Tag Archives: verba volant

Antitheses

December 13, 2018 – 10:18 am

This is an attempt at a dialectical understanding of freedom and responsibility, punishment and forgiveness, things like that. My text is a part of the Gospel, though as I shall say, I attribute no special supernatural power to this. I shall refer also to the Dialogues of Plato.

The Antitheses are the six parallel teachings, delivered by Jesus of Nazareth in the Sermon on the Mount, as recounted in Chapter 5 of the Gospel According to St Matthew, starting at verse 21. I summarize:

  1. Do not kill people; do not even get angry with them.
  2. Do not commit adultery; do not even fantasize about it.
  3. In divorce, follow the established procedure; do not even divorce.
  4. Do not forswear yourself; do not even swear.
  5. Keep retribution commensurate with the crime; do not even seek retribution.
  6. Love your neighbor; love even your enemy.

For better or worse, these are part of the cultural heritage of many of us; they are at least a commentary on the cultural heritage (the Mosaic Law) of more of us.

I write now specifically, because I think the Antitheses can illustrate or illuminate some contemporary philosophical concerns, Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Freedom, Galileo, New Leviathan, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Plato, Science, Stoicism | Also tagged , | Comments (15)

NL XXIV: The Body Politic, Social and Non-Social

September 17, 2017 – 11:36 am

Index to this series

Executive summary (added September 11, 2018): The subject of political theory is the kind of community called a body politic. For the Ancients, this is a society, composed of, for example, the citizens of Athens, excluding women, children, slaves, and foreigners. In medieval times, all human beings in the community compose a body politic, which is thus non-social, though having within it the societies called estates; sovereigns rule by force (e.g. by the bribery called the granting of liberties), but may in turn be ruled, as is the husband, sovereign of the wife. For Hobbes, a sovereign can also rule by authority. An eristic argument would insist that only one of these accounts of the body politic is correct; but the world is in the flux described by Heraclitus, and the way to come to terms with it is not eristic, but dialectic, as described in the Meno of Plato.

Dialectic is the way to come to terms with a world of constant change. On the internet in particular, too many persons engage in eristic, staking out a position like the Greeks at Troy, who built a wall around their ships on the shore and tried to defend it against all comers.

Dogs stake out their positions in the shade,
2017.09.14

In the argument of the New Leviathan, we pass from the family to the state, which Collingwood calls the body politic. This is what political theory must give a scientific account of (24. 1). We consider three phases of political theory:

  1. ancient,
  2. medieval, and
  3. modern.

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Plato | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

Interconnectedness

June 30, 2014 – 1:19 pm

Note added January 13, 2019. This essay concerns a letter I once wrote about

  • teaching;
  • the infinitely large and small, as contemplated by Pascal in that one of the Pensées headed Disproportion de l’homme;
  • Zen Buddhism.

Since the ideas of Collingwood often dominate this blog, one may ask why they influence me. My old letter provides some evidence, since I wrote it before I had read anything by Collingwood but The Principles of Art.

The present essay has the first of this blog’s several mentions of the slogan verba volant scripta manent, which may not mean what we tend to think today.

The indicated pensée happens to allude to the definition of God as une sphère infinie dont le centre est partout, la circonférence nulle part; this definition is not taken up here, but it is in later posts, apparently without recollection of its use by Pascal.

When do our thoughts progress, and when do they only confirm what we have always thought?

In December of 1987, I was between college and graduate school. I was living with my mother in Virginia, doing some tutoring at my old high school, waiting for inspiration about what to do next. Inspiration did come in the course of the following year, when I was working at an organic farm in West Virginia. I was going to apply to graduate schools in mathematics or philosophy (earlier I had considered also physics); then, in a dream, I understood that I had to do mathematics. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in “God is a circle …”, Collingwood, Education, overlap of classes, Philosophy, Principles of Art, West Virginia | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)