11 Sep 2013

30 minutes, 300 lowrise steps, 250 movements with weights and 100 without first thing at 5:15 AM. No physio today: have to go to chemo and cancer followup.

Rested, the usual pain, a sort of tug deep within the butt as if a malignant dwarf is ringing changes inside my leg for my funeral Mass. Prospero says in the Tempest, i’th’old play,

And thence retire me to my Milan, where
Every third thought shall be my grave.

The nice thing about pain is that you don’t have to dress in black, and pray all the time, and pull a long face and rebuke the children for farting around, there is the pain to make every third thought to be of your grave.

Study? No progress. But see where Mr Sitdown tragedies realizes as I have the utility of diagramming:

http://sitdowntragedies.wordpress.com/2013/09/10/aaaaaaaand-im-back/

If only Kant were an artist, he says. But his diagram doesn’t explain the formation of multi-level concepts.

cf also my comment at his site. Abstract expressionist painting the representation of pure sensation?

The chorus of soft screaming, the singing, the “ay-yahs” erupt as we awake to pain.

3 Sep 2013: Review of Strawson’s Book “The Bounds of Sense”

A review (submitted to Amazon 3 Sep 2013) of PF Strawson’s book on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, “The Bounds of Sense”. Routledge 2002.

Strawson is overly creative in his reading of Kant, for it’s axiomatic (well, it is to me) that doing the history of philosophy including monographs on individual philosophers is itself philosophical whence the popular illusion that philosophers cannot stop arguing and make no progress. They stop arguing when they are dead, like natural scientists in Steven Kuhn’s account in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 2012). And, they make progress, especially in the sense that each philosopher reads many of her predecessors, except for Ayn Rand, about whom the less said, the better.

Strawson’s Kant is a straw man.

Strawson’s review is dismissive and savage, filled with what seems to be a postwar hatred of German philosophers. A “fallacy of numbing grossness” is memorable and perhaps drew laffs down at Oxford, but Kant doesn’t do anything of numbing grossness. What was numbingly gross was Strawson’s apparent ignorance, that could have been rectified in minutes, of the fact that there are two editions of the Critique. It’s as numbingly gross an error as some Tea Partier here in America confusing the Articles of Confederation (circa 1781, the year of the first edition of the Critique) with our Constitution (1789, the year of the second edition of the Critique).

Dieter Henrich made a significant post-Strawson contribution to the forward progress of philosophy in Henrich 1969. Simply by including the 1787 edition in his analysis, Henrich created the neo-realist understanding of Kant, replacing the oversimplified idealist understanding in effect almost from 1781 to 1969.

Strawson creates an idealist strawman out of Kant whom we need not read (or read because we care about Strawson not about Kant), because at the time of his writing Bounds of Sense, Strawson was more interested in crafting his own analytic metaphysics…as were many philosophers of the 1960s.

Metaphysics was back in fashion because the anti-metaphysical, logical positivist generation of the 1930s was realizing something Kant recognized early, in reading Hume: denialist or reductionist metaphysics is still metaphysics. To deny castles in the air is precisely the same sort of activity as creating castles in the air.

[For more on this, cf. Bergmann 1978. The title is elegant: “The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism”. ]

Strawson bases his account of Kant on the 1781 edition of the Critique and altho this was a common error (Heidegger also did this), Henrich and a bit later Paul Guyer, now the leading Kant scholar in the world (Guyer 2010), based their neo-realist reading on the 1787 edition and a close reading of the most difficult part of a difficult work, the Transcendental Deduction.

The preceding chapter, the “Clue” or “Metaphysical Deduction” is reasonably accessible:

An intuition of sense is a judgement:

We don’t think “red” as a noun like a computer (would if a computer could “think” which it cannot):

We think the sentence “I see red” and we could be wrong: this is a *judgement* because (1) it is a complete sentence and (2) it could be false, we may not see “red”, we may be color-blind and not know it.

However, the next chapter or “Transcendental Deduction” is even post-Henrich still not fully understood and can drive you nuts. It is unlikely that Kant himself fully understood what Kant was talking about, and this was no vice, it was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”.

I have pointed out elsethread (https://spinoza1111.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/28-aug-2013-home-of-the-whopper/) that part of the reason for Kant’s infamous prolixity, verbosity and obfuscation is that (as in a little noticed sentence of *150 German words* on p. 712 of the 1787 edition: on p. 613 of Kant 1998: I call this sentence “the whopper”) Kant lacks a language, a language that was created post-Kant based on his own “boldly going”. This I call the “tragedy of Kant’s tools”.

Kant, in the “whopper” sentence, is struggling to parse the distinction Kant himself discovered but could not express: between a Platonic infinity specified as complete (often using the excluded middle), and an “intuitionist” infinity specified by a stepwise rule, usually recursive. At the time Kant wrote, this distinction didn’t exist. It wasn’t made until the twentieth century by the “mathematical intuitionists” Brouwer and Heyting…who based their distinction on Kant’s work! (Korner 1986).

In addition, the Logical Positivists, notably Rudolf Carnap, were heavily influenced by Kant who on the Continent was part of the philosophical, and, France, sociological, curriculum. Kant could have done with some symbolism to render his arguments less prolix but the use of symbolism was unknown in philosophy (outside Leibniz) until Boole. Again, Kant’s descendants developed tools that Kant himself would have used.

The Transcendental Deduction mess of 1781 was partly cleaned up in the Prolegomena and completely, as far as it was possible given the tragedy of Kant’s tools; but both Strawson and Heidegger lacked sufficient intellectual humility to see that since doing the history of philosophy is philosophy, the same rigor applies to both activities.

The bottom line? Don’t read The Bounds of Sense if you’re into Kant, read it if you’re into Strawson, an important metaphysician in his own right. And a word to professors: don’t adopt this book for a class on Kant or the Critique. University students pay too much for textbooks as it is.

More generally, since doing philosophical history including monographs is itself doing philosophy, use primary sources and RTFM, read the f*g primary source. This means the Critique itself preferably in German or a literal translation such as has been provided by Paul Guyer et al. (Kant 1998).

You won’t understand it on the first, perhaps on the tenth, reading. But instead of buying books sold by profit-seeking publishers, who have in this book’s case mislabeled The Bounds of Sense as a book about Kant, take a look at Dell Adams’ excellent Amazon review of the Critique, “How to Get Your Money’s Worth from this Book” (Adams 2001). The only book outside Kant that Dell recommends is Kant 2010, “The Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics”, which Kant wrote in 1782 when it appeared that many people were misreading the Critique as a crudely Berkeleyan denial of the reality of an external world. Kant was wounded by this accusation and the Prolegomena was his initial reply. The Prolegomena is Kant at his finest, urbane and elegant especially as compared to the Critique itself.

