At the end of Book XVI of the Iliad, Hector
Postacı Halil Sokağı (Street of Halil the Postman)
Tarabya (Θεραπειά), Sarıyer, Istanbul
Thursday morning, March 2, 2023
(Note added October 23, 2022.) As I return to the analysis of the philosopher in the Republic, I think of two or three recent encounters with resistance to what I would call philosophical thought. See my comments added at the end. Meanwhile, here is a table contents for this post:
We are going to define the lovers of knowledge or wisdom: the philosophers. Socrates’s definition is at Stephanus 480a, at the end of our seventh reading in Plato’s Republic. The reading constitutes, of Book V, the latter part, beginning at 472a. Socrates concludes,
Τοὺς αὐτὸ ἄρα ἕκαστον τὸ ὂν ἀσπαζομένους
φιλοσόφους ἀλλ’ οὐ φιλοδόξους κλητέον.
We might translate the first part word by word as follows.
| τοὺς | αὐτὸ | ἄρα | ἕκαστον | τὸ | ὂν | ἀσπαζομένους, |
| those-who-are | itself | therefore | each | thing-that-is | being | delighting-in. |
The whole sentence then is literally,
Therefore those who are delighting in each thing that is being, itself,
are to be called philosophers, but not “philodoxers.”
Here are five published translations; take your pick.
Note added, October 5, 2023. At the end of this post, from sunny days in the first spring of the Covid pandemic, I take up Anacreon’s poem “The Thracian Filly,” translated as “To a Colt” in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Anacreon was from Teos, whose ruins I have visited. Thoreau may not be sensitive to the sexual connotations of the poem. First I review Thoreau’s book, noting in particular:
Other books discussed or mentioned (and in my physical library) are
In a poetry review, a remark on being a student has drawn my attention:
In My Poets, a work of autobiographical criticism with occasional ventriloquial interludes, McLane recalls two “early impasses in reading,” freshman-year encounters with Charles Olson and Frank O’Hara. She writes about not “getting it” but wanting to get it, about a desire to get it that was left wanting by code-breaking and analysis and satisfied by hearing and feeling.
This is from the second half of a “New Books” column by Christine Smallwood, in the Reviews section of Harper’s, July 2017. After quoting Smallwood’s review, I want to say something about learning and creating, in poetry and also in mathematics.
Kuzguncuk, 2017.11.05
Born on the Asian side of Istanbul in Kadıköy in 1886, İbrahim Feyhaman was orphaned nine years later. His father had been a poet and calligrapher. His mother’s dying wish was that Feyhaman attend the Lycée Impérial Ottoman de Galata-Sérai; his maternal grandfather, Duran Çavuş, saw that this happened. Some time after graduation, headmaster Tevfik Fikret had Feyhaman come back to Galatasaray to teach calligraphy.
Garden of Aşiyan, September 10, 2015
Polytropy 