Tag Archives: Agnes Callard

Badiou, Bloom, Ryle, Shorey

September 19, 2021 – 9:57 am

Index to this series

The discussion having been postponed for our fifth reading in the Republic, I give here some remarks that started out as part of my commentary on Book IV. The remarks concern

  • the translations of the Republic that I have been reading, mainly those of
    • Alain Badiou (b. 1937), translated in turn from the French by Susan Spitzer;
    • Allan Bloom (1930–92);
    • Paul Shorey (1857–1934);
  • the “Interpretive Essay” that accompanies Bloom’s translation;
  • a 1969 review of Bloom’s translation and essay by Gilbert Ryle (1900–76), who embarrasses the profession of philosophy (if it be a profession).

I quote also Christopher Hitchens, Daryl H. Rice, Agnes Callard, Martha Nussbaum, and Henry David Thoreau.


Palm trimmed
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 13, 2021

Here’s a table of contents:

Shorey

In the preface of his own translation, Bloom says Shorey’s is one of the two best English translations. The other is A. D. Lindsay’s, but I know nothing about him or it.

Being part of the Loeb Classical Library, Shorey’s translation is

  • convenient for

    • including the Greek, so that one can see that Shorey makes “the principle of doing one’s own business” (433b) from τὸ τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν (Bloom has “the practice of minding one’s own business”);
    • using footnotes rather than endnotes;

  • inconvenient for having

    • two volumes;
    • small thin pages, so that leafing through to find the passage you want is hard.


Palm bearded
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 12, 2021

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By David Pierce | Posted in Hitchens, Homer, Philosophy, Plato, Thoreau | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (3)

On Plato’s Republic, 4

September 12, 2021 – 8:50 am

Index to this series

Our fourth scheduled reading in the Republic is Book III, Stephanus pages 386–417. Socrates continues to direct the construction of the fantastic city. Plato’s brothers, faithful as dogs, agree to two infamous proposals:

  1. The deportation from the city of any poet “who is able by wisdom to become every sort of thing and to imitate all things” (δυνάμενον ὑπὸ σοφίας παντοδαπὸν γίγνεσθαι καὶ μιμεῖσθαι πάντα χρήματα, 398a).

  2. The teaching of the Noble Lie, that the citizens were formed under ground and distinguished, according to class, with admixture of

    • gold for the rulers,
    • silver for the auxiliaries,
    • iron and bronze for the “farmers and other craftsmen” (414b–5c).

Later in this post, I shall try to analyze the reading into sections; but a serial summary of these seems tedious, and I shall focus on a few remarkable points, such as the ones above.


Two dogs with my copy of
Allan Bloom (translator), The Republic of Plato, 2016 edition,
on the beach at
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 8, 2021

I shall be quoting

  • Homer, whom Socrates loves to hate;
  • Adam Kirsch, from the 2016 introduction to Allan Bloom’s Republic translation, on the danger of summarizing Plato;
  • Pascal on the will of God as the rule for justice;
  • Bruno Bettelheim on fairy tales such as the Three Little Pigs, and perhaps our City in Speech, as opposed to fables;
  • Somerset Maugham on the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper;
  • Plato, in the Symposium, on the identity of comedy and tragedy, and Socrates as a seductive flute-player;
  • Anne Applebaum on “The New Puritans”: the same as the old ones, called Glaucon, Adeimantus, and Socrates?

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By David Pierce | Posted in Homer, Maugham, Philosophy, Plato | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (11)

On Plato’s Republic, 3

September 5, 2021 – 11:01 am

Index to this series

We are reading now Book II of Plato’s Republic, Stephanus pages 357–83, covering:

  1. The conventional arguments in favor of injustice and justice, reviewed by Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus respectively.
  2. The beginning of the construction of the city in speech, wherein the advent of justice is to be discerned; the guardians of the city are to be like dogs and to be given a traditional education, although with none of the traditional stories, since they talk about things like parricide and bad luck.

A book next to a dog lying on the beach

Dog with copy of Alain Badiou, Plato’s Republic:
A Dialogue in Sixteen Chapters, with a Prologue and an Epilogue, 2012
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey, September 2, 2021

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By David Pierce | Posted in Homer, Leo Strauss, Philosophy, Plato, Thoreau | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments (15)

Words

January 9, 2021 – 11:08 am

This post is based on recent readings, often on or through Twitter, especially of

  • Lilith Saintcrow on “Domestic abusers, white supremacists, and religious bigots”;
  • C. S. Lewis on gulling the educated, and objectivity as a dubious value;
  • Marilynne Robinson on consensus as concealing the objectively true;
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson on objectivity as a good value;
  • Plato on seeming wise, without being so;
  • Mark Vernon on imagination in William Blake;
  • whoever wrote an “Open Letter Concerning Transphobia in Philosophy,” signed by many professional philosophers;
  • Kathleen Stock, the subject of the “Open Letter”;
  • Agnes Callard on how philosophers shouldn’t be signing petitions;
  • Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, on the incoherence of the notion of gender identity;
  • Aaden Friday, on what’s wrong with Reilly-Cooper and other such women;
  • Brian Earp, on declaring pronouns;
  • John Steinbeck, on being a man;
  • Christa Peterson, on what gender identity might be.

I have edited and augmented this essay since originally posting it on January 9, 2021; the current version is from January 19.

A lot of old PSA’s about drugs are on YouTube and the Web Archive, and sometimes they are linked to by articles that ridicule them. There is one that I have not been able to find, perhaps from around 1970, in which parents confront their teenager with the drug paraphernalia that they have found in his room. The boy storms out of the house, saying, “You don’t understand!”

There’s a lot that I don’t understand. I must not, since it seems childish, but is coming from adults. Some of these adults stormed the US Capitol the other day; others encourage them; still others are professors of philosophy.


“Human egg and sperm cells.”
Asimov’s New Guide to Science (1984), page 600

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By David Pierce | Posted in Harper’s, Philosophy, Plato, Sex and Gender | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Map of Art

September 1, 2020 – 10:15 am

The bulk of this post is a summary of the chapter on art in Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis: or The Map of Knowledge (1924). The motto of the book is the first clause of I Corinthians 13:12:

Βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι’ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι

For now we see through a glass, darkly

The chapter “Art” has eight sections:

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By David Pierce | Posted in Aristotle, Art, Collingwood, dialectic, Philosophy, Pirsig | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (5)