See also mentions of Justin E. H. Smith in this journal, including . . .
“… Western academic philosophy will likely come to appear
utterly parochial in the coming years if it does not find a way
to approach non-Western traditions that is much more rigorous
and respectful than the tokenism that reigns at present.”
— Justin E. H. Smith in the New York Times philosophy
column “The Stone” yesterday
For example—
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The Philosopher's Gaze , by David Michael Levin, The post-metaphysical question—question for a post-metaphysical phenomenology—is therefore: Can the perceptual field, the ground of perception, be released from our historical compulsion to represent it in a way that accommodates our will to power and its need to totalize and reify the presencing of being? In other words: Can the ground be experienced as ground? Can its hermeneutical way of presencing, i.e., as a dynamic interplay of concealment and unconcealment, be given appropriate respect in the receptivity of a perception that lets itself be appropriated by the ground and accordingly lets the phenomenon of the ground be what and how it is? Can the coming-to-pass of the ontological difference that is constitutive of all the local figure-ground differences taking place in our perceptual field be made visible hermeneutically, and thus without violence to its withdrawal into concealment? But the question concerning the constellation of figure and ground cannot be separated from the question concerning the structure of subject and object. Hence the possibility of a movement beyond metaphysics must also think the historical possibility of breaking out of this structure into the spacing of the ontological difference: différance , the primordial, sensuous, ekstatic écart . As Heidegger states it in his Parmenides lectures, it is a question of "the way historical man belongs within the bestowal of being (Zufügung des Seins ), i.e., the way this order entitles him to acknowledge being and to be the only being among all beings to see the open" (PE* 150, PG** 223. Italics added). We might also say that it is a question of our response-ability, our capacity as beings gifted with vision, to measure up to the responsibility for perceptual responsiveness laid down for us in the "primordial de-cision" (Entscheid ) of the ontological difference (ibid.). To recognize the operation of the ontological difference taking place in the figure-ground difference of the perceptual Gestalt is to recognize the ontological difference as the primordial Riß , the primordial Ur-teil underlying all our perceptual syntheses and judgments—and recognize, moreover, that this rift, this division, decision, and scission, an ekstatic écart underlying and gathering all our so-called acts of perception, is also the only "norm" (ἀρχή ) by which our condition, our essential deciding and becoming as the ones who are gifted with sight, can ultimately be judged. * PE: Parmenides of Heidegger in English— Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 ** PG: Parmenides of Heidegger in German— Gesamtausgabe , vol. 54— Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992 |
Examples of "the primordial Riß " as ἀρχή —
For an explanation in terms of mathematics rather than philosophy,
see the diamond theorem. For more on the Riß as ἀρχή , see
Function Decomposition Over a Finite Field.
"Imbedding the God character in a holy book's very detailed narrative
and building an entire culture around this narrative
seems by itself to confer a kind of existence on Him."
— John Allen Paulos in the philosophy column "The Stone,"
New York Times online, Oct. 24, 2010
A related post from Log24 later that year—
Sunday, November 28, 2010
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"Next come the crown of thorns and Jesus' agonized crawl across the stage,
bearing the weight of his own crucifix. And at last, after making
yet another entrance, Mr. Nolan strikes the pose immortalized
in centuries of art, clad in a demure loincloth, arms held out to his sides,
one leg artfully bent in front of the other, head hanging down
in tortured exhaustion. Gently spotlighted, he rises from the stage
as if by magic, while a giant cross, pulsing with hot gold lights,
descends from above to meet him. Mr. Lloyd Webber's churning guitar rock
hits a climactic note, and the audience erupts in excited applause."
— Charles Isherwood, review of "Jesus Christ Superstar" in today's New York Times
Other remarks on embedding —
Part I
Review of a new book on linguistics, embedding, and a South American tribe—
"Imagine a linguist from Mars lands on Earth to survey the planet's languages…."
— Chronicle of Higher Education , March 20, 2012
Part II
The Embedding , by Ian Watson (Review of a 1973 novel from Shakespeare's birthday, 2006)
The New York Times philosophy column "The Stone" has returned—
"There will certainly always be a place for epistemology,
or the theory of knowledge. But in order for a theory of
knowledge to tell us much, it needs to draw on examples
of knowledge of something or other." — Justin E.H. Smith
Amen.
