Tag Archives: Isaac Newton

Pascal, Pensées, S 415–437

March 18, 2021 – 8:45 pm

Before the annotated text of the Pensées of Pascal, Sellier 415–437, here is an attempt at a detailed summary. I have tried to indicate all chapters of the Bible (OT, Apocrypha, NT) quoted from by Pascal or by me. I may have figured out what passages are by looking at the notes of Descotes and Proust. I may not always have completed this work, which can be tedious and which I hope not to be doing so much for later readings. Pascal may be study scripture as scientists such as himself study nature, and Isaac Newton (nineteen years younger) may resemble him in this.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Philosophy | Also tagged , | Comments (10)

Feminist Epistemology

January 29, 2021 – 6:47 am

To this post, I am adding this introduction in July 2021. I have returned to some of the ideas of the post, and I see that I left them in a jumble. They may still be that, but I am trying to straighten up a bit.

Beyond this introduction, the post has three parts. Part III takes up more than half of the whole post and consists of my notes on

  1. Elizabeth Anderson, “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, February 13, 2020. 61 pages.

In Anderson’s article I see – as I note below – ideas that are familiar, thanks to my previous reading of philosophers such as Robin George Collingwood, Mary Midgley, and Robert Pirsig. Henry David Thoreau may not exactly be one of those philosophers, but he is somehow why I came to write this post in the first place.

Here is a table of contents for the whole post:

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By David Pierce | Posted in “ceases to be a mind”, Collingwood, Descartes, Midgley, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mathematics, Principles of Art, Sex and Gender | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (6)

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 (2)

Multiplicity of Mathematics

October 8, 2020 – 5:54 am

I continue with the recent posts about mathematics, which so far have been as follows.

  1. “What Mathematics Is”: As distinct from the natural sciences, mathematics is the science whose findings are proved by deduction. I say this myself, and I find it at least implicit in an address by Euphemia Lofton Haynes.

  2. “More of What It Is”: Some mathematicians do not distinguish mathematics from physics.

  3. “Knottedness”: Topologically speaking, there is a sphere whose outside is not that of a sphere. The example is Alexander’s Horned Sphere, but it cannot actually be physically constructed.

  4. “Why It Works”: Why there can be such a thing as the horned sphere.

When I first drafted the first post above, I said a lot more than I eventually posted. I saved it for later, and later is starting to come now.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Education, Euclid, Mathematics, Philosophy of Mathematics | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Be Sex Binary, We Are Not

July 7, 2020 – 4:51 pm

Content warning: suicide.

The following sentence is bold in the last paragraph of an essay: “the science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary, transgender people are real.” I don’t know what the writer means by this. As far as I can tell, as a biological concept used for explaining reproduction, sex has two kinds or parts or sides or aspects, and the essay tacitly affirms this; at the same time, obviously persons called transgender exist.

☾ ♂ ☿ ♃ ♀ ♄ ☉

The title of the essay is a command: “Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia.” I can support that. I don’t even need the qualifier “phony.” If transphobia is the kind of morbid fear suggested by the suffix “-phobia,” then science ought to help dispel this, not promote it.

One might also just say, Stop using phony science.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Plato, Science, Sex and Gender | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (5)

Salvation

February 24, 2020 – 7:06 am

Because Herman Wouk was going to put physicists in a novel, Richard Feynman advised him to learn calculus: “It’s the language God talks.” I think I know what Feynman meant. Calculus is the means by which we express the laws of the physical universe. This is the universe that, according to the mythology, God brought into existence with such commands as, “Let there be light.” Calculus has allowed us to refine those words of creation from the Biblical account. Credited as a discover of calculus, as well as of physical laws, Isaac Newton was given an epitaph (ultimately not used) by Alexander Pope:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

I don’t know, but maybe Steven Strogatz quotes Pope’s words in his 2019 book, Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe. This is where I found out about Wouk’s visit with Feynman. I saw the book recently (Saturday, February 22, 2020) in Pandora Kitabevi here in Istanbul. I looked in the book for a certain topic that was of interest to me, but did not find it; then I found a serious misunderstanding.

book cover: Steven Strogatz, Infinite Powers Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Archimedes, Calculus, Euclid, Mathematics, Philosophy of Mathematics | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

On Causation

August 20, 2019 – 5:10 am

Causation seems commonly to be understood as a physical concept, like being a fossil. The paleontologist seeks the one right answer to the question of when a particular dinosaur bone became part of the fossil record; likewise readers of international news seem to think there is one right answer to the question of whether Donald Trump or Ali Khamenei caused the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 on January 8, 2020.

