This is mostly about Goethe’s Faust, but it was not going to be. Faust says he never wants to sit still. It doesn’t seem like a great idea.
Athens, Monday, July 10, 2017
If, as Wikipedia now mentions, and John Warner discusses in the fittingly titled “That’s Not What Lolita Is About” (November 16, 2025) – if Elisa New recommended that Jeffrey Epstein read Lolita (which I have read) and My Antonia (which I haven’t), why not Faust?
Zometool construction, Ankara, November 20, 2010
The main point of this post is to share a passage from an essay by the late William Thurston:
1 What is it that mathematicians accomplish?
… We are not trying to meet some abstract production quota of definitions, theorems and proofs. The measure of our success is whether what we do enables people to understand and think more clearly and effectively about mathematics.
Therefore, we need to ask ourselves:
2 How do people understand mathematics?
This is a very hard question. Understanding is an individual and internal matter that is hard to be fully aware of, hard to understand and often hard to communicate …
Below are some notes (by me) on Immanuel Kant’s 1785 treatise, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. This is the work that introduces the categorical imperative. My notes are in sections corresponding to Kant’s, but with my own titles (after the preface):
The English title of the treatise is Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Apparently the first word can also be Grounding or Foundation or even Fundamental Principles, and the ensuing preposition can be of. Also, in imitation of the German, Metaphysics can be made singular in form.
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One place I have been reading Kant is Çamlık Parkı, Erguvantepe, Kireçburnu, Sarıyer, İstanbul, here on Wednesday, July 2, 2025. Çamlık = pine grove; erguvan = Judas tree: tepe = peak; kireç burnu = lime point (source for the construction of Rumeli Hisarı, a fortress used in the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, which led to the conquest of the city in 1453); sarı yer = yellow place, perhaps so named for the soil in some part of today’s borough.
The view is of the Bosphorus as it opens to the Black Sea. Jason would have passed through the opening with the Argonauts, and Xenophon with the Ten Thousand. Now the third Bosphorus Bridge crosses it
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Aristotle was the subject of the last three posts on this blog:
Two more posts might have taken up the latter half of the Poetics, but they never materialized.
I turn now to the work held under the arm of Aristotle’s teacher, at the center of Raphael’s School of Athens.
Polytropy 