This is about metaphor.
Shop window in Athens, Monday, July 10, 2017:
ΜΕΤΑΦΕΡΘΗΚΑΜΕ
ΔΙΠΛΑ ΣΤΟ 46Α
→
ΤΑΚΗΣ
Μεταφερθήκαμε is the first-person plural passive aorist of μεταφέρω. I guess the meaning of the sign is, “We moved next door to 46A – Takis.” I took the photo, just so I could use it at a time like this. I didn’t try to talk with Takis.
Below is “Creation in the Old Testament,” which is Chapter 3 of The Relevance of Science by C. F. von Weizsäcker. I have highlighted key passages. I have added a note concerning Pascal, because I spent time reading him and blogging about him, and von Weizsäcker mentions him.
I am studying von Weizsäcker’s chapter, to see what the author makes of the Creator’s assessment of His own work. That assessment is the title of another post of this blog: “It Was Good.”
Somebody set out to build Burj Al Babas here in Turkey, for buyers in the Persian Gulf, but abandoned the project
From a walk around the neighborhood
Tarabya, Istanbul, Wednesday, October 9, 2024
There were a couple of tweets on the eve of Easter:
Just a reminder to make sure that you preach a doctrine of the resurrection tomorrow that is not reducible to that of the old IWW song “Joe Hill”
It’s a good song! I find it moving! But if that’s all we have to say about the resurrection (and I have heard many sermons that suggest that it is) – well, we should all be doing something else with our lives.
Fortunately, of course, it’s not all we have to say.
The essay below was originally a post on Medium, August 7, 2017. I wrote from the Nesin Mathematics Village. The crowds there, described here, are a great way to spread infections, as I used to find out. For this reason, I have not gone back to the Village since the winter of 2020, when Covid-19 became pandemic.
The Village is in the hills above Ephesus, site of the temple of Artemis, where there were golden oxen, donated by King Croesus, according to Herodotus (I.92).
When I first came to Turkey in 1998, Herodotus was my tour guide. Because of my interest, from our base in Atarneus, my father-in-law-to-be took seven of us (including himself and a dog) to see Sardis: this was the seat from which Croesus had ruled Lydia, until Cyrus the Great of Persia defeated him.
Cats facing off in the Atatürk City Forest
Tarabya, Sarıyer, Istanbul, October 16, 2024
My title alludes to some notes for the layperson that I rediscovered recently. I have reviewed and edited them, and they are below, in the following sections (linked to by the titles after the three main bullets; other links are to Wikipedia).
My wife and I had recently moved to Istanbul, and the Istanbul Model Theory Seminar had just got going. The Nobel Prize and quasicrystals had been mentioned there too.
Vegetable plot in Yeniköy (where Cavafy lived a while), Istanbul, Saturday, September 28, 2024
The son of the king of Persia wants to press the advantage, after the combined forces of Media, Persia, Armenia, and Chaldaea have
The king of Media is of another mind: he would rather quit while he is ahead. He has an argument for standing pat, by the account of Xenophon in the Cyropaedia (IV.i.11–18).
One may consider the argument of Cyaxares as an example of “motivated reasoning.” I think it is a specious argument: attractive, but ultimately unsound. Perhaps I say that, only because the king’s nephew Cyrus rejects the argument, but is nonetheless successful in what he goes on to do. With his Persian troops and as many Medians as wish to join them, along with the Hyrcanians, who have defected from Assyria, Cyrus pursues and defeats again the Assyrian army. He kills the kings of Cappadocia and Arabia, and he puts to flight both the king of Phrygia and Croesus, king of Lydia (IV.ii.28–31). Of course, this is not the end of the story; history never ends.
I have been reading and discussing the eight books of the Cyropaedia with a Catherine Project group, at the rate of half a book a week, since July 8 of this year (2024). Thus we shall have completed the sixth book (called “On the Eve of the Great Battle” in the Loeb edition) on September 23. It has astonished me that some of my fellow readers think well of the argument for taking it easy, even as they acknowledge that the man who makes it may be a fool. The argument does not seem to me like one that a king such as Cyaxares can afford to make.
