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.

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in “God is a circle …”, Collingwood, Contradiction, Education, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Principles of Art, West Virginia | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (8)

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.
Continue reading →

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 (9)

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):

Continue reading →

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


Continue reading →

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)

NL VI: “Language,” again

March 31, 2014 – 11:33 am

Index to this series

This is about language: language the concept, and “Language,” the sixth chapter of Collingwood’s New Leviathan. We shall consider language in a very basic way, not as a means of communicating what we know, but as the way we come to know things in the first place.
Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Homer, Language, New Leviathan, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Pirsig, Principles of Art, Science | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Funeral march for Berkin Elvan

March 13, 2014 – 2:29 pm

Posters around our university building invited us to leave together at two o’clock, to walk to Şişli Meydanı to await the hearse bearing the body of young Berkin Elvan. But for some reason the students left a bit early. Some faculty walked together.

It’s a ten-minute walk to Şişli square. Police had blocked a street that ran parallel to the main avenue that we expected to march along.

DSC09843
Continue reading →

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