But beyond this there’s only sitzfleisch, that is enough Germanic butt fat (or a nice pillow) to sit down and understand Kant. Consider yourself fortunate, if you’re reading the Critique as part of a class, to be able to do so as opposed to working for some bonehead to pay school loans. If you’re doing so at Brown University under Prof. Paul Guyer, consider yourself blessed. But Strawson is not a good teacher when it comes to Kant.

REFERENCES

Adams 2001: Dell Adams, “How to get your money’s worth from this book”, Amazon review, http://www.amazon.com/Critique-Reason-Cambridge-Works-Immanuel/dp/0521657296/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1378198975&sr=1-1&keywords=critique+of+pure+reason

Bergmann 1978: Gustav Bergmann, The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism. Praeger.

Guyer 2010: Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Henrich 1969: Dieter Henrich, “The Proof Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction”, Review of Metaphysics

Kant 1998: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, tr.: Cambridge University Press.

Kant 2010: Immanuel Kant, “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics”: http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/kantprol.pdf

Korner 1986. Stephan Korner, “The Philosophy of Mathematics: an Introductory Essay”. Dover.

Kuhn 2012: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: University of Chicago Press.

Nilges 2013: Edward G. Nilges, “Home of the Whopper”. https://spinoza1111.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/28-aug-2013-home-of-the-whopper/

30 Aug 2013

20 minute workout at 6:35 AM: 200 lowrise steps, with only one hand for balance to see if balance has improved: 250 supine weight gestures.

A beneficial side effect of mastering a very difficult text such as the Critique of Pure Reason is that less difficult texts are pleasantly more readable. Johansen’s History of Ancient Philosophy, for example, which was originally written in the relatively minor language Danish and translated to English by way of a grant from Denmark’s queen, is a real treat after the Transcendental Deduction of Kant’s Critique as is a daily newspaper. Even the “Transcendental Aesthetic” chapter of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is easier to read because Kant is applying later methods of logic.

Started to take the Open Courseware (OCW) class in Ancient and Mediaeval Philosophy as taught by David O’Connor of the University of Notre Dame to accompany my reading of Johansen and get my money’s worth of my purchase of this expensive book. Started re-reading Plato’s Republic in the required Jowett translation posted as part of the OCW materials.

Philosophy contrary to jejune opinion does make progress. This is indicated by my example of Kant’s Whopper (cf. p 613 of the Cambridge University Press Critique), in which Kant takes 150 (German) words to explain in one sentence something that would take far fewer words, in one or more sentences, to explain had Kant only had a clear idea of the distinction between constructive and non-constructive infinity, which Brouwer and Heyting based on their studies of…Kant. Clearly, the replacement of poor Kant’s confused Scholastic logic by modern logic (with preservation of the best of the old tradition such as the classification of syllogisms) was real progress.

Likewise, Kant’s invention of the taxonomy of synthetic apriori, analytic aPriori, and synthetic aPosteriori proved to be useful for later generations.

Philosophy makes progress, however, chiefly in the way each philosopher must engage the past, at a minimum to find out if she’s “reinventing the wheel”…altho there’s not the total ban on wheel reinvention in philosophy as there is in engineering.

Two twentieth century philosophers who seem to have ignored tradition and who risked reinvention of the wheel are GE Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Moore simply wanted to think things through as his brilliant essay The Refutation of Idealism shows. Without the gibbering ghosts of former idealists such as Berkeley, or philosophers seduced by idealistic talk such as Descartes, Moore came up with a strikingly original thesis: that the results of philosophy could not contradict common sense, indeed, common sense was the empirical data for the philosopher as physical reality is for the scientist; common sense can falsify the most beautiful philosophical theories.

This point is remote from Kant yet anticipated in Kant.

Although Moore (like Wittgenstein) fails to credit older thinkers, in Moore’s case Kant, whose distinction between what I call “metaphysics” (the creation of nonsense entities) and how I use “ontology” (the analysis of experience into constituent immanent thingamawhats) really authorized Moore to want to discard elaborate idealistic theories about really real reality as opposed to the rag and bone shop of our experience. This inspired in turn the Moorean “Oxford” school of “ordinary language” philosophy which eschewed references to the philosophical tradition in favor of pub bore discussion of matters best left to scientific linguists, dictionary writers and other harmless drudges.

Even more so than Moore, Wittgenstein, who was educated as an aeronautical engineer and who then renounced his share of the considerable Wittgenstein financial legacy, meaning that he had to work for a living, which he did, was the real Noble Savage of 20th century British and Austrian philosophy. When Bertie Russell heard Wittgenstein defend his philosophy for a formal credential, Russell basically overrode the rules (as a Lord Russell could do in that era) to give Wittgenstein his credentials.

Yet even less so than in Moore, and ordinary language philosophy, do we find references to an older philosopher in Wittgenstein. Of course, Wittgenstein based the calculus of the Tractatus on Gottlob Frege’s Begriffschrift (conceptual notation), but this is a mere technical calculus, of the sort Wittgenstein must have taken-to.

“The world is what is the case” taken together with “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” echo Hume’s final conclusion and I’ve no doubt that Wittgenstein read Hume, who’s engaging and easy to read (altho too tiresomely bouncy at times), but Wittgenstein, like most Kantian scholars until very recently, doesn’t seem to have comprehended the central part of Kant, that is the 1787 Books I and II of the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements.

An additional tribulation of the reader of Kant, beyond the confusion of translations and the lousy bindings of the best edition in terms of translation and thorough research (Guyer and Moore, Cambridge 1998) is the chaotic layout of the Critique.

Basically, the central and most difficult part of Kant is where he leaves off boring you on *Raum undt Zeit* (the “transcendental aesthetic” of time *undt* space) and where starts up boring you on the “analytic of principles” (the Kantian attempt to ground Newtonian mechanics, which impressed Kant as much as relativity and quantum physics impressed the Logical Positivists): two really hard chapters which reward the seven read-through Kant wonk only with further confusion in most cases, and to which, one bids a hearty “farewell” at the end, only to find that the reading has changed your life.

The two “books” (numbered I and II but only in relationship to their containing material) must be comprehended by the serious Kant scholar or anyone aspiring to teach a class on Kant. And in their own atonal way, these two “books” present the reader with an alpine challenge of living in a world without the usual handwaving and excuses of life at sea-level one in which we have to understand when we cannot understand, and where we have to keep on climbing when we cannot, a sort of Everest littered as Everest is today with the bodies of philosophers who didn’t get it.

I make the above claim about Wittgenstein (and beg the reader’s forgiveness for digressing so on Kant: I am still snow-blind and dazzled by my intensive reading of Kant) only because Wittgenstein like most 20th century logicians, doesn’t seem to see the need for a “transcendental” logic setting for the preconditions for a philosophical dialog. But there was a move in this direction in the Philosophical Investigations.

However, as in the Tractatus, there’s what literary theorists call “the anxiety of influence” in Wittgenstein, the Freudian fear that the father might show up and spoil the fun. The strings “Kant”, and “Spinoza” do not appear in the Investigations. Instead, we can do Fun projects based on the Investigations.

