Tag Archives: Leviathan

Facts (NL IX, ‘Retrospect,’ first 6 paragraphs)

August 1, 2014 – 9:43 am

Index to this series

A certain person says,

I am not better than you or more virtuous than you. If you see me on the right path, help me. If you see me on the wrong path, advise me and halt me. And obey me as far as I obey God.

How should one hear these words: as an eminently reasonable expression of benevolent humility such as any of us might honorably make? Well, no matter how qualified, the command obey me might be a warning sign. The words are in fact from a recently published video, as quoted in the Guardian Weekly (Vol 190 No 5, 11–17 July 2014, p. 4). The speaker is the man whose nom de guerre is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, on whose head the Department of State of the United States of America placed a ten-million-dollar bounty in 2011. He now styles himself Ibrahim, Caliph of the Islamic State, a new entity that is supposed to restore the lost Muslim glory of past centuries. This restoration is to be achieved through war. War requires military discipline, with punishments meted out for infractions like insubordination, not to mention the slaughter of those perceived as enemies. So al-Baghdadi’s request to be advised and halted if seen to be in the wrong must be interpreted rather carefully.

It is difficult to know how to interpret somebody’s words. With that I pass to the transitional chapter in the first part, “Man,” of Collingwood’s New Leviathan.

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Aristotle, Categorical Thinking, Collingwood, Grammar, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato, Turkish, Visual Art | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (4)

NL VI: “Language,” again

March 31, 2014 – 11:33 am

Index to this series

This is about language: language the concept, and “Language,” the sixth chapter of Collingwood’s New Leviathan. We shall consider language in a very basic way, not as a means of communicating what we know, but as the way we come to know things in the first place.
Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Homer, Language, New Leviathan, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Pirsig, Principles of Art, Science | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)

NL I: “Body and Mind”

January 13, 2014 – 2:35 pm

Index to this series. See also a later, shorter article on this chapter

The Chapter in Isolation

“Body and Mind” is the opening chapter of Collingwood’s New Leviathan. The chapter is a fine work of rhetoric that could stand on its own, though it invites further reading. In these respects it resembles the first of the ten traditional books of Plato’s Republic, or even the first of the thirteen books of Euclid’s Elements. The analogy with Euclid becomes a bit tighter when we consider that each chapter of The New Leviathan is divided into short paragraphs, which are numbered sequentially for ease of reference.

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in absolute presuppositions, Collingwood, Criteriological Science, Descartes, dialectic, Education, Euclid, Logic, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato, Principles of Art, Psychology, Science | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (18)

A personal overview of Collingwood’s New Leviathan

January 7, 2014 – 1:50 pm

These are the notes of an amateur of the work of the philosopher R. G. Collingwood.

Published in 1942, The New Leviathan was the last book that Collingwood wrote. He finished it in some haste, because he knew he was dying—albeit of a condition brought on or at least exacerbated by overwork in the first place. He did die in 1943. Having been born in 1889, he was not so old as Socrates at death; but like Socrates, he had a babe in arms. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, dialectic, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato, Principles of Art | Also tagged , , , | Comments (10)