This is about Thales of Miletus and what it means to study him. I am moved to ask what history is in the first place. It is a study of the freedom in which we face our conditions. Thales had his way of understanding the world, and we may benefit from trying to learn it.
“The Thaleses of the future are meeting in Didim,
September 24, 2016”
I began writing this article on Saturday, December 10, 2016; I finished the next morning, Istanbul time. I wrote the first three paragraphs last. The planned breakfast did take place, quite pleasantly. The death toll in the bombing rose to 39. No matter how much I read drafts of my articles, I usually want to make changes after they are published. Continue reading
A chance encounter with a Medieval definition of God, used as the title of a sculpture, leads to an ancient plane tree and to more consideration of what can go wrong with public opinion polls.
Ancient plane tree of Bayır, Marmaris Peninsula, September 9, 2010
I composed this post after the US Presidential election of November 8, 2016; I revised it after the election of November 3, 2020. The general question is of responsibility, as for Clinton’s loss in 2016 or the Democrats’ loss of Congressional seats in 2020. More precisely, the question is not whom to blame, but why. The former question depends on the latter. There is a common belief, retained from childhood experience, that somebody, some power, is going to judge our actions. With regard to this belief, many of us continue to behave as if we are still children, be we obedient or not. Asked, for example, to think of the feelings of Trump supporters after their man’s 2020 loss, some of us reply, “Why should we? Did they ever think of our feelings?” You can ask that of a parent whom you expect to impose fairness; do you think there is such a parent of the world? My investigation of the 2016 election continued in “How to Learn About People.”
“Everything will be fine” is usually correct, but not always.
I wrote my last article, “Happiness,” after the arrests of editors and writers at Turkey’s largest independent newspaper, Cumhuriyet (“Republic”).
A philosophical point buried the article was this: there is no one reason, not even a collection of reasons, why things happen.
If only tangentially sometimes, this is about living in Turkey, especially under the ongoing official state of emergency.
Aristotle, Marx & Engels, and Collingwood
A blog article on Medium recently struck me for its treatment of science. Dated October 3, the article is called “The Purpose Of Life Is Not Happiness: It’s Usefulness,” and its opening section is as follows.
For the longest time, I believed that there’s only purpose of life: And that is to be happy. Continue reading
After five years in Istanbul, we continue to learn how much there is still to discover here. Now we have been to the Asian borough of Beykoz. Much of what we saw there was rural, and the topography and flora reminded me of Appalachia. I have nothing to say about the poverty and ignorance that might be suggested by this term; for me, Appalachia was always a locus for holidays, mostly at my late uncle’s place in West Virginia, but also in the form of bicycle tours. Travelling now to Beykoz, Country roads,
I could think, take me home, to the place I belong!
We got there by public bus from our European borough of Şişli.
Polonezköy, Beykoz, 2016.08.14
The Turkish name of this island is Burgazada, and I discussed its etymology in an article about a visit in February of 2014. We stayed there again in October of 2015. During this August of 2016, on our last day on the island, I saw a fellow with the Greek name of the island tattooed on his forearm. Continue reading
Note added May 31, 2018: Here are some meditations on education from the summer of 2016, when Donald Trump was threatening to become President of the United States. Education cannot be forced on unwilling students. Neither need students know just what they are accepting; they may be enticed or beguiled into learning. Whether they have learned cannot be directly tested. I include some memories of racism (as an observer, not a victim) and of my own liberal education.
Note added May 22, 2023: I return to this post, precisely because of that assertion that testing does not show directly whether students have learned. As I have learned recently through a friend, Emily Bender said something similar on Medium last year, in response to Steven Johnson in “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” (New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2022):
First, large language models have been making steady improvements, year after year, on standardized reading comprehension tests.
Bender’s response is “On NYT Magazine on AI: Resist the Urge to be Impressed” (April 18, 2022):
just because the tests were designed to test for reading comprehension by people, and even if we assume that they do a good job of measuring that, doesn’t mean that comparable scores by machines on the same tests entail that machines are doing something comparable …
Bender goes on to talk about “construct validity.”
Would education solve the world’s problems? A meaningfully positive answer would imply that the appropriate education could actually be supplied to us, or enough of us; and yet education is not a drug that can be administered willy-nilly.
Tables for art entrance exam, MSGSÜ, 2016.08.02
This essay is written as a distraction from current events, though I make some reference to them. I am prompted by questions of analogy provoked by
Polytropy 