More later…too sleepy to write coherently.

Edward G Nilges, Grantham Hospital, Hong Kong, 30 August 2013

14 August 2013: So foul and fair a day

Big ass typhoon seems to be missing us, but the city (o City city) has shut down nonetheless. These typhoons were a serious matter even before global warming.

First thing (6 AM) workout included 75 lowrise steps, supine weights, cycling and air conducting for a 20 minute total workout. Will try a standup free dance (if I can find my iPod) or walk with weights tomorrow morning.

However, I got nauseated while eating my congee, surprisingly enough. Was able to finish the Egg later and now am drinking an Ensure, the milk of the gods and of cancer sufferers. I am bored to tears, and sometimes to nausea, by the constant sameness of the food here. I long for dim sum, pizza, steak…anything but chicken, veggies and rice every day.

Kant Study

Finished the Cambridge Companion to the Critique with very interesting articles on the neo-Kantians and the use of Kant by analytic philosophers including Clarence Irving Lewis, the Strawson at least of The Bounds of Sense and Wilfred Sellars. Not going to finish my copy of the Bounds of Sense since according to more than one authority (including the author of the Kant/analytic philosophy essay, Kenneth R Westphal), the Strawson book is overrated and out of date.

This means that except for one essay taken from an Open Courseware class on Kant, and my essay on the complexity of Kant’s style, I have completed this self-administered beating, I mean, class on Kant’s Critique. It certainly confirms that the best of Kant is not his ontology or metaphysics, it is his work on ethics and aesthetics in which he applies the metaphysics to real problems.

But within ontology, Kant is good on the healthy-minded distinction between Object and Concept. I am familiar with a syndrome in programming where an idea is overgeneralized. Let’s make the existence of this [software object] a property, create all POSSIBLE objects and then, before using the possibly nonexistent object, test its existence property. Essentially, you’re doing work the system can do for you as well as crafting a recipe for trouble.

Kant’s critique of the Ontological Proof as found in Anselm and Descartes is a pattern repeated throughout the Critique notably in the Transcendental Aesthetic, where Kant intuitively recognizes that there’s an ontological similarity (in difference) between time and space, and an ontological difference (in similarity) between space and the things in space and time, and the events in time.

Space, and spatial relations, are not properties of objects, for example. Objects are not properties of space. This all sounds to me like a properly “factored” design in object-oriented software.

Owing to tiredness, possible delayed effects of chemotherapy which doctor says are unlikely, I deal with Kant in a fug, I read him in a fog. But the very act of reading and rereading, reacquaintance with concepts I have visited before, awakens me and sharpens me up a bit.

I’d love a strong coffee, and the lovely staff in the day centre make a lovely powerful cup. So I struggled out of bed and to the day centre only to find that because of the level 8 typhoon warning, the staff hasn’t shown up. I am fatalistic. I have plenty of green tea which relieves my pain.

No matter how much sleep I get I am sleepy during the day, just one more artifact of the chemo or now, so long (2+ weeks) after chemo, the cancer. I slip into micronaps and dream fragments. I will be thinking of Kant’s distinctions only to be, for a microsecond, a crew of a boat in time and space with ethical duties in excess of job duties…you get the picture.

This could be frightening if it is death but if it is death it is foretold. I am dying, if I am dying, alone (if you don’t count my friends which I do) but not in pain (because of Fentanyl). Things could therefore be worse.

But then as an hart my healthy thigh leaps because I want to dance and to walk, not just “go gently”. The pain drops away and I wiggle, feeling high, because the pain’s gone away. It returns but the left hip pain has been an old friend since April 2012.

“Let me be your father”, said the pain,
“Let me be your big brother”
“And all this will be just a bovver,”
“A smallish sacrifice on the floor.”

12 Aug 2013 Full many a glorious morning I have seen

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

(William Shakespeare, Sonnet 33)

First-thing workout at 3:30 AM: 20 mn. Only 25 lowrise steps owing to yesterday’s nausea. Remainder was supine aerobics: air conducting and weights.

No physio. Feel light-headed and get easily nauseated when I walk. During morning hours before a long midday nap, was constantly falling asleep. Hospital is doing blood testing.

Beautiful glorious morning and beautiful glorious day flushed down the toilet by my condition.

Kant Study

The difficulty in understanding Kant far more prevalent that many philosophers are willing to admit. One of the Neo-Kantians, a gentleman named Schröter who’s not in Wikipedia, wrote:

“[that] it has never come into my mind to copy again what Kant has written or to know what Kant was after with his philosophy but only what according to my understanding he had to be after if his philosophy was to be coherent.”

I really need to track down this quote, and when I do, I’ll update this essay.

Call this character “Schröter’s” method of Kantian hermeneutics KH1: let KH0 be what we assume a Kantian interpreter is after by default, that is, when she doesn’t specify her hermeneutic; KH0 describes what Kant means. KH1 has to be specified when in use but the only other Kantian authority to do so is Adorno. The problem with KH1 is that it assumes that Kant was coherent. Altho he probably was, there is an element of question begging in adoption of KH1; perhaps Kant is incoherent all the way down.

It also assumes that Kant is coherent in only one way; but if we don’t have a single renarration of Kant’s thought on which we could construct fair tests on Kant in a class on Kant, and we don’t in my belief, this means Kant is incoherent in possibly more than one way. Our tests have to measure the student’s understanding of the teacher’s {mis)understanding.

Therefore KH1 is not a usable hermeneutic. Instead we do ontology using Kant’s tools and approaches to see if anything coherent and true pops out. The scandal is that basically, no one seems to understand vast tracts of Kant, notably the Deduction of the Categories, and Kantian hermeneutics is less a part of the history of philosophy than, say, describing Leibniz’ thought. Kantian hermeneutics is more original philosophy using Kant’s language. It is difficult, in my view, because Kant was trying to do (original) philosophy without tools he needed such as the distinction between constructed and constructible infinity that the mathematical intuitionists pioneered basing their thought on Kant’s insight.

To begin again, then. Again, as was the case earlier, when we produced an unworkable interpretation we cheerfully said, no problem, and continued to rock the Kantian Juggernaut back and forth in the mud to see if we could get it to work, all the while becoming more familiar with its dizzying array of tools.

7 31 2013: Sucks to be Me…sometimes…new complication in Cancer’s Journey

First thing supine workout with weights: about 300 moves (variable in time and intensity as in the dance, because I was listening to Ravi Shankar perform Raga Mishra Pilloo) for 20 minutes.

Chemo therapy day, at centre, weight is now 155 pounds: 70.5 kg! Yay!

Now need to stabilize weight gain so that it stops between 155 and 175. One MAD CHOC FREAKOUT on Sunday night and when I do chemo and can visit 7-11 at Queen Mary.

