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (12)

The Private, Unskilled One

May 19, 2017 – 5:55 am

I went into Istanbul’s Pandora Bookshop a month ago, looking for an English translation of War and Peace, since the Garnett translation I had read at college was falling apart. I was told the Oxford World’s Classics edition (with the Maude translation) was coming the next week, and it did come.

Elif Batuman, The Idiot, in Nesin Matematik Köyü, Kayser Dağı Mevkii, Şirince, Selçuk, İzmir, Turkey, 2017.05.18

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By David Pierce | Posted in Categorical Thinking, Education, Harper’s, Hitchens, Maugham, Nesin Mathematics Village, Thoreau | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (5)

Edirne

May 6, 2017 – 6:35 am

This is about a May Day trip from the third Ottoman capital to the second. In the former, the government has been suppressing May Day demonstrations in Taksim Square since 2013. That year, the suppression may have helped provoke the Gezi Park protests, as I suggested in “May Day One Month Late.” I reported on the following year’s suppression in “Madness, Stupidity, or Evil?” This year (2017), labor unions held a legal May Day demonstration in Bakırköy, further west in European Istanbul, as reported by the Anadolu Agency (which as far as I know is owned by the Turkish state). My wife and I just got out of town.


Selimiye Mosque, 2017.04.30

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By David Pierce | Posted in History, Nesin Mathematics Village, Tourism, Turkey | Tagged , , , | Comments (4)

On Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad, Book II

April 24, 2017 – 8:14 am

Index | Text

Even gods must sleep; but under the weight of his responsibility to Thetis, Zeus cannot. As Achilles pointed out in Book I, “dreams are often sent from Jove”; now we shall have a case in point (Chapman’s lines 4–7).

… Al waies cast; this coūsel seru’d his mind
With most allowance: to dispatch, a harmefull dreame to greet
The king of men; and gaue this charge: Go, to the Achiue fleet,
(Pernicious dreame) …

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By David Pierce | Posted in Homer | Tagged , | Comments (7)

Thinking in the age of cyborgs

April 19, 2017 – 6:00 pm

I am reblogging this article because I like it, and because it may help amplify or refine (or correct?) some ideas I tried to express in “The point of teaching mathematics.” Mathematics should teach both the possibility of peaceful cooperation and the power of our own thought.

junaidmubeen's avatarJunaid Mubeen, PhD

We have our clearest indication yet that the cyborgs are coming.Elon Musk has formally accepted his invitation to the AI party the only way he knows how: by founding a company. Neuralink will create brain-enhancing digital implants; the first step on the road to merging humans with software. Musk has taken on the mantel of preserving the human race, and he believes the only way to counter the threat of AI’s rapid ascent is by meshing together biological and digital forms of intelligence.

To date, cyborgs have been the preserve of Sci-Fi. But Musk has form for bringing outlandish fantasies to bear. In fact, to Musk the cyborg is no fantasy at all. He recently argued that humans have already merged with technology. Musk is not the first to make the point: over half a century has passed since Marshall McLuhan declared technology “the extensions of man”

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By David Pierce | Posted in Philosophy | Tagged | Comments (0)

36th Istanbul Film Festival, 2017

April 18, 2017 – 3:35 am

This is about seeing six films in the Istanbul Film Festival, which began this year (2017) on Wednesday, April 5.

Kazimer Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918 (MoMA)

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By David Pierce | Posted in Film, Istanbul | Tagged | Comments (1)

On Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad, Book I

April 14, 2017 – 1:48 pm

This post, originally of April 14, 2017, is the first of twenty-four, one on each book of Homer’s Iliad in Chapman’s translation.

A later series began on November 29, 2022. Again there was a post on each book of the Iliad, but now I was reading Murray’s translation in the Loeb Classical Library.

“Achilles banefull wrath” is to be resounded by the Goddess, whom the poet invokes.

Strife between Achilles and Agamemnon is the story of the Iliad. It begins with Apollo, who has plagued the Greek army.

Homer denies no human responsibility. Apollo has plagued the army, because Agamemnon insists on keeping a man’s daughter as his slave. The woman’s father is a priest of Apollo called Chryses; we shall come to know the daughter’s name only as Chryseis. She has been taken in a Greek raid on her home town, which will be called Chrysa. We shall hear more about the raid later in Book I, when Achilles tells the story to his mother.

Thus Homer’s narrative is not sequential. In a technique that will become standard in literature, we start in medias res.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Homer, West Virginia | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (13)

Homer for the Civilian

April 8, 2017 – 9:23 am

The sources of this essay (originally posted April 8, 2017) are an earlier one, written as an email in 2009, and a conversation that ensued it, on the theme of what Homer may mean in one’s life, and whether an application to one’s life involves an abuse of the original text. I wrote on this blog, in July 2016, on analogies in Homer and elsewhere, in “Thinking & Feeling.” My last post considered an apparent instance of abuse of the Hebrew Bible.

At the end of the Iliad, to retrieve the body of Hector from its killer, King Priam of Troy visits Achilles in his tent in the evening, in the camp of the hostile Greeks. The scene may recall two political enemies from the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and Congressman Thomas O’Neill, Speaker of the House: these two were able to be on friendly terms “after 6 PM.”

Homer, Iliad, Wordworth edition
Aleksandr Andreevich Ivanov
“King Priam begging Achilles for the Return of Hector’s Body,” 1824
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

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By David Pierce | Posted in History, Homer | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (10)

The Hands of an Angry Deity

April 2, 2017 – 6:29 pm

I first drafted the following essay in late October, 2011, a few days after the first of the earthquakes in Van, and a few weeks after moving from Ankara to Istanbul. I rediscovered the essay recently by chance. It seems worth revisiting now, in the spring of 2017, given the political upheaval in the United States last fall, and the potential for more around the world.

Body of minivan with missing windows on overgrown grassy slope
Above Mehmetçik Caddesi in Şişli, one of the most densely populated of Istanbul’s 39 boroughs; 2017.04.02

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By David Pierce | Posted in absolute presuppositions, Collingwood, History, Istanbul, Nature, Ontological Proof, Philosophy, Plato, Tourism | Tagged , , | Comments (4)