Examples: Quine on geometry and Quine on universals.
Fans of the New York Times philosophy series "The Stone"
(named for the legendary philosophers' stone) may consult
posts tagged "Crucible Raiders" in this journal.
Some context — the previous post, "Night at the Social Media."
The previous post, together with remarks in this journal
on April 3-5, 2013 — the dates of a CUNY philosophy
conference — suggests a look at today's New York Times
philosophy column "The Stone."
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The challenges of this enterprise go beyond merely finding the rhetorical and material resources to brush deception aside. To be a participant in a good-enough democratic polis is a perpetual project that requires taking seriously one’s abiding and evolving tastes and interests and working without surcease to create an ever-expanding social and linguistic space for every individual who arrives on our shores, or at our borders, to pursue happiness. The authors are philosophy professors: Nancy Bauer at Tufts University; Alice Crary at the University of Oxford; and Sandra Laugier at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. |
Related material about the film referenced in today's previous post —
Happy birthday, LiLo.
Or: "What Dreams May Come"
(For the foxtail girl)
"Most religious beliefs are not true. But here’s the crux.
The emotional brain doesn’t care. It doesn’t operate on
the grounds of true and false. Emotions are not true or false.
Even a terrible fear inside a dream is still a terrible fear."
— Stephen T. Asma in the New York Times philosophy
column "The Stone" today
See also Triple Cross.
In greater depth:
Posts tagged on131004, a tag derived from a date in
a Google search today …
For enthusiasts of symbology, a webpage illustrated here this morning —
This morning's review of this Ajna webpage was suggested by posts from
the Oct. 4, 2013, date in the Google crux search above.
In memory of a French film publicist who worked with Clint Eastwood
in 1971 on the release of "The Beguiled" —
From a New York Times graphic review dated Sept. 16, 2016 —
It's Chapter 1 of George Eliot's "Middlemarch."
Dorothea Brooke, young and brilliant, filled with passion
no one needs, is beguiled by some gemstones . . . .
The characters, moving through the book,
glitter as they turn their different facets toward us . . . .
Cf. a glitter-ball-like image in today's New York Times philosophy column
"The Stone" — a column named for the legendary philosophers' stone.
The publicist, Pierre Rissient, reportedly died early Sunday.
See as well Duelle in this journal.
(Continued from yesterday's Sunday School Lesson Plan for Peculiar Children)
Novelist George Eliot and programming pioneer Ada Lovelace —
For an image that suggests a resurrected multifaceted
(specifically, 759-faceted) Osterman Omega (as in Sunday's afternoon
Log24 post), behold a photo from today's NY Times philosophy
column "The Stone" that was reproduced here in today's previous post —
For a New York Times view of George Eliot data, see a Log24 post
of September 20, 2016, on the diamond theorem as the Middlemarch
"key to all mythologies."
Say You, Say Me
Lionel Richie
. . . .
"I had a dream,
I had an awesome dream
People in the park
playing games in the dark
And what they played
was a masquerade
And from behind walls of doubt
a voice was crying out"
. . . .
"Something else was behind this . . .
because it makes no sense.”
— The author reviewed in today's previous post,
as quoted yesterday in The Boston Globe
Say you, say me, say IT . . .
A comment on Sean Kelly's Christmas Morning column on "aliveness"
in the New York Times philosophy series The Stone —
Two Students of Structure
A comment on Sean Kelly's Christmas Morning column on "aliveness"
in the New York Times philosophy series The Stone —
Diana Senechal's 1999 doctoral thesis at Yale was titled
"Diabolical Structures in the Poetics of Nikolai Gogol."
Her mother, Marjorie Senechal, has written extensively on symmetry
and served as editor-in-chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer .
