Tag Archives: pappus

Reason in Pascal

February 23, 2021 – 9:05 am

In some of the Pensées, Pascal contrasts reason with instinct, passions, folly, the senses, and imagination.

Here I investigate Pascal’s raison, after one session of an ongoing discussion of the Pensées that is being carried out on Zoom.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Philosophy | Also tagged , , | Comments (4)

Math, Maugham, and Man

September 1, 2019 – 7:49 am

A human being was once a man. A female of the species was a wife; a male, a were. The word “were” was used in werewolf, but also were-eld, which became our “world.” Our word "woman" comes from wife-man.

That is roughly the history, which I shall review later in a bit more detail. It would be a fallacy to think the history told us how we must use the words “woman” and “man” today. The history does suggest what may happen again: in a world dominated by men, a word like “person,” intended for any human being, may come to have its own meaning dominated by men. Yet again, this is no reason not to try to make our language better.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Language, Mathematics, Maugham, Plato, Sex and Gender | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Victor Vasarely

March 26, 2017 – 5:48 pm

Tophane-i Amire
Tophane-i Amire, 2017.03.25

Last week I wrote about the Turkish Impressionist Feyhaman Duran, born in 1886. Now my subject is the Hungarian-French Op Artist born twenty years later as Győző Vásárhelyi. His “Rétrospective en Turquie” is at the Tophane-i Amire Culture and Art Center in an Ottoman cannon foundry.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Archimedes, Collingwood, Descartes, Education, Euclid, Istanbul, Mathematics, Midgley, Pirsig, Principles of Art, Tophane, Visual Art | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)

Thinking & Feeling

July 20, 2016 – 2:16 pm

This essay is written as a distraction from current events, though I make some reference to them. I am prompted by questions of analogy provoked by

  1. the similes of Homer and
  2. a recent theater review in Harper’s that mentions the parables of Jesus.

With sea in the background, on the sand of a beach sits Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad, the cover featuring a 16th-century Flemish tapestry (framed by a circle), Scene from Roman History, showing a number of men, the one in the middle armored; a horse is in the foreground

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By David Pierce | Posted in Archeology, Collingwood, coup, Education, Harper’s, History, Homer, Language, Mathematics, Maugham, Midgley, Nature, Nesin Mathematics Village, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Principles of Art | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (5)

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.

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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)