Tag Archives: Simone Weil

Creativity

June 6, 2022 – 6:26 am

Index to this series

In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates frequently mentions τέχνη (technê), which is art in the archaic sense: skill or craft. The concern of this post is how one develops a skill, and what it means to have one in the first place.

Books quoted or mentioned in the text, by Midgley, Weil, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Byrne, Wittgenstein, Arendt, and Alexander

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Education, Euclid, Homer, Midgley, Pirsig, Plato, Principles of Art, Thoreau | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Homer for the Civilian

April 8, 2017 – 9:23 am

The source of this essay is an earlier one, written as an email, and an ensuing conversation, in 2009, on the theme of what Homer may mean in one’s life, and whether an application to one’s life involves an abuse of the original text. I wrote in this blog, in July 2016, on analogies in Homer and elsewhere, in “Thinking & Feeling.” My last post considered an apparent instance of abuse of the Hebrew Bible.

At the end of the Iliad, to retrieve the body of his son Hector from its killer, King Priam of Troy visits Achilles in his tent in the evening, in the camp of the hostile Greeks. The scene may recall two political enemies from the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and Congressman Thomas O’Neill, Speaker of the House: these two were able to be on friendly terms “after 6 PM.”

Homer, Iliad, Wordworth edition
Aleksandr Andreevich Ivanov
“King Priam begging Achilles for the Return of Hector’s Body,” 1824
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in History, Homer | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (6)

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

Continue reading →

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)