On Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad, Book VI

September 11, 2017 – 7:20 am

Index to this series | Text of Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad

Book VI of the Iliad may illustrate or test what I have also been reading, whose second title is Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism. For the Greeks, the Trojan war is a fight for civilization, against the barbarism of stealing the wife of the man who has played host to you. In Book VI we find the great exemplar of civilization: the meeting of Diomedes with Glaucus. Discovering that the grandfather of his Trojan enemy had once been a guest of his own grandfather, Diomedes urges that he and Glaucus must exchange gifts, be friends, and avoid meeting on the battlefield; and Glaucus agrees.

The flames, surrounded by blackened rock, are taller than the backpack

One flame of the Chimera, with my backpack, 2009

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By David Pierce | Posted in Homer, New Leviathan | Tagged , | Comments (16)

NL XXI: Society as Joint Will

September 9, 2017 – 5:50 am

Index to this series

Executive summary (added September 10, 2018):

1.
I cannot say “I will” without recognizing the possibility of joining with others to say “we will.”
2.
A social consciousness consists of (1) a precise idea of one’s place in a society and (2) a vague sense of the society as a whole. The latter sense may be incorrect, having been foolishly accepted on the word of an authority.
3.
Properly understood, ruling, of itself and perhaps of a non-social community, may be all that a society does. It is the responsibility of the members alone.
4.
To form a society means (1) to form social relations and (2) to do this for some purpose. To focus on (1) yields the idea of a universal society—which cannot actually exist, despite foolish hopes for the League of Nations.
5.
The universal society cannot exist, because we produce a society by transforming an earlier community, and some trace of this must remain.
6.
Members of a society are equal, (1) in having the freedom to join and (2) in just being members. A society may create an inequality, as by delegating authority. There may be natural inequalities, not produced by the society itself; society may compensate for them, turn them into assets, or even depend on them, as in the case of initiative.
7.
Rule by force (in a non-social community) may be by rewards and punishments, that is, objects of desire and fear. These may be promised or threatened fraudulently. One who grows too accustomed to exerting force may lose freedom of will.
8.
Societies institute criminal law to mitigate members’ losses of freedom of will.
9.
Societies can be temporary or permanent.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Hitchens, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

On Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad, Book V

September 7, 2017 – 11:20 am

Index to this series | Text of Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad

Book V of the Iliad is long and rich, with lots of characters like War and Peace, and stories within stories. The main story is of Tydeus’s son Diomedes, who with Pallas’s help is able to wound both Venus and Mars – I follow Chapman in using the Roman names.

  • Mars agrees with Minerva not to interfere with the war, but she immediately breaks the agreement.
  • A skilled hunter is successfully hunted down.
  • An oracle is mentioned that the Trojans should not go to sea; the master builder of Paris’s ships is slain.
  • A man who can read the future in dreams is bereft of the sons he let go to war.
  • An old man loses his only sons, the offspring of his old age.
  • Having broken the truce and shot Menelaus, Pandarus turns out to have left his horses in Lycia, because he didn’t think they would eat well in Troy.
  • The story is mentioned twice of the horses of Aeneas, offspring of the horses of Jove.
  • Pandarus thinks he cannot command the horses of Aeneas better than Aeneas.
  • Venus is not the first deity to have been injured by a mortal, and her mother Dione advises patience.
  • “He that fights with heaven hath never long to live,” or perhaps to have a faithful wife, she says.
  • She can cure a wound without balm.
  • “The race of gods is far above men creeping here below,” says Apollo to Diomedes.
  • Sarpedon discusses justice and sets an example of it.
  • “Strength is but strength of will,” says Agamemnon.
  • To have self-confidence may be good, but not to tempt fate.
  • Pallas has a theory of just war.

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

NL XX: Society and Community

September 5, 2017 – 5:11 am

Index to this series

Executive summary (added September 9, 2018): Henceforth we are concerned with communities, namely “societies” of human beings (or beings with at least the potential for free agency). Indeed, the whole of Part II is “an inquiry into communities” (1. 15). A society, also called a partnership, is a community formed by common agreement among its members, each with each, for some purpose: this relaxes the original, more specific requirements of Roman law. Members of any community share something; members of a society share a social consciousness. Any community is established and maintained by rule: immanent rule if the community is a society, otherwise transeunt rule. Practically speaking, the ruler of others must also rule him- or herself. Rule of a non-social community is by force: this is moral force, an irresistable emotion within the person being ruled, excited by somebody who is mentally stronger in any of various ways.

