This is about metaphor.
Shop window in Athens, Monday, July 10, 2017:
ΜΕΤΑΦΕΡΘΗΚΑΜΕ
ΔΙΠΛΑ ΣΤΟ 46Α
→
ΤΑΚΗΣ
Μεταφερθήκαμε is the first-person plural passive aorist of μεταφέρω. I guess the meaning of the sign is, “We moved next door to 46A – Takis.” I took the photo, just so I could use it at a time like this. I didn’t try to talk with Takis.
The use of a distinction between the subjective and the objective has sometimes made me suspicious. The suggestion is made here that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem relies on the distinction. I shall look at this more in “Gödel and AI.” Meanwhile, the major sources for the present post are the following.
– also (in response to James) on how emotions don’t need a physical source.
Minor sources include the following.
Having started last spring, my wife and I recently completed a project to read Ulysses together. I was glad to be able to put the book back on the shelf. It sits there, next to another of comparable length, Kristin Lavransdatter; this is because I order my books according to the birth of the writer (or subject), and James Joyce was born February 2, 1882; Sigrid Undset, May 5.
I read her book on my own, for and with pleasure, and it entered into my thoughts on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, expressed for example in “Impermanence” (on Book IX, chapters i–iii; the common theme was how children might forget their mothers, but not conversely; Maya Angelou recalled how many black women had nursed white children in America).
This is adapted from emails I wrote in 2022 (on February 10 and July 16 and 17). I post them now, because I have been updating the “Directory” of documents that I have saved on this blog, other than as posts. I could not remember why I had saved an “Annotation” from Harper’s, until I found the reason below. I take up poetry by T. S. Eliot, E. McKim, and Robinson Jeffers, in addition to the one I first quote.
An email friend shared a poem called “Merrymakers” (from “Four Poems,” London Review of Books, 9 May 2013), by Charles Simic:
A troop of late night revellers,
most likely shown the door
at some after-hours club
or a party in the neighbourhood,
still whooping it up
as they stagger down the street
with a girl in a wedding dress
walking pigeon-toed far behind them,
and calling out in distress:
‘Hey, you! Where the fuck
do you think you’re going?’
The poets sets us up, sort of the way young Eliot does in “Prufrock”:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table …
The shock from Simic is not in image, but in meter, which one might have expected to continue iambically:
A troop of late night revellers,
most likely shown the door
at some old after-hours club,
continued with their roar,
forgetting sensibilities …
As it is, the poem gets prosy. The lines are pretty much just units of speech, “end-stopped,” never “emjambed,” at least until the end.
Just printing the vignette as poetry makes us pay attention in a certain way. Art is everywhere, if we know how to see it. The other day I was walking by an ugly old electrical box on the street, covered with remains of old posters, and I thought it could be spruced up with a small brass plaque, as if it were a sculpture.
Below is Chapter 1, “Science and the Modern World,” of The Relevance of Science by C. F. von Weizsäcker.
The last post of this blog was of my annotated version of Chapter 3, “Creation in the Old Testament.”
As the author reports in his Preface, The whole book consists of the first of two series of Gifford Lectures at Glasgow, 1959–61.
I had the opportunity myself to lecture in Tabriz, on August 28, 2012. This was in Iran, so the wall behind me held a portrait of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, along with some kind of icon of science. We were at a national mathematics conference, but I included some of my artwork in the slides of my talk (called “Model-theory of differential fields”)
Below is “Creation in the Old Testament,” which is Chapter 3 of The Relevance of Science by C. F. von Weizsäcker. I have highlighted key passages. I have added a note concerning Pascal, because I spent time reading him and blogging about him, and von Weizsäcker mentions him.
I am studying von Weizsäcker’s chapter, to see what the author makes of the Creator’s assessment of His own work. That assessment is the title of another post of this blog: “It Was Good.”
Somebody set out to build Burj Al Babas here in Turkey, for buyers in the Persian Gulf, but abandoned the project
From a walk around the neighborhood
Tarabya, Istanbul, Wednesday, October 9, 2024
There were a couple of tweets on the eve of Easter:
Just a reminder to make sure that you preach a doctrine of the resurrection tomorrow that is not reducible to that of the old IWW song “Joe Hill”
It’s a good song! I find it moving! But if that’s all we have to say about the resurrection (and I have heard many sermons that suggest that it is) – well, we should all be doing something else with our lives.
Fortunately, of course, it’s not all we have to say.