OK, here’s today’s bad news. PSA has shot up to 169, an unprecedented value since the start of this year. We need to retest 21 Aug no matter, and Dr at the Cancer Center, a fully qualified oncologist really urges the “jab” for hormone therapy, Leucoprolein. This is pricey in Hong Kong because the alternative is getting your balls cut off and leaving Mister Penis floating haplessly between two empty Tea Bags. Dreadful.

So I have to ponder staying exclusively on chem, or adding the best hormone therapy, either a wallet Hoover or else a dickstock, Dick, I mean a Dick chop for free.

Sucks to be me at times.

Rereading critical passages in Kant’s Critique.

B221-266 (second ed. pp221-266) concern impossibiity of ontological proof, which most phil majors will explain, correctly, as using “existence” as a “property”. But what’s fascinating is the way a GENIUS like Kant “kan” with such apparent facility (apparent in relation to the size of the problem) GENERALIZE a theorem.

Dig this, now:

The Genius hero computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra discovered in the 1970s that the so-called Pythagorean Theorem is actually implied by a far more powerful theorem. The Pythagorean Theorem only applies to right angled “right triangles”, and as Dijkstra pointed out a generalization allows you to calculate the values of any part of any triangle from small (<-2) sets of values.

Likewise, Kant's disproof of the Ontological proof is a specialization of a more widely effective thought-tool.

Kant's Refutation of Idealism follows from a generalization of the logic of the refutation of the Ontological proof.

In any Idealist argument, including not only the Ontological proof (for Kant regards Descartes, and not William of Ockham, as his primary source on the Onto proof, but also Descartes, one finds at least one type-confused "predicate" that allows the Idealist, whether William of Ockham, Descartes or Otto the Crazed Monk to transgress a type boundary. It's almost as if Kant was intuiting Bertrand Russell's intuition of a type boundary!

But unlike Russell, Kant had no precise road map that was for Frege developed by Peano…several years of new codification of what a set or a number might be. Kant had objects and concepts. Having been taught that they were different, Kant (like a spirited student in computer science who asks why "Kant" she calculate with a string-valued object or the contents in the form of specific machine language bytes both very good questions) showed how a thingamabob could be both but like many creative thinkers then came to grief when a transcendant property such as existence could not be an object. As far as I can tell Kant then set himself the task of learning which properties could act like empirical objects and which were transcend-ANT and how and why.

And now for something completely different

And now for something completely different. My PSA score has leaped up to 169 after steadily declining after chemotherapy was started. Doctor suggests we wait until a new measurement is made 21 August and that I get the (plus cost) leukocyte injection, against which the Grantham doctors who are, now l learn, primarily doctors and not specialist oncologists, STRONGLY counsel and advise. I shall get the injection however after a heart to heart with my trusted financial *vizier*, the BAZ and an opinion from Sasha Alexandrovitch.

One feels in need not only the BAZ. I could use a 400 pound Samoan Attorney as did Hunter Thompson in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and a 500 pound Fijian fitness guru whose client list included Manny Pacquaio.

I already GOT the lovely, talented and learned Doctor Susan Jamieson who puts one in mind of Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, who’s treated Mick Jagger, Elton John and GaGa.

Change Record

6 Aug 2013: Added this change record along with minor changes

26 July 2013

Another attack of severe pain last night but at 5:30 AM I awoke to do 5 minutes lowrise step (100 steps), 10 minutes walking, 3 minutes step on the stairs (50 steps) and about 7 minutes prone weight movements for a 25 minute exercise session. Pain after the workout caused me to cancel a subsequent physio session. Tonight shall sleep on a flat bed to see if this helps.

Kant Study

Includes significant updates added 28 Feb 2028

Finished Michelle Grier on “The Ideal of Pure Reason”, primarily a discussion of the ontological proof method in general. Although Kant famously rejected the equivocation on properties and “existence” and other prerequisites to having properties he did believe that objects in the world could have a perfection as it were of properties and tried in the Ideal to make use of this.

To determine (or describe) a thing completely would seem to require that we know all possible positive predicates of that thing and have a list, say (A…Z, A0…Z0, … Az…Zz) of applicable predicates handy. Each NEGATIVE predicate (where, for example, “bad” is ~good or “male” is ~female in the sort of taxonomy we’d look for at this point) can be removed.

Of course, Kant’s optimism on this is rather touching. We can discover new predicates and in other cases we can find predicates meaningless as applied to certain objects. But proceeding as if these wrinkles were ironed-over…

…there exists a perfect being PB such that A(PB) & B(PB) & C(PB) & … Zz(PB) qed.

For example, if we can in such a facile manner prove the existence of the perfect being we also can prove using the same method, the existence of the Perfect Being’s “foil”, PBF, let’s say the Devil, simply by writing (~A(PBF) & ~B(PBF) & … & ~Zz(PBF).

And, if God doesn’t exist, and the same set of properties applies to God and the Devil in reverse, then the Devil doesn’t exist. “Imagine there’s no heaven”.

At this point, we’ve been reduced to conjuror’s tricks which assume almost that beings can be brought into existence by writing or saying certain Kabbalah-like things but that is nonsense. What we’ve done is shown the backward-looking nature of Kant’s thought in addition to its forward looking nature. Kant’s thought is the ground of the very developments in modern logic which he would probably have found most useful, but which defy him here, including the very idea that our ordinary language including the ordinary mathematical notation we use in the spot (without fear that our calculus has occult, Kabbalistic power).

Both traditional and modern logic can treat properties as things and thereby making lists of properties including the excellencies of a Perfect Being. But modern logic can discover contradictory and nonsense properties that much better.

In a sort of “hack” of symbolic logic notation I can “say” things that look meaningful such as this paraphrase of “some properties are excellencies but not all”.

(Ex)[isProperty(x) && isAnExcellency(x)] && (Ey)[isProperty(x) && ~isAnExcellency(x)]

These amusing parlor games raise issues. For example, the above implies that the world has two objects, one of which is an ordinary object and the other a property.

Now, suppose we have implemented the above notation as a “programming language” (which I ask you not to do). If its world data base contains fewer than two objects then we crash, or at best “there is a bug”. If the And operator is not implemented lazily such that in A && B, the “lazy” evaluator does NOT evaluate B when A implies that such evaluation may be a problem, then we crash.

But because my painkiller base dosage on the patch has been increased by the Sunday resident, and owing to my four requests Fentanyl jungle jump joy juice earlier today, I am getting quite fuzzy and unequal to digital philosophy.

Change Record

28 July 2013 Correction to spelling error (“primary”=>”primarily”)
28 July 2013 Significant additions to the Kant Study section

25 July 2013: The Matador, I

Up at 5:30 AM in agonizing pain: essayed to do 100 lowrise steps and 250 supine motions with hand weights. Succeeded. At 2:00 in the afternoon did about 700 movements on the Rackety Rowing Machine. Its hand weight and pulley broken, so I replaced that feature (which was very easy owing to the looseness of he pulley) with rowing and upper body dance movements with “zero” (no) resistance.

