From a flat on the rue Saint-Jacques, Paris
Thursday, June 4, 2015
What René Descartes says here does not make a lot of sense to me:
it is far better never to contemplate investigating the truth about any matter than to do so without a method. For it is quite certain that such haphazard studies and obscure reflections blur the natural light and blind our intelligence.
The extant works of Hippocrates take up ten volumes of the Loeb Classical Library. I’ve got the fourth of those volumes, because it contains also the extant fragments of Heraclitus, collected under the title ΠΕΡΙ ΤΟΥ ΠΑΝΤΟΣ, On the Universe. [See the footnote on this title.]
I am going to look here at some aphorisms of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Turkish folklore, Zen, and Erich Segal – also of Hippocrates, who seems to be the source of our word “aphorism.” He wrote ΑΦΟΡΙΣΜΟΙ, and they turn out be in the same Loeb volume with Heraclitus.
I was reading Parmenides
in Kireçburnu Çamlık Parkı
Erguvantepe, Sarıyer, Istanbul
July 6, 2025
Somebody else can amuse us or frighten us. They might put us to sleep with an injection, or perhaps keep us awake. They cannot make us rational. They cannot make us think. Thinking is up to us.
Our Bosphorus view
from a local mosque, Ecdat Cami
Tarabya, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Monday, February 16, 2026
Trigger warnings for this post:
After the post of December 9, for some reason I wanted to record here a surgical operation in 2019. Then I became preoccupied with mathematics.
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, “Dendrologia,” 2023; part of an exhibit called Phantom Quartet at Arter Istanbul, visited Wednesday, February 4, 2026. The bark of the masks is said to be taken from dead trees on the Isle of Vassivière in the artificial Lac de Vassivière, Limousin, France
On the subject of mathematics, let me take the opportunity to recommend “The Tool/Weapon Duality of Mathematics,” by Alexandre Borovik, recently published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (volume 16, number 1, January 2026; pages 365–392). Continue reading
Polytropy 