A society is an act of will: it emerges and persists because its members will that it do so. We said this in the previous chapter; we say it now in more detail. In particular, we impose on a society no such further requirement of economic interest as Roman lawyers (apparently) did.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, New Leviathan, Philosophy | Tagged | Comments (11)

On Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad, Book IV

September 2, 2017 – 10:35 am

Index | Text

The gods confer. The humans can make war or peace; which shall it be? Juno insists on war, so that Troy can be punished. When Jove objects, Juno offers up her most beloved Greek cities in return.

  • Mycenae,
  • Argos,
  • Sparta

– let Jove destroy them at will, if only Pallas be sent to induce one of the Trojans to break the truce.

Dog in the square shadow of an umbrella on a beach where there are other umbrellas, but no humans
Altınova (Golden Plain), Balıkesir (Paleocastron), 2017.08.31

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By David Pierce | Posted in Homer | Tagged , | Comments (5)

NL XIX: Two Senses of the Word “Society”

September 1, 2017 – 4:15 am

Executive summary (below) | Index to this series

After a break of half a year, I return to reading Collingwood’s New Leviathan. Being on holiday at an Aegean beach gives me the opportunity. While here, I may also return to Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad. Last winter I finished Part I of the New Leviathan, the part called “Man.” Here I continue with the first chapter of “Society.” I have reason to look at what Mary Midgley and Albert Einstein say about science. Collingwood’s investigation suggests a way of thinking about prejudice and discrimination.

Part II of the New Leviathan is “Society,” and the first two chapters of this, XIX and XX, concern the distinction between society proper and two more general notions. In Chapter XX, the more general notion will be community. In Chapter XIX, the more general notion has not got its own proper name, and so Collingwood denotes it by writing “society,” in quotation marks.

A “society” of chairs at the beach (Altınova 2017.08.31)

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By David Pierce | Posted in absolute presuppositions, Collingwood, G. H. Hardy, Midgley, New Leviathan, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Plato, Principles of Art, Science | Tagged , , , | Comments (9)

Ahtamar Island

August 30, 2017 – 5:05 am

During a mathematics conference, I visit the ruins of a monastery on a remote island in an inland sea. This moves me to consider the relation between introversion and, if not mathematics, then monasticism. On the origins of Christian monasticism, I look at several sources, notably Gibbon (see the References); also Maugham, who writes of a hermit on an island of the Torres Strait. Since the monastery on the island was Armenian, in what is now Turkey, one should consider also the treatment of minority populations here. I only acknowledge the issue, suggesting Wikipedia pages (linked to presently) as a starting point for research. On this subject, old books on my shelves are not much help; my own experience is not much more help, at least not in a way that lends itself to being written of here. I do know that Turkish politicians will treat imputations of their own Armenian ancestry as an insult.

We visited Ahtamar Island for a second time on Wednesday, August 23, 2017. Thus we saw again the remains of the Church of the Holy Cross. This Armenian church was consecrated in 921 and presumably desecrated in 1915, if not earlier; now, since our last visit, though officially a museum, the church would seem to have been reconsecrated, to judge by the new altarpiece, featuring an icon of the Madonna and Child.

Madonna and child
Altarpiece, Church of the Holy Cross, Ahtamar Island

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By David Pierce | Posted in Harper’s, History, Tourism, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (7)

Hypomnesis

July 30, 2017 – 6:35 pm

When is a help a hindrance? The Muses have provoked this question. They did this through their agents, the cicadas, who sang around the European Cultural Center of Delphi, during the 11th Panhellenic Logic Symposium, July 12–5, 2017.

     Cicada, European Cultural Center of Delphi, 2017.07.15     

Cicada, European Cultural Center of Delphi, 2017.07.15

My question has two particular instances.

  1. At a mathematical conference, can theorems “speak for themselves,” or should their presenters be at pains to help the listener appreciate the results?

  2. When the conference is in Greece, even at one of the country’s greatest archeological sites, does this enhance the reading of ancient Greek texts, or is it only a distraction?

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By David Pierce | Posted in Archeology, Archimedes, Art, Collingwood, Education, G. H. Hardy, Language, Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy, Plato, Principles of Art, Tourism, West Virginia | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (18)

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)