I’d learned from Billy Blanks that “zero resistance” is non zero owing to the mass and lifting of the arm/hand or leg. Doing his moves without weights almost as difficult as with the weights. So, I merely mimed running and upper body dance to get a reasonable workout for 20 minutes.

Much pain experienced during the first workout but now, in the Now, at this minute, not feeling any pain AMDG (ad maiorem Dei gloriam), to the greater glory of God: for a workout is beyond a work of conceptual art, it is a sacrifice. Oooohhh there’s a throb of pain, blasting the ass and rear thigh, rolling through like a Midwestern storm: and dark is his face on the wings of the storm.

Kant Study: Here’s a Dollar, Buy a Clue

Finished Rohlfe on Kant and Kant’s view of reason but backing up to the somewhat more critical question: the meaning of what seems to be at once the central and most difficult chapters, “On the Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding”, and, the single most difficult chapter, “On the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding”.

Kant, in these chapters, seems to me to proceed by a minimalist venture in which, grasping at straws (to find an account of sensation-to-concept) he comes up with straws which we then must grasp. From minimal straws, that is, very thin propositions which are seen to be synthetic apriori by us (because they cannot be anything else in an argument by elimination), he reasons to other SAP truths.

Straw 1 is “apperception is a judgement”. If all that happens in perception, considered as getting from sensation to concept, were to be “I am having this sensation”, that’s something: “I am having this sensation” is a binary proposition, true or false (but never false in actual practice: better said “made or not made”) but always true in practice.

Which is troubling. As Hume had observed, a report of sensation can never be denied although it may be false when the speaker is lying. Such reports as “the balloon to me appears as red”, in contrast to “the balloon is red” can never be denied unless they are lies. Applying the four way taxonomy we know that “the balloon is red” is synthetic aPosteriori. What about “the balloon appears to be red” when we know (through magic) that the user isn’t lying?. Some philosophers of the sort who can guess what I am up to will say that this statement is synthetic in that it extends the concept of “me” to “being thinking that the balloon is red”, but strangely aPriori in that we cannot deny a perception-report, other philosophers, and most ordinary people, will say that the statement is synthetic aPosteriori, true if I see red no matter the “real” colour, false if I lie, and be done with it. As we should.

But again an aside: rather than use italics I will mark out the return to the main question.

When I was at Princeton, a departmental or college secretary, a jolly Chinese matron, said that Saul Kripke of Princeton’s philosophy department “really got the girls”…up to a point. I can affirm that there are philosophy groupies at Princeton.

This was because Kripke found that we need not accept the four-way taxonomy (analytic aPriori, analytic aPosteriori, synthetic aPriori, and synthetic aPosteriori) because it’s never been proven and for that reason can’t be used without proof or at a minimum, thinking.

Analytic aPriori makes perfect sense; the categorization may have been invented to mark out this kind of statement once 17th century mathematicians realized that logic and possibly mathematics were aPriori and not synthetic. But note that while Kant classed logical truths with the analytic aPriori, he did not so categorize mathematical truths such as 7+5=12 because 12 is not inside 7, not inside the plus sign, and not inside 5. Kant didn’t think of the string 7+5 as a singular Concept … not having talked to Godel who’d say it was one, with a Godel number derived from the string 7, plus and five.

Kant didn’t see “7+5” the way a modern logician or compiler developer sees it, as having the same ontological status as 7, 5, 7+5 or 12 (and 1+11, 2+10 and so on), and being just another version of the number 12, something valid as a term in any expression. But not the same ontological status as + or (possibly) 7+5=12 when the programming language tool does not support the equals sign as a test operator returning true or false, or “something like that”.

Synthetic aPosteriori propositions like “the length of that stick they have in Paris is one meter” are analytic aPriori in Kripke’s quondam view. This is surprising but makes sense once we realize that the stick defines one meter. But then Kripke realized that this presented all kinds of problems for the traditional taxonomy which had never been proven to be true although its utility was remarkable.

To end the aside, to return to the main question, then.

The clue is the fact that apperception is judgement. And it is already a complex judgement at least of the form (Ex)[x=Me & hasPerception(x, y)], where “y” is the content of the perception; if we were, say, to write a simulator of the Kantian mechanism, y would be a complex “software object” encoding the perception in as simple or as complex a way as one would want: the Logical Positivist would, I’d hazard, settle for x, y, and z space coordinates, a w time coordinate (when it did happen in World Time), perhaps a d duration, and the shade of red hopefully not reported as a Windows color byte. The Phenomenologist would want precisely all these reports and similar reports for other sensory inputs occurring at the same time.

But as we see in the above paragraph, where we tentatively start to construct apperception as a software object, treating software as Carnap treated his own notation in Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, we find that it’s at a minimum a true-false AND statement: I exist and I see red.

That’s the clue. Kant differs from Descartes in two ways: cogito ergo sum becomes sum ergo sentio: not “I think therefore I am”, instead “I am therefore I perceive”, and I perceive only by way of judgement, starting with the obvious true/false judgement “I am”. It’s never false when made but retains the logical and the syntactical form of judgment.

Judgement is complex all the way down and “simple apperception” was a self-destructive clue that explodes on examination. And even though “I exist and I see red” is already complex, a minimal judgement can always extend to maximal judgement.

“Sensory deprivation” experiments of the 1960s turned out to cause some subjects to create lurid fantasies in place of ordinary sense data and prisoners in isolation, truck drivers, pilots, mariners and other occupations to see colors, shapes, and human figures, with or without sounds, when sensory deprived. This phenomena is called “prisoner’s cinema”. The Clue to use of all categories (for Kant, “the” Categories of the logic of his time) is the judgmental nature of simple Apperception. If we can reason and judge at the simple level, there’s no aPriori obstacle to doing this at a much more complex level.

I claim that the Clue is the “edition one” story of bare naked apperception then seen to be completely extensible in 1787, but still understood by many as bare naked apperception. The Clue is like a spider’s web’s cable tossed across the path which can be thickened without limit as we bring more and more to apperception. Rather than a stepwise, sequential series of independent processes, as I diagrammed in my “Evil Clown” picture in order to get started in a somewhat misleading way, “everything” happens all at once.

But I need to extend and support this reading, based on the text of Kant.

Apple Development

This gave me the willies when I tried to restart:

“The MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update will update the EFI firmware on your computer. Your computer’s power cord must be connected to a working power source. When your MacBook Pro restarts, a gray screen will appear [the Gray Screen of Death?] with a status bar [that never moves or worse moves backward as one waits in fear, hoping that power will not be interrupted, the Status Bar of Death] to indicate the progress of the update. It will take several minutes [several hours?] for the update to complete. Do not disturb or shut off the power on your MacBook Pro during the update.”

This should end with:

“Your needs take second place to our incompetent and overly pressured developers.”

