Tag Archives: 2022

On The Human Condition of Hannah Arendt 1

February 24, 2022 – 6:29 pm

Here begins a series based on the 1958 book by Hannah Arendt (1906–75) called The Human Condition. The publisher classifies it as philosophy and political science. I sense a kind of similarity with a book that I have devoted many blog posts to: The New Leviathan (1942) of R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943).

Collingwood wrote about European civilization as a war threatened to end it. Arendt managed to escape that war, and she went on to write about civilization in her own way in The Human Condition. Today, February 24, 2022, a new war for territory in Europe begins.

Red-themed cover of The Human Condition against dull green cloth

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By David Pierce | Posted in Philosophy | Also tagged | Comments (11)

Gödel, Grammar, and Mathematics

February 14, 2022 – 8:01 am

Preface

This attempt at exposition of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem was inspired or provoked by somebody else’s attempt at the same thing, in a blog post that a friend directed me to (by means of a Twitter message on November 17, 2020). I wanted in response to set the theorem in the context of mathematics rather than computer science.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Exposition, Fowler, Grammar, Mathematics | Also tagged , , | Comments (0)

The Society of Mathematics 2

January 24, 2022 – 8:19 am

This post is a response by Alexandre Borovik to my previous post. The following words then are Sasha’s:

Dear David,

I joined the AMR. In my view, its areas of activities are sufficiently clearly defined [on its homepage]:

The AMR has several initiatives under development. These include:

  • AMR colloquia, lectures and workshops, exploring new ways to present research
  • Updates and reviews of new research
  • Reviews of classic influential papers
  • Discussions of open problems
  • Video expositions of mathematical research
  • AMR journals and publications leveraging new technological opportunities
  • Interviews of mathematicians
  • Developing new ideas for the flourishing of the international mathematical research community

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By David Pierce | Posted in Mathematics, Philosophy of Mathematics | Comments (0)

The Society of Mathematics

January 22, 2022 – 2:00 pm

Mannequin in front of summation formula

This post concerns the Association for Mathematical Research, or AMR. A number of people are upset by its existence. I am not exactly one of them, but am suspicious, mainly because I do not know why a new organization would be needed, when we already have

The Twitter account of the AMR is dated to April, 2021. The website of the AMR supplies a list of founding members, but no account of when, how, or why they became founders. The site has a brief mission statement:

THE MISSION of the AMR is to SUPPORT MATHEMATICAL RESEARCH and SCHOLARSHIP

Are those other organizations not doing a good job? Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Mathematics, Philosophy of Mathematics | Comments (1)

Plato and Christianity

January 11, 2022 – 9:33 pm

Index to this series

This post uses work of Hannah Arendt, Augustine, R. G. Collingwood, Tom Holland, Somerset Maugham, and Ved Mehta.

Elevated highway, way above city streets

Ortaköy, December 27, 2021

In the first post of this series, I gave some reasons to read the Republic, and one of them was the problem of how our political leaders were not always the best. Plato had not solved that problem, since we still had it; but that meant nobody else had solved it either. Plato had at least taught us that people with great worldly power could nonetheless be more miserable than their subjects. In the Republic, Plato has Socrates teach that lesson

  • to Thrasymachus, in the latter part of Book I;
  • to Glaucon, who concludes at the end of Book IV that if having an unhealthy body is bad, having a vicious soul is worse;
  • in Book IX, with the account of the tyrant;
  • with the Myth of Er in Book X.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Maugham, Plato | Also tagged , , , | Comments (2)