In high school, if not sooner, one learns theorems established more than two millenia ago by Euclid and Archimedes. I am thinking of the theorems expressed today by the equations
𝐶 = 2π𝑟,
𝐴 = π𝑟²
for the circumference and area of a circle whose radius is 𝑟, and
𝐴 = 4π𝑟²,
𝑉 = (4/3)π𝑟³
for the surface area and volume of a sphere whose radius is 𝑟. Continue reading
The essay below was originally a post on Medium, August 7, 2017. I wrote from the Nesin Mathematics Village. The crowds there, described here, are a great way to spread infections, as I used to find out. For this reason, I have not gone back to the Village since the winter of 2020, when Covid-19 became pandemic.
The Village is in the hills above Ephesus, site of the temple of Artemis, where there were golden oxen, donated by King Croesus, according to Herodotus (I.92).
When I first came to Turkey in 1998, Herodotus was my tour guide. Because of my interest, from our base in Atarneus, my father-in-law-to-be took seven of us (including himself and a dog) to see Sardis: this was the seat from which Croesus had ruled Lydia, until Cyrus the Great of Persia defeated him.
Cats facing off in the Atatürk City Forest
Tarabya, Sarıyer, Istanbul, October 16, 2024
My title alludes to some notes for the layperson that I rediscovered recently. I have reviewed and edited them, and they are below, in the following sections (linked to by the titles after the three main bullets; other links are to Wikipedia).
My wife and I had recently moved to Istanbul, and the Istanbul Model Theory Seminar had just got going. The Nobel Prize and quasicrystals had been mentioned there too.
Vegetable plot in Yeniköy (where Cavafy lived a while), Istanbul, Saturday, September 28, 2024
The son of the king of Persia wants to press the advantage, after the combined forces of Media, Persia, Armenia, and Chaldaea have
The king of Media is of another mind: he would rather quit while he is ahead. He has an argument for standing pat, by the account of Xenophon in the Cyropaedia (IV.i.11–18).
One may consider the argument of Cyaxares as an example of “motivated reasoning.” I think it is a specious argument: attractive, but ultimately unsound. Perhaps I say that, only because the king’s nephew Cyrus rejects the argument, but is nonetheless successful in what he goes on to do. With his Persian troops and as many Medians as wish to join them, along with the Hyrcanians, who have defected from Assyria, Cyrus pursues and defeats again the Assyrian army. He kills the kings of Cappadocia and Arabia, and he puts to flight both the king of Phrygia and Croesus, king of Lydia (IV.ii.28–31). Of course, this is not the end of the story; history never ends.
I have been reading and discussing the eight books of the Cyropaedia with a Catherine Project group, at the rate of half a book a week, since July 8 of this year (2024). Thus we shall have completed the sixth book (called “On the Eve of the Great Battle” in the Loeb edition) on September 23. It has astonished me that some of my fellow readers think well of the argument for taking it easy, even as they acknowledge that the man who makes it may be a fool. The argument does not seem to me like one that a king such as Cyaxares can afford to make.
Possibly Xenophon has an esoteric message, as Plato is thought to have. However, although these two writers had a common teacher in Socrates, he never went far from Athens. Xenophon helped lead a stranded army of ten thousand Greek mercenaries, from Babylon north to the Black Sea, after the failure of the coup for which they had been hired by Cyrus the Younger. Xenophon admires a practical man who can actually get things done. This being what Cyrus the Elder is, he is the hero of the Cyropaedia. I shall review my textual reasons for saying this. First I shall look at “motivated reasoning” today, along with the idea that we could have “evolved” to use it. (In short, the rest of this post has the three parts just linked to.)
Photo taken September 17, 2024, of Lesbos over the sea, from a beach in Lydia. Of this country, Chrysantas says to Cyrus, after the latter has pursued the Assyrians over the objections of his uncle Cyaxares (Cyropaedia VI.ii.21),
since it now appears that Syria is not to be the only prize – though there is much to be got in Syria, flocks and herds and corn and palm-trees yielding fruit – but Lydia as well, Lydia the land of wine and oil and fig-trees, Lydia, to whose shores the sea brings more good things than eyes can feast on, I say that once we realise this we can mope no longer, our spirits will rise apace, and we shall hasten to lay our hands on the Lydian wealth without delay.
This is in response to the suggestion of Cyrus that his army are intimidated by the alliance that Assyria has formed with Lydia.
Polytropy 