Tag Archives: Anaxagoras

On Knowing Ourselves

March 3, 2018 – 4:47 am

In a 2012 post in this blog, I criticized a 2009 essay called “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice.” The putative advice was that of Strunk and White. It was not in fact grammatical. They had written not the elements of grammar, but The Elements of Style. They gave style advice by precept and example. The advice is good, if well understood. The critic should recognize that, as I wrote, “Rules of style are supposed to induce thinking, not obedience.”

By David Pierce | Posted in Archeology, Collingwood, Leo Strauss, Nesin Mathematics Village, Philosophy, Pirsig, Plato, Principles of Art, Strunk and White, Turkey, West Virginia | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (17)

War and Talk

June 18, 2017 – 7:41 pm

This is a foray into the mystery of how things happen, based the 164th of the 361 chapters of War and Peace. This chapter contains, in a one-sentence paragraph, a summary of Tolstoy’s theory of history:

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Aristotle, Causation, Collingwood, Criteriological Science, Harper’s, History, Istanbul, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Plato, Principles of Art | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (9)

Thales of Miletus

December 24, 2016 – 11:01 am

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”

“The Thaleses of the future are meeting in Didim,
September 24, 2016”

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By David Pierce | Posted in Archeology, Collingwood, Education, Euclid, Freedom, History, Leo Strauss, Mathematics, Nesin Mathematics Village, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Principles of Art, Tourism, Turkey | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (20)