In other words, yet more design for the upper middle class that ignores the fact that many users, especially in the cities or rural areas as opposed to suburbs do not have uninterrupted power but experience brown-outs that could very well cause a partial “EFI Firmware Update”…or may simply not be able to boot until they find a clean power source.

Firmware is special and rather secret code that enables the machine to execute new instructions, extending its power. But if firmware gets in any way messed up, for example by a slight interruption in power during the EFI firmware update you have at a minimum a not-fun visit to an Apple store and at worst a nice chunk of aluminum that doesn’t do anything and never will. What say you upgrade to the next gen?

There were many ways to get around this when the firmware was developed, mostly by loading the firmware as a chunk of data, without trying to execute it during startup, and then, once the machine is fully operational, getting the user to approve the firmware update, check the power source for reliability, and then relax and watch the firmware load. A reliable, restartable and safe firmware “up” load that has the full resources of your system.

I can just see me fighting, and usually losing, the battle for this kind of software that acknowledges a real difficulty. My team has the chops to do it but the firmware guys want to keep control and they win by creating the appearance that somehow meeting the user’s needs to avoid problems the user doesn’t fully understand is “too much work”, “too much expensive development” (for profits must be maximized) and, in the most amusing argument, “not filling real users’ needs”.

These are, I think, the problems at a high level of abstraction and as such Apple developers might snarl that I don’t know what I am talking about. But I do, and I do see a potential problem for the 99% user. But ever since 1984, Apple has preferred to deal with affluent users who have clean power, and a considerable amount of time every time they purchase a new device, to get it working…users like the couple in Spielberg’s film A.I. who are given a highly advanced robot child by their company that the (nonworking) wife installs including activation codes.

It’s amazing that I was so gulled by Apple’s PR, which since 1980 has created the illusion that Mac users are intelligent hipsters, that I abandoned HP’s inexpensive and reliable “net book” technology, the HP Mini, available for less than 500 USD and reliable in the sense that non-proprietary technology, as opposed to the Mac’s highly proprietary technology, breaks in more visible ways.

And, there’s not this strange fear of developers, outside Apple’s distortion zones. I had to jump through hoops to get xCode and the “command line tools” for compiling C and C++, whereas Microsoft makes .Net non-enterprise software available to download for one and all. Apple, it appears, came close to requiring a credit card to get software without which you can’t write code, and provided a workaround at the last minute.

Apple’s Microsoft-like arrogance provides a chance for Microsoft to get competitive once again as it was in the .Net glory days (2000-2005). But under Ballmer, Microsoft won’t see that opportunity.

Rawls, Krugman, Yer Granny, Sun Yat Sen and Practically Everybody Now Hates NeoClassical Economics Even When They Don’t Know What It Is

Let’s start by giving NeoClassical Economics what might seem to be a great argument for free. It concerns the justice of any taxation whatsoever and if it’s valid, liberals can no longer tax as a matter of justice at all, and libertatiantards win.

OK? OK. It would seem that progressive taxation or even a flat tax is unjust towards the taxed, for it is a second taking after the first “taking”, in which the taxpayer provided his labor to get the money from his employer or client. It would seem that the taxpayer pays twice, unjustly: in the first labor and then in paying any tax at all.

The Right would love this (and is about to get as we say pimped). We do a job of (presumed) valuable work giving our employer or client x units of pure (reinen) value (Germans, I claim, love this sort of argument and its sort of destructive and divisive effect). Since we’re not in anyway heaven forfend “altruistic” saps who mess things up with their altruism we expect pay at the end of the day and we get it.

End of story: Nozickan justice done. To come ’round and pass the Government hat for taxes, requiring me and the lads to pony up is injustice because the government by cracky gets money it didn’t earn.

But the answer comes from Rawls (Political Liberalism, A Theory of Justice)…and common sense.

First of all, progressive taxation as determined by an exponential function ramps up slowly and is close enough in a representative currency to be zero for low income working people for quite a while as we ramp up her income. Also, we can and have, in all progressive income taxation schemes, inserted points where income below that point is not taxed. Therefore, the “injustice” only kicks in for rich slobs.

The tragedy of the latter day Republican Party? You can’t make a victim out of a perp. Abraham Lincoln said, in a bit of folk wisdom preserved in Irving Copi’s Introduction to Logic for many years, “if I call a tail a leg how many legs does a dog have?”

When Lincoln asked this, his interlocutor, perhaps his hapless Secretary of State Seward, said, “well, five, Mister President?”, knowing he was about to be had, Lincoln replied, “no: callin’ h’it a leg don’t make a limb, a leg, whether for a poppet, a dog, or a human child: the cre-a-ture remains a dog with four legs.”

Likewise, a perp (the Congressman who ends abortion and causes the murder of women seeking some say in the use of their bodies, the enraged white male, the deadbeat Dad) tries to pose as the victim.

But words have to mean something, as Kong Fu Zi (Confucius) “said” in “The Rectification of Names”. Rush Limbaugh’s real insanity, what he babbles, is that Rush actually believes that in a conservative (don’t soak the rich and arm the government) state we can make anything true

The more money you have, the higher value (monetary or otherwise) of civic goods including democratic institutions, no corruption, and rule of law becomes to you. Your money above certain levels can be invested in running for office, and reducing taxation. “Money attracts money” as if money were like gravity. The more you earn, if your income increases in a linear fashion (a=bm where a is next year’s income, b is last years and m is a multiplier) the more benefits you retain in a non-linear fashion.

At 50K you pay your bills and save for a house.

At 500K you have a house. Home equity makes you richer in the form of access to credit and a safety net (two types of wealth).

And, you didn’t lose the house to get “access to credit and a safety net”.

At 500,000 you’re a significant player in real estate.

And, you didn’t lose the house, access to credit or a safety net to become a Player. Did you.

At 500 million you make the market in real estate and print your own money.

And, you didn’t lose the house, access to credit or a safety net to become a Player. Did you.

In terms of Rawlsian, “really real” dollars the rich are not only different from you and me. They are richer than they seem to be. To pastiche Ogden Nash:

You remember how poor Scottie Fitzgerald used to mumble, after several Old Fashioneds “the rich are different from you ‘n me”?
Well, lemme tell ya something pal, and here’s a clue, buddy:
The rich are also richer ‘n you and me, systematically.

To factor in what Rawls identifies as values that increase as your income increases such as the greater holding power of your political orientation you need to apply a “progressive” multiplier, the value of value as it were, to higher and higher levels of raw dollars…until society becomes polarized, not only into CEOs making thousands of times more dollars than us, and us, but also into us, and CEOs whose overall “taking” is not thousands of times ours but hundreds of thousands.

The result, until recently, for yours truly? Rushing through fancy malls (where I’d never shop except at the chemist and bookstore) to get to the City of Sadness to try to level a playing field between near-native ESL speakers from expensive international schools, and people relegated to service and dead end jobs as soon as they opened their mouths.

