Facts (NL IX, ‘Retrospect,’ first 6 paragraphs)

August 1, 2014 – 9:43 am

Index to this series

A certain person says,

I am not better than you or more virtuous than you. If you see me on the right path, help me. If you see me on the wrong path, advise me and halt me. And obey me as far as I obey God.

How should one hear these words: as an eminently reasonable expression of benevolent humility such as any of us might honorably make? Well, no matter how qualified, the command obey me might be a warning sign. The words are in fact from a recently published video, as quoted in the Guardian Weekly (Vol 190 No 5, 11–17 July 2014, p. 4). The speaker is the man whose nom de guerre is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, on whose head the Department of State of the United States of America placed a ten-million-dollar bounty in 2011. He now styles himself Ibrahim, Caliph of the Islamic State, a new entity that is supposed to restore the lost Muslim glory of past centuries. This restoration is to be achieved through war. War requires military discipline, with punishments meted out for infractions like insubordination, not to mention the slaughter of those perceived as enemies. So al-Baghdadi’s request to be advised and halted if seen to be in the wrong must be interpreted rather carefully.

It is difficult to know how to interpret somebody’s words. With that I pass to the transitional chapter in the first part, “Man,” of Collingwood’s New Leviathan.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Aristotle, Categorical Thinking, Collingwood, Grammar, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato, Turkish, Visual Art | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)

Şirince 2014

July 19, 2014 – 7:01 am

This is about our second visit to the Nesin Mathematical Village in Şirince this year. The first visit was to attend the Summer School Around Valuation Theory, May 22–26. Now we have come back to teach, as usual, in the Turkish Mathematical Society Undergraduate and Graduate Summer School. This time we are teaching not just one week, but two: July 14–27. My own course, as several times in the past, is on nonstandard analysis. Each course meets every day but Thursday, two hours a day.

The Math Village only increases in beauty every year, as I mean to suggest by posting a few photographs below.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Education, Mathematics, Nesin Mathematics Village, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (10)

Two women

June 30, 2014 – 2:43 pm

On the left, Vincent van Gogh, Mousmé, 1888, National Gallery of Art, Washington. On the right, Stephen Chambers, Woman (Green Background), 2006, private collection, London; currently on display at the Pera Museum, Istanbul, where I saw it on Saturday, June 21, 2014, and made the (slightly tilted) photograph on the right below.

A10433.jpg

The van Gogh image, I downloaded from the National Gallery website. I cropped and resized the Chambers image to be the same height as the van Gogh; then I juxtaposed the two with convert +append van-gogh-la-mousme.jpg chambers-woman.jpg two-women.jpg

I did not know of the artist Stephen Chambers before. The green background of his Woman, and her expression, caused me to think of van Gogh’s Mousmé. The Mousmé’s head is round, but her dotted skirt is as flat as the blouse of the Woman.

By David Pierce | Posted in Istanbul, Visual Art | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Interconnectedness

June 30, 2014 – 1:19 pm

Note added January 13, 2019. This essay concerns a letter I once wrote about

  • teaching;
  • the infinitely large and small, as contemplated by Pascal in that one of the Pensées headed Disproportion de l’homme;
  • Zen Buddhism.

Since the ideas of Collingwood often dominate this blog, one may ask why they influence me. My old letter provides some evidence, since I wrote it before I had read anything by Collingwood but The Principles of Art.

The present essay has the first of this blog’s several mentions of the slogan

Verba volant scripta manent,

which may not mean what we tend to think today.

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By David Pierce | Posted in “God is a circle …”, Collingwood, Contradiction, Education, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Principles of Art, West Virginia | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

NL VIII: “Hunger and Love”

June 30, 2014 – 11:57 am

Index to this series

§1

Collingwood recognizes the two kinds of appetites named in the title of the chapter.
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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato, Psychology | Tagged , , , , | Comments (8)

June in the New World

June 20, 2014 – 2:21 pm

This is about our first visit to the US since the death of my mother. The visit culminated in a memorial observance on a wooded hillside at my cousin’s place in West Virginia. Before going there, Ayşe and I stayed with friends in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington. We made some visits to my mother’s currently unoccupied house in Alexandria. Unfortunately we had little time for much else; at least we could not plan on anything else. I have no intention of recounting the whole trip, but will have some things to say about the photos below. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Nature, Visual Art, West Virginia | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (8)

NL VII: “Appetite”

May 5, 2014 – 3:18 pm

Index to this series

How can we compare two states of mind? This is the question of Chapter VII of The New Leviathan. The answer is contained in the chapter’s title. “Appetite” is a name, both for the chapter and for the fundamental instance of comparing a here-and-now feeling with a “there-and-then” feeling. We compare these two feelings because we are unsatisfied with the former, but prefer the latter.

It would seem then that appetite is at the root of memory. Thus we are among the ideas of the opening verses of The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot, who attended Collingwood’s lectures on Aristotle’s De Anima at Oxford (and was just a year older):

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Logic, Midgley, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Pirsig, T. S. Eliot, West Virginia | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (12)

Madness, stupidity, or evil?

May 2, 2014 – 3:39 pm

In Turkey in 2014, May Day was an official holiday, and yet demonstrations in Taksim were banned. They had been banned also in 2013. In June of that year, I opined that the banning had contributed to the rage that erupted in the Gezi protests.

Why would the government ban demonstrations again this year? The only reasons I can think of are suggested by my title.

May Day demonstrations were permitted in 2012, and I remember the day as a joyous occasion. Some photographs of mine should suggest this.

May Day 2012 Istanbul

May Day 2012 Istanbul


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By David Pierce | Posted in Gezi, Istanbul, Turkey | Tagged | Comments (4)

Cogito ne demek?

April 11, 2014 – 1:40 pm

Why the late Geoffrey Lewis’s Turkish Grammar (2d ed., Oxford, 2000) is exceptional:

At the beginning of a clause demek, demek ki, or demek oluyor ki (‘it becomes to say’) signifies ‘that is to say’: düşünüyorum, demek ki varım ‘I am thinking, which means I exist.’ (This Turkish translation of Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum is right—‘I am thinking’—and the usual English version—‘I think’—is wrong.)

I sent the foregoing to Facebook this morning, but this was not the best medium for the typographical features of boldface, italics, directional quotation marks, and indented quotations.

I had been aware that Lewis had died, Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Descartes, Facebook, Grammar, Language, Philosophy, Turkish | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

An afterbirthday message

March 31, 2014 – 3:24 pm

I originally posted the following on Facebook on March 17, 2014. I post it here too so that it is not lost in the bowels of that other medium.

Sevgili arkadaşlar // dear friends,

Doğum günümü kutladığınız için hepinize teşekkürler, ve aşağıdaki sözleri okuyanlara teşekkürler. // Thanks to all of you for the birthday greetings, and thanks to those who read the following.

(1) Yaşayın, (2) Diaspora*’ya katılın, (3) özgür olun! //

(1) Live, (2) join Diaspora*, (3) be free!

İngilizce’de devam ediyorum // I continue in English. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Facebook, Freedom, Philosophy, Plato | Tagged , | Comments (3)