Possibly Xenophon has an esoteric message, as Plato is thought to have. However, although these two writers had a common teacher in Socrates, he never went far from Athens. Xenophon helped lead a stranded army of ten thousand Greek mercenaries, from Babylon north to the Black Sea, after the failure of the coup for which they had been hired by Cyrus the Younger. Xenophon admires a practical man who can actually get things done. This being what Cyrus the Elder is, he is the hero of the Cyropaedia. I shall review my textual reasons for saying this. First I shall look at “motivated reasoning” today, along with the idea that we could have “evolved” to use it. (In short, the rest of this post has the three parts just linked to.)
Photo taken September 17, 2024, of Lesbos over the sea, from a beach in Lydia. Of this country, Chrysantas says to Cyrus, after the latter has pursued the Assyrians over the objections of his uncle Cyaxares (Cyropaedia VI.ii.21),
since it now appears that Syria is not to be the only prize – though there is much to be got in Syria, flocks and herds and corn and palm-trees yielding fruit – but Lydia as well, Lydia the land of wine and oil and fig-trees, Lydia, to whose shores the sea brings more good things than eyes can feast on, I say that once we realise this we can mope no longer, our spirits will rise apace, and we shall hasten to lay our hands on the Lydian wealth without delay.
This is in response to the suggestion of Cyrus that his army are intimidated by the alliance that Assyria has formed with Lydia.
It could have been nice to live in a world where spending time and energy on playing chess did not seem like an unconscionable luxury.
Is it a luxury to be able to ignore the setting sun over Lesbos
in order to look at your mobile?
Photo taken September 1, 2024
on the coast of what used to be part of Lydia
I used to play chess, until I figured that when I wanted to think mathematically, there were better ways to do it.
This post concerns different kinds of knowledge, as for example of Achilles, or Cyrus the Great, or even oneself.
According to the last sentence of the “Findings” column in Harper’s for June, 2023,
Researchers developed a blood test for anxiety, which was found to underlie the joy of missing out.
Those researchers need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.
Similar research is reported in the Guardian Weekly for 9 September, 2022. The article is called “‘I’m glowing’: How an app is helping us measure the joy of trees.” The app in question does not detect your joy in the woods; it gives you a way to record your own self-assessment for later study. However, writes Patrick Barkham,
several studies suggest that more biodiversity has a bigger boost on people’s mental health, while the recording of brain activity in response to forest density found a more relaxed state and reduced tension and fatigue in forests with a lower density of trees.
Are you going to need a brain scan to tell if you are chilling out? Other people may relax among a few trees; does that mean you will?
My grandfather Kenneth Crawford described his own grandparents’ house in Wisconsin as being
innocent of plumbing, central heat or telephone. But the proportions were good and it was set in a grove of assorted trees.
I wish he had named some of the trees in the assortment. Right now I’ve got doves cooing in the umbrella pines overhead. Beneath these are oleanders and laurels and pomegranate trees.
At the beginning of the first post “On Dialectic,” I raised the question of why I put so much into such posts. I propose now a couple of answers.
I want to collect all evidence for what I am investigating – currently dialectic in Plato’s Republic. As Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) has Sherlock Holmes say in A Study in Scarlet (1887; Wordsworth Classics, 2004),
It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.
And yet in Religion and Philosophy (1916), Collingwood states “the fundamental axiom of all thinking,”
namely that whatever exists stands in some definite relation to the other things that exist.
Thus “all the evidence” is everything in the world.
I am engaged in such self-defense as a certain Islamic philosopher is, by the account of Strauss in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952):
Fārābī avails himself then of the specific immunity of the commentator or of the historian in order to speak his mind concerning grave matters in his “historical” works, rather than in the works in which he speaks in his own name.
View from our balcony
Sanatçılar Sitesi, Tarabya, Istanbul
Saturday, July 8, 2023
In Book XIV of the Iliad, Hera distracted Zeus while Poseidon helped the Achaeans fight off the Trojans. Now, in Book XV, Zeus takes control again. He tells Apollo to let the Trojans, under the leadership of Hector, come to the point of burning the Achaean ships.
Sarıyer, European Istanbul, March 6, 2023
Polytropy 