What we want, what the founders in the USA (except for Hamilton) wanted, what Sun Yat Sen wanted for China and what #OccupyHongKong wants is a far more egalitarian society in which the rich man would not be able to buy influence and office: where Confucius wouldn’t have to trundle around north China looking, essentially, for “temp” and adjunct positiond with traps like Nan-zi the Courtesan being set in his way. How to get there is through the progressive income tax which by reducing excess wealth that naturally sticks to the already rich man even as kitten wool naturally sticks to his woolen suit.

The ordinary slob, like “Dave Moss” in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, otherwise becomes profoundly cynical and ready at any indication to tear his own society apart. “The rich get richer, it’s the law of the land”, as Moss says when he wearily comes to work. We know we’re being screwed (heck, I deserved a large cash bonus more than once in my career and didn’t get it) but like Caliban in th’old play we must eat our dinner.

Change Record

27 July 2013: Revised and extended section on Rawls (and Practically Everybody With a Clue) vs Libertarianism

27 July 2013: Revised and extended section on “My Dreams Post-Diagnosis”, removed it to make it stand alone.

27 July 2013: Error: the person who says “x appears as red” may be lying. Reworded but the entire passage needs to be revised and re-evaluated for it is horseshit as it stands.

24 July 2013: So, what will be the Royal Baby’s name?

Up at 6:00 AM: 100 stair steps and 200+ weight moves from the supine position for a 20 minute workout overall. Later in the morning did 700 rowing movements, exchanging arm rowing moves without resistance owing to yesterday’s breakage of the Rackety Rowing Machine.

A few more considerations regarding pain

When it strikes I grimace and hold my mouth into a rictus. As the Kingmaker, the Earl of Warwick, says in the second part of the Henrician trilogy as the wicked Cardinal Winchester writhes dying: “See, how the pangs of death do make him grin”. Shakespeare makes it clear that Winchester’s agony is caused by his evil life.

The peers pay a courtesy call on Winchester but most of them hate him owing to his machinations to overthrow the “good Duke Humphrey” and his wife Eleanor in a trumped up charge of witchcraft.

Almost 100 years before Shakespeare, Luther had observed that the pangs of death can be used to erase our responsibility even for sins thought mortal, and Father Tito tells me the same thing. When these pangs, which signal doom impending or doom further off but surely are the pangs of cancer, I am to offer them up in a short prayer. I find that prayer an analgesic, like using my mind to decode Kant is analgesic.

Idea: in palliative medicine, customize the pain management plan around the unique personality of the patient. A bookish patient could be taken to the new bookstore with her gift card and a friend, and such a patient would endure more walking around.

Men are usually Big Babies as regards small pains, but turn more logical, I’d hasard a guess, as regards big pains: big man whines and curses and swears when he stubs a toe, but in great pain after a flaming collision with a drunk driver, he may well be cool, discussing with the physician his chances for life and what is meant by “debridement”, using his logical mind to think away from his agony. I say this because of the studies (books) I’ve read that confirm my Big Baby/Cool Guy theory. We men handle big disasters as military ops in many cases, because we’ve served in the military, or it represents for us an Ideal of self-control.

Pain before the first workout and after both is reducible, hopefully permanently at this time, to naught using the Fentanyl syrup doses I am given.

Kant Study

…continues with reading Michael Rohlfe in the Cambridge Companion on the Ideas of Pure Reason. Kant has shown in the Antinomies that “reason” interpreted as logic and suasion based on logic, could mislead us, since reason always wants to take us into moonlike regions no longer supported by “mother wit” the oxygen of empirical data or common sense, much like Baron Munchausen in the Monty Python film based on little known German tales…who’s reasoned himself in a way onto the moon and the company of Venus (played by a very young Uma Thurmann in her first well-known role).

Health Notes

Undergoing a procedure the other day about which the less said the better, but which has to be carried out by the nursing staff if the patient is not “regular” in his BMs, I reflect but what of that. Sure it was (is) painful in the Now but I sure as heck needed it and in the new Now I need to take steps to prevent constipation. One reflects, all this hospital stuff, this ceremony as it were of pain, it takes itself so seriously.

Royal Baby

To my knowledge, no-one has ever written down the algorithm for finding a successor given the deceased monarch, therefore it’s good that a male was born, because his legitimacy is questioned less and we have to endure less discussion as to whether he’s going to be the next King.

I think Wills and Kate should name him Edward. It’s a popular traditional name unlike Dylan, or Tonto where in the latter case you mock actual ethnics in some cases, if you use their name. It’s easy for British people to pronounce non-rhotically and it usually comes out Ed-wood of Ed-wud with the schwa. In America it comes out Ed-worrrrd especially if you name is Edward and she’s mad at you.

We need to redeem that name, that of Saint Edward the Confessor before 1066, from the damage done by that rotter Edward VIII (who was number 8 but never crowned). An Edward IX reigning successfully over the coming disasters could do wonders after Charles III and William V.

Just so Wills and Kate don’t name their baby after a motor car. King Bentley I? Camargue? No.

We have a clear line of succession: Charles, William, and this new kid. I don’t know what the new kid’s name is and the whole issue is as they say not as important as warm spit.

23 July 2013

Up at 5:45 AM: 150 lowrise steps in about 7 minutes and freestyle weights from the supine position in about 8 minutes. Later in the morning I was asked to do physio: but the staff had tightened the resistance on the arm movement cables and at about 14 minutes the left cable’s handle broke. I will therefore treat this snafu, commencing at 5:45 but including 14 minutes on the rackety rowing machine as a 20.4 minute workout. Too bad about the left cable. Altho my friends on the staff including “Uncle” Man will doubtlessly repair it it looks like I might not get the arm workout that I was enjoying today.

Later today was laboring over several things but nodding out and finally gave in, enjoying a most refreshing 2 hour nap.

Kant Study

Reading Michael Rohlf on “The Ideas of Pure Reason” in the Cambridge Companion. “Pure reason” sounds like something Kant would support all the way but reflection shows that this is not the case, especially in the Antinomies:

1. Assume A (one or more of: a bound to the universe, the end of time or the beginning of time): already we see trouble, whether in the form of inexpensive or free bleachers beyond the end of the universe or viewing time after its end or before its beginning, viewing where the gerund implies that our viewing takes up time, either the same time as before, or a super time containing “time”. The paradox (antinomy) is apparent.

2. A -> B -> ~A where B might be x is in space outside space or in time after the end of time, or before its beginning

3. And ~A -> ~B -> A which means we’re in a loop

This is an incredibly sophisticated argument for its time as it mirrors Turing’s argument for the existence of “Turing Machines” that never halt and Godel’s argument for the existence of either inconsistency or incompleteness in mathematics: in all three, a “vicious” (as opposed to benign) circle is proven.

