reason - APHELIS

“τῶν ἁλόγων πραγματείαν” in Proclus’s Commentary on Euclid’s Element (see Procli Diadochi in primum Euclidis Elementorum librum commentarii, edited and introduced by Gottfried Friedlein, 1873, p. 65)

On the threshold of knowledge: Pythagoreans, incommensurability and the experience of modernity.

The Greek experience, as we reconstitute it, accords special value to the “limit” and reemphasizes the long-recognize scandalousness of the irrational: the indecency of that which, in measurement, is immeasurable. (He who first discovered the incommensurability of the diagonal of the square perished; he drowned in a shipwreck, for he had met with a strange […]

• By Philippe Theophanidis on July 14, 2012 ― Published in Communication | Tagged: allegory, communitas, community, death, Euclid, experience, incommensurability, incommunicability, inconceivable, irrational, knowledge, limit, mathematics, modernity, number, parable, Pythagoras, reason, unknown, unrepresentable

Epistemology as a form of melancholy

The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space. Just in the same way did Plato, abandoning the world of sense because of the narrow limits it sets to the understanding, venture upon the wings […]

• By Philippe Theophanidis on April 21, 2012 ― Published in Communication | Tagged: disappointment, epistemology, Kafka, Kant, knowledge, Lost, melancholy, metaphor, object, Platon, reason, subject, Wittgenstein