From a 2013 memoir by Marjorie Senechal —
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"While I was in Holland my enterprising student assistant at Smith had found, in Soviet Physics – Crystallography, an article by N. N. Sheftal' on tetrahedral penetration twins. She gave it to me on my return. It was just what I was looking for. The twins Sheftal' described had evidently begun as (111) contact twins, with the two crystallites rotated 60o with respect to one another. As they grew, he suggested, each crystal overgrew the edges of the other and proceeded to spread across the adjacent facet. When all was said and done, they looked like they'd grown through each other, but the reality was over-and-around. Brilliant! I thought. Could I apply this to cubes? No, evidently not. Cube facets are all (100) planes. But . . . these crystals might not have been cubes in their earliest stages, when twinning occurred! I wrote a paper on "The mechanism of certain growth twins of the penetration type" and sent it to Martin Buerger, editor of Neues Jarbuch für Mineralogie. This was before the Wrinch symposium; I had never met him. Buerger rejected it by return mail, mostly on the grounds that I hadn't quoted any of Buerger's many papers on twinning. And so I learned about turf wars in twin domains. In fact I hadn't read his papers but I quickly did. I added a reference to one of them, the paper was published, and we became friends.[5]
After reading Professor Sheftal's paper I wrote to him in Moscow; a warm and encouraging correspondence ensued, and we wrote a paper together long distance.[6] Then I heard about the scientific exchanges between the Academies of Science of the USSR and USA. I applied to spend a year at the Shubnikov Institute for Crystallography, where Sheftal' worked. I would, I proposed, study crystal growth with him, and color symmetry with Koptsik. To my delight, I was accepted for an 11-month stay. Of course the children, now 11 and 14, would come too and attend Russian schools and learn Russian; they'd managed in Holland, hadn't they? Diana, my older daughter, was as delighted as I was. We had gone to Holland on a Russian boat, and she had fallen in love with the language. (Today she holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literature from Yale.) . . . . |
Philosophy professors and those whose only interest in mathematics
is as a path to the occult may consult the Log24 posts tagged Tsimtsum.
"… the war of 70-some years ago
has already become something like the Trojan War
had been for the Homeric bards:
a major event in the mythic past
that gives structure and sense to our present reality."
— Justin E. H. Smith, a professor of philosophy at
the University of Paris 7–Denis Diderot,
in the New York Times column "The Stone"
(print edition published Sunday, June 5, 2016)
In memory of a British playwright who reportedly
died at 90 this morning —
Structure
Sense
The New York Times philosophy column yesterday —
The Times's philosophy column "The Stone" is named after the legendary
"philosophers' stone." The column's name, and the title of its essay yesterday
"Is that even a thing?" suggest a review of the eightfold cube as "The object
most closely resembling a 'philosophers' stone' that I know of" (Page 51 of
the current issue of a Norwegian art quarterly, KUNSTforum.as).
The eightfold cube —
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Definition of Epiphany
From James Joyce’s Stephen Hero , first published posthumously in 1944. The excerpt below is from a version edited by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (New York: New Directions Press, 1959). Three Times: … By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance: — Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany. — What? — Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty. — Yes? said Cranly absently. — No esthetic theory, pursued Stephen relentlessly, is of any value which investigates with the aid of the lantern of tradition. What we symbolise in black the Chinaman may symbolise in yellow: each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action. — Yes … — You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. Isn’t that so? — And then? — That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing , a definitely constituted entity. You see? — Let us turn back, said Cranly. They had reached the corner of Grafton St and as the footpath was overcrowded they turned back northwards. Cranly had an inclination to watch the antics of a drunkard who had been ejected from a bar in Suffolk St but Stephen took his arm summarily and led him away. — Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn’t make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas . After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany. Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly’s hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend’s company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled: — It has not epiphanised yet, he said. |
From the New York Times philosophy column "The Stone"
yesterday morning —
"Our knowledge of the universe and ourselves expands
like a ripple surrounding a pebble dropped in a pool.
As we move away from the center of the spreading circle,
its area, representing our secure knowledge, grows.
But so does its circumference, representing the border
where knowledge blurs into uncertainty and speculation,
and methodological confusion returns. Philosophy patrols
the border, trying to understand how we got there and to
conceptualize our next move. Its job is unending."
— Scott Soames, "Philosophy's True Home"
Related ripples —
From the previous Log24 post:
From a passage by Nietzsche quoted here on June 9, 2012:
For Soames's "unending" job of philosophy and Nietzsche's
"maieutic and educational influences on noble youths,"
consult the lyrics played over the end credits of "Monster" —
"Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on, and on, and on, and on"
The title refers to yesterday evening's remarks titled
"Free the Philosophical Beast" in The Stone , a NY Times weblog.