There is not one right answer. If you are Trump, you caused 176 civilian deaths by attacking the Iranians and provoking their response. If you are Mitch McConnell, you caused the deaths by inhibiting the removal of Trump from office. If you are Khamenei, you did it by meeting Trump’s fire with fire.

Being a cause does not mean you deserve condemnation or praise: that is another matter.

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By David Pierce | Posted in absolute presuppositions, Aristotle, Causation, Collingwood, Descartes, Plato, Thoreau | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (9)

Antitheses

December 13, 2018 – 10:18 am

This is an attempt at a dialectical understanding of freedom and responsibility, punishment and forgiveness, things like that. My text is a part of the Gospel, though I attribute no special supernatural power to this. I shall refer also to the Dialogues of Plato.

The Antitheses are the six parallel teachings, delivered by Jesus of Nazareth in the Sermon on the Mount, as recounted in Chapter 5 of the Gospel According to St Matthew, starting at verse 21. I summarize:

  1. Do not kill people; do not even get angry with them.

  2. Do not commit adultery; do not even fantasize about it.

  3. In divorce, follow the established procedure; do not even divorce.

  4. Do not forswear yourself; do not even swear.

  5. Keep retribution commensurate with the crime; do not even seek retribution.

  6. Love your neighbor; love even your enemy.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, dialectic, Freedom, Galileo, New Leviathan, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Plato, Science, Stoicism | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (25)

NL XXXI: Classical Physics and Classical Politics

September 8, 2018 – 10:52 am

Index to this series

As my beach holiday winds down, so perhaps does the current spate of blog posts. Here is one more. Setting aside Homer, I continue immediately with Collingwood, in part because, in the 2000 paperback impression of the 1992 Revised Edition of the New Leviathan that I take to the shore, I have now also read the Editor’s Introduction by David Boucher. (Back at the cottage, I have to type out the quotes from this that I make below; for quotes of Collingwood himself, I cut and paste from a scan of the 1947 corrected reprint of the 1942 First Edition.)

As I could infer from my pencil-marks, I had read Boucher’s introduction some time before; but I could remember little of it. I think it is aimed at professional philosophers, rather than at anybody who would admire Collingwood for saying, as he does in An Autobiography (page 6), when he describes getting prepared to go to Rugby School,

The ghost of a silly seventeenth-century squabble still haunts our classrooms, infecting teachers and pupils with the lunatic idea that studies must be either ‘classical’ or ‘modern’. I was equally well fitted to specialize in Greek and Latin, or in modern history and languages (I spoke and read French and German almost as easily as English), or in the natural sciences; and nothing would have afforded my mind its proper nourishment except to study equally all three.

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By David Pierce | Posted in absolute presuppositions, Criteriological Science, dialectic, Galileo, New Leviathan, Pacifism, Principles of Art | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (12)

On Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad, Book XIV

September 5, 2018 – 10:14 pm

Index to this series | Text of Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad

When Neptune was helping the Greeks stave off certain defeat, I tried to suggest that divine intervention in the course of events might be understood as human resolve to change that course. This was in Book XIII of the Iliad, where Neptune took the form of one of the Greeks—Calchas—in order to exhort the others. They would have listened to Calchas anyway; he was a prophet. Ajax Oileus said he could tell Calchas was “really” a god; we can read this to mean Calchas was inspiring. We can say this of somebody today, without meaning to suggest any supernatural influence.

Mostly a calm sea, with heads of two swimmers; behind, a strip of pink sky with setting sun

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By David Pierce | Posted in absolute presuppositions, Collingwood, Homer | Also tagged , , | Comments (3)