The later chapter in Kant on “The Ideas of Pure Reason” isn’t in awe of Reason, for Kant demonstrates that Reason is just part of the story and when given autonomy tends to come to paradox and ends in tears…as Kant had seen for himself when Kant discovered the Antinomies.

We rarely want to say that a philosopher “discovers” something although Charles Hartshorne was so impressed by his own impressive discovery that he could overcome Kant’s refutation of St Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of God by refurbishing St Anselm’s proof that Hartshorne called the refurbished ontological proof “Anselm’s Discovery”.

Kant certainly deserves here to be credited with the discovery of the necessary bounds to Reason, before the thinkers of the 19th century could, by discovering prototypical forms of 20th century paradoxes and objections. On p 613 of Guyer and Wood’s Cambridge translation, for example, there is a Whopper of a long sentence, approximately 150 words in German and about 180 words in English. Such Whoppers are usually passed over in silence and soporific awe since without a detailed linguistic analysis (a Chomsky syntax diagram or one of my sentence diagrams) they are incomprehensible.

But when the sentence in question is fully analyzed one makes a rather moving discovery, that Kant, in what appears to be some anguish, is trying to show how a finished infinity (such as God) could not be contemplated as such, as a complete, finished Platonic ideal but does exist as the rule for the creation and evolution of such a being. Kant, at this point, does not know a central claim of “intuitionist” mathematics as developed by Brouwer, Heyting et al. based on Kant’s own thought: that one may not argue on the basis of the non-contradictory contemplation of a finished (wtf? finished?) infinity, but one may argue on the basis of the rule for generating an infinity.

Mathematicians using “mathematical induction” do this all the time but it also occurs in theology and ordinary life. The alcoholic argues that he can’t believe in God as an all-powerful and oh-so Perfect being nailing his drunk ass on the Judgement Day but his sponsor for AA then says “all you need is a power greater than yourself” … whose generating rule is that this Power has always the drop on you and has been there before, and now precedes you into the wilderness. “What is God were one of us?” What if God is a recovering alcoholic or simply an evolving and as such suffering God.

You find you can pursue this Power with faith through the wilderness.

There’s a twentieth century “intuitionist” religion and math because we know more about what we cannot know. Indeed in many ways Kant was the first “modern” philosopher in this regard, the first to use unknowability in this way. “Modern” in the history of philosophy means “Descartes or later” but in most other fields such as physics “modern” starts in the 20th century (physics starts in 1905 with Einstein’s first publication). The twentieth century modern strain in Kant is this strangely fecund Cloud of Unknowing.

Free or Lower Cost Access to Academic Journals!

Oxford University Press has free content through its Oxford Open Initiative.

But many journal articles and nearly all books remain locked away. I decided to have a look at the following article, in Oxford’s Journal of Legal Analysis: Unconstitutional Conditions Questions Everywhere: The Implications of Exit and Sorting for Constitutional Law and Theory.

The article is incredibly specialized and arcane, which is a good joke, for decoding such complexity is what I need to do to avoid boredom as I sit in the hospital with, I suppose, a fatal disease. I did read in comparative constitutional law a couple of years ago to find that one can only understand one constitution only if one compares it with all other constitutions, since the absence of a pre-existing Rawlsian or contractual justice means that constitutions are only verbal structures with no grounding in Justice, only a position on a topoi or map.

Looks interesting. But instead of legal theory, let’s look at an arcane part of mathematics.

In Britain, people being kicked around (here, by the extraordinary rise in prices of academic journal subscriptions and articles) get collectively angry more often than people in the USA. In Britain, with non-profit support and simple bloody-mindedness, scholars including mathematicians specializing in “topology”, an especially arcane branch of a highly generalized geometry, asked why they should have to pay prices equivalent to first class air travel to get journals they needed for their field. In America, people could “care less” as we Americans so cheerfully (and incorrectly) say.

Using eleemosynary funding from the academic community and the posh, the entire editorial staff of the overpriced journal Topology, apparently not allowed by their corporate owners to extend discounts, simply set up a new journal called The Journal of Topology, down the street a bit. All of the Topology readers followed the Journal, of course, and Topology itself had to be discontinued, an ideological victim of Stalinist free market ideology; but no worry for the Journal can now carry with ease all developments for the topology community.

Topology is just topology and will equate a “geometric set of order 1” ( a coffee cup with a handle that stands for, is, a hole) with any other such set such as a donut (that is NOT one of my “long johns” of past posts) that has a hole no matter what. It deals with blobs of various dimensions which are infinite but bounded sets of points so that it’s meaningful to speak of “the topmost set of points”, etc. This is politically neutral.

But the egg hits the fan in social sciences such as history where ideology is unavoidable. Here, cutbacks in research are convenient to Free Market Stalinists and their vulgar, half-educated, and obese sponsors like the “Koch Brothers” and other filthy swine.

Why? Because the smartest ideologues on the Right knew that in general, the story told by progressives is true. Their deepest wound is the high level of academic support for justified true beliefs including:

The right to belong to a labor union

The right to control one’s body and to be able to choose from the standpoint of reproduction and abortion

The now known scientific fact that economic activity has caused global warming

It burns their ass. We have “justified true belief” (knowledge) that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory is correct and that for no x>2 does m**x + n**x = p**x (Fermat) by way of the (collective!) agreement among learned people with social grace.

Likewise, because of the consensus of many learned women, men, and communities formed by them, we know that ordinary working people do better when Democrats hold power. We know that the American Civil War was over slavery and that the settlement of the English Civil War, while economically progressive and for that reason somewhat good for the ordinary slob, betrayed the hopes of Catholics and men without land for many centuries.

We also know that guns aren’t a guaranty of freedom in the USA given that the context of the Second Amendment was that of disciplined militias and armories where weapons were stored, not that of fat men who feel betrayed by their wives, their employers, or the entire world.

We also know that Paul Krugman, a Princeton professor, is right about most everything in his field and that his opponents aren’t…such as Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. As many know, the latter two “proved” that “deficits over 90% of GDP slow growth” using a spreadsheet with a bug and by eliminating societies experiencing fast growth with deficits in excess of 90%, those being postwar Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

In fine, every day we know more and more stuff thanks to a professoriate just doing their adjunct, untenured, or tenured six figured job.

Come now the Free Market Stalinists. These thugs want us to selectively “do” history, remembering only those parts of the past that profit somebody, usually them, by telling a story that makes all markets look good. Which has in recent years created great patches of ignorance…the cashier who in England confused 1415 and 1066 (the dates of Agincourt and Hastings) in front of historian Norman Davies…the waiter who, without the concept of “history” as “justified true beliefs about the past written down readably”, asked me if the book I was reading (which happened to be Norman Davies’ history of Britain, The Isles), was a fantasy novel; the waiter simply didn’t have the mental category of “justified true beliefs, that is knowledge, about the past”, that is, das ist, das ist, for the love of Mike, History.

Hopefully Oxford’s open initiative will help to stop the decline caused by academic publishers described by some as feral.