The January 2015 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society
has an article by Michael J. Barany. From November 2012 remarks
by Barany :
"A highlight of the workshop was Cathryn Carson’s interpretation
of the transcendental phenomenology and historicism of Husserl,
Heidegger, Cassirer, and a few others, launched from a moving
reflection on the experience of reading Kuhn."
See Carson's paper "Science as Instrumental Reason: Heidegger, Habermas,
Heisenberg," Continental Philosophy Review (2010) 42: 483–509.
Related material: Monday's Log24 posts Rota on Husserl and Annals of Perception.
Part I:
The sermon, “God’s Architecture,” at Nassau Presbyterian
Church in Princeton on Sunday, Feb. 23, 2014. (This is the
“sermon” link in last Sunday’s 11 AM ET Log24 post.)
An excerpt:
“I wonder what God sees when God looks at our church.
Bear with me here because I’d like to do a little architectural
redesign. I look up at our sanctuary ceiling and I see buttons.
In those large round lights, I see buttons. I wonder what would
happen if we unbutton the ceiling, Then I wonder if we were to
unzip the ceiling, pull back the rooftop, and God were to look in
from above – What does God see? What pattern, what design,
what shape takes place?” — Rev. Lauren J. McFeaters
Related material — All About Eve:
A. The Adam and Eve sketch from the March 8 “Saturday Night Live”
B. “Katniss, get away from that tree!” —
C. Deconstructing God in last evening’s online New York Times .
Part II:
“Heavensbee!” in the above video, as well as Cartier’s Groundhog Day
and Say It With Flowers.
Part III:
Humans’ architecture, as described (for instance) by architecture
theorist Anne Tyng, who reportedly died at 91 on Dec. 27, 2011.
See as well Past Tense and a post from the date of Tyng’s death.
Continued from September 3rd, 2013.
On that date, there were two posts in this journal:
"The Stone" today suggests…"* and
"An End in Itself."
The former dealt with some philosophy and
mathematics related to graphic design.
The latter dealt with death and finality.
The New York Times today has an obituary
that, revisiting Sept. 3rd, unites the topics of
death and design.
|
Alvin Eisenman,
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK Alvin Eisenman, a graphic designer who in 1951 became the first director of Yale’s graduate program for graphic design, the first offered by a major American university, died on Sept. 3 at his home, which he also designed, on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 92. More>> |
For greater depth, see the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
* This post's title and "The Stone" above refer to the New York Times
philosophy column "The Stone"— In particular, to its Sept. 2nd post
"Women in Philosophy? Do the Math."
The New York Times philosophy column "The Stone"
last evening had an essay on art by a sarcastic anarchist,
one Crispin Sartwell—
"… whole generations of art lovers have been
trained in modernist dogma, and arts institutions’
access to various forms of state or foundation
support depend on it completely. One goes to
the museum to gasp at stunning works of
incomparable, super-human genius by beings
who are infinitely more exalted and important
than the mere humans staring at their paintings.
That’s why ordinary people staring at a Picasso
(allegedly) experience a kind of transcendence
or re-articulation of their lives and world."
Cubism Re-Articulated:
Click image for some backstory.
(IMAGE: Walter Gropius and Froebel's Third Gift,
from a Google image search today)
Background: Cubism in this journal and
Pilate Goes to Kindergarten.
Related material: Chesterton + Thursday in this journal.
"… Western academic philosophy will likely come to appear
utterly parochial in the coming years if it does not find a way
to approach non-Western traditions that is much more rigorous
and respectful than the tokenism that reigns at present."
— Justin E. H. Smith in the New York Times philosophy
column "The Stone" yesterday
For example—
(Rhetorical question on the NY Times online front page,
10:01 PM May 23, 2012, in teaser for "The Stone" column
about Philip K. Dick, "Sci-Fi Philosopher")
Perhaps The Last Airbender ?
The NY Times philosophy column "The Stone" is currently about gnosticism
and science fiction.
The Last Airbender is about an avatar who is master of the four elements
air, water, earth, and fire. For a more sophisticated approach to gnosticism
and the four elements, see Irenaeus: Against Heresies.
See, too, Elements Diamond in this journal.
From the NY Times philosophy column "The Stone"
yesterday at 5 PM—
Timothy Williamson, Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford,
claims that all the theorems of mathematics
"… are ultimately derived from a few simple axioms
by chains of logical reasoning, some of them
hundreds of pages long…."
