"Language is about the world— we use it to communicate
about things. So we must ask what this 'aboutness' is:
what is it and how does it work? That is, how does language
manage to hook up with reality?"
— Colin McGinn in Philosophy of Language :
The Classics Explained , MIT Press, Jan. 16, 2015,
as quoted by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
in The New York Review of Books , Oct. 8, 2015
See also a Harvard Crimson review of another book by McGinn.
The current issue (dated Oct. 8, 2015) of
The New York Review of Books has two
(at least) items related to philosophy —
See also Backstory, a Log24 post of Nov. 22, 2010:
"He said, 'I wrote a piece of code
that they just can’t seem to do without.'
He was a symbolic logician.
That was his career…."
By chance, the latest* remarks in philosopher Colin McGinn's
weblog were posted (yesterday) at 10:04 AM.
Checking, in my usual mad way, for synchronicity, I find
the following from this weblog on the date 10/04 (2012)—
Note too the time of this morning's previous post here
(on McGinn)— 9:09 AM. Another synchronistic check
yields Log24 posts from 9/09 (2012):
Related to this last post:
Detail from a stock image suggested by the web page of
a sociologist (Harvard '64) at the University of Washington in Seattle—
Note, on the map of Wyoming, Devil's Gate.
There are, of course, many such gates.
* Correction (of about 11:20 AM Aug. 3):
Later remarks by McGinn were posted at 10:06 AM today.
They included the phrase "The devil is in the details."
Yet another check for synchronicity leads to
10/06 (2012) in this journal with its post related to McGinn's
weblog remarks yesterday on philosophy and art.
That 10/06 Log24 post is somewhat in the spirit of other
remarks by McGinn discussed in a 2009 Harvard Crimson review.
See the title in this journal.
Related material:
Philosophers on the Beach—
George Santayana in Acapulco, Colin McGinn in Miami.
For Women's Day—
See a Harvard Crimson review of a book
by philosopher Colin McGinn.
“Logic is all about the entertaining of possibilities.”
– Colin McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning,
Harvard University Press, 2004
Geometry of Language,
continued from St. George's Day, 2009—
Related material:
Prima Materia,
The Galois Quaternion,
and The Wake of Imagination.
See also the following from a physicist
(not of the most orthodox sort, but his remarks
here on Heisenberg seem quite respectable)–
Where Three Worlds Meet
From an obituary for David Brown, who died at 93 on Monday–
"David Brown was a force in the entertainment, literary and journalism worlds," Frank A. Bennack, Jr., vice chairman and chief executive officer of Hearst Corporation, said in a statement Tuesday. —Polly Anderson of the Associated Press
Mark Kramer, "Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists," Section 8–
"Readers are likely to care about how a situation came about and what happens next when they are experiencing it with the characters. Successful literary journalists never forget to be entertaining. The graver the writer's intentions, and the more earnest and crucial the message or analysis behind the story, the more readers ought to be kept engaged. Style and structure knit story and idea alluringly.
If the author does all this storytelling and digressing and industrious structure-building adroitly, readers come to feel they are heading somewhere with purpose, that the job of reading has a worthy destination. The sorts of somewheres that literary journalists reach tend to marry eternal meanings and everyday scenes. Richard Preston's 'The Mountains of Pi,' for instance, links the awkward daily lives of two shy Russian emigre mathematicians to their obscure intergalactic search for hints of underlying order in a chaotic universe."
Hints:
“Logic is all about the entertaining of possibilities.”
— Colin McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning, Harvard U. Press, 2004
"According to the Buddha, scholars speak in sixteen ways of the state of the soul after death…. While I hesitate to disagree with the Compassionate One, I think there are more than sixteen possibilities described here…."
"That's entertainment!"
Logocentric Theology
“Logic is all about the entertaining of possibilities.”
— Colin McGinn,
Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning,
Harvard U. Press (See yesterday’s entry.)
“God is the sum of all possibilities.”
— Isaac Bashevis Singer, according to
the Associated Press “Today in History“
feature for today, March 30, 2005
“A probability space is a measure space with total measure one.”
— Gregory F. Lawler, Probability Notes
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
For other illustrations of logocentric theology, see
Matrix of the Death God (May 25, 2003),
Transcendental Meditation (July 30, 2003),
and, for Warren Beatty’s birthday today,
Graphical Password (April 27, 2003).
continued
The stranglehold of the Wiener Kreis on Harvard philosophy may at last be breaking:
"… imagination and belief are related…. belief presupposes imagination…."
"To negate the actual is to move imaginatively into the realm of modality. Logic is all about the entertaining of possibilities."
"… imagination is central to an account of linguistic understanding. To understand a sentence is to imaginatively grasp the possibility it represents."
— Colin McGinn, excerpt (pdf) from Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning, published by Harvard University Press on November 22, 2004
From Four Quartets:
And the pool was filled
with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light…
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