Williamson gives as an example recent (1986-1995)
work on Fermat's conjecture.
He does not, however, cite any axioms or "chains of
logical reasoning" in support of his claim that
a proof of Fermat's conjecture can be so derived.
Here is a chain of reasoning that forms a crucial part
of recent arguments for the truth of Fermat's conjecture—
K. A. Ribet, "On modular representations of Gal(Q̄/Q)
arising from modular forms," Invent. Math. 100 (1990), 431-476.
Whether this chain of reasoning is in fact logical is no easy question.
It is not the sort of argument easily reduced to a series of purely
logical symbol-strings that could be checked by a computer.
Few mathematicians, even now, can follow each step
in the longer chain of reasoning that led to a June 1993 claim
that Fermat's conjecture is true.
Williamson is not a mathematician, and his view of
Fermat's conjecture as a proven fact is clearly based
not on logic, but on faith.
Gary Gutting, "Arguing About Language," in "The Stone,"
The New York Times philosophy column, yesterday—
There's a sense in which we speak language
and a sense in which, in Mallarmé's famous phrase,
“language itself speaks.”
Famous? A Google Book Search for
"language itself speaks" Mallarmé
yields 2 results, neither helpful.
But a Google Book Search for
"language itself speaks" Heidegger
yields "about 312 results."
A related search yields the following—
Paul Valéry, encountering Un Coup de Dés in Mallarmé’s worksheets in 1897, described the text as tracing the pattern of thought itself:
It seemed to me that I was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space. Here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms….
… there in the same void with them, like some new form of matter arranged in systems or masses or trailing lines, coexisted the Word! (Leonardo 309*)
* The page number is apparently a reference to The Collected Works of Paul Valéry: Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé , translated by Malcolm Cowley and James R. Lawler, Princeton University Press, 1972. (As a temporal form, "309" might be interpreted as a reference to 3/09, March 9, the date of a webpage on the Void.)
For example—
Background:
Deconstructing Alice
and Symbology.
For Women's Day—
From a review of Truth and Other Enigmas , a book by the late Michael Dummett—
"… two issues stand out as central, recurring as they do in many of the
essays. One issue is the set of debates about realism, that is, those debates that ask
whether or not one or another aspect of the world is independent of the way we
represent that aspect to ourselves. For example, is there a realm of mathematical
entities that exists fully formed independently of our mathematical activity? Are
there facts about the past that our use of the past tense aims to capture? The other
issue is the view— which Dummett learns primarily from the later Wittgenstein—
that the meaning of an expression is fully determined by its use, by the way it
is employed by speakers. Much of his work consists in attempts to argue for this
thesis, to clarify its content and to work out its consequences. For Dummett one
of the most important consequences of the thesis concerns the realism debate and
for many other philosophers the prime importance of his work precisely consists
in this perception of a link between these two issues."
— Bernhard Weiss, pp. 104-125 in Central Works of Philosophy , Vol. 5,
ed. by John Shand, McGill-Queen's University Press, June 12, 2006
The above publication date (June 12, 2006) suggests a review of other
philosophical remarks related to that date. See …
"Every partitioning of the set of sixteen ontic states
into four disjoint pure epistemic states
yields a maximally informative measurement."—
For some more-personal remarks on Dummett, see yesterday afternoon's
"The Stone" weblog in The New York Times.
I caught the sudden look of some dead master….
Religion for stoners,♦ in memory of Horselover Fat
Amazon.com gives the publication date of a condensed
version* of Philip K. Dick's Exegesis as Nov. 7, 2011.
The publisher gives the publication date as Nov. 8, 2011.
Here, in memory of the author, Philip K. Dick (who sometimes
called himself, in a two-part pun, "Horselover Fat"), is related
material from the above two dates in this journal—
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Tuesday, November 8, 2011 m759 @ 12:00 PM …. Update of 9:15 PM Nov. 8, 2011— From a search for the word "Stoned" in this journal—
See also Monday's post "The X Box" with its illustration
Monday, November 7, 2011
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs, quoted in
For some background on this enigmatic equation,
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Merry Xmas.
♦ See also last night's post and the last words of Steve Jobs.
* Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publisher, has, deliberately or not, sown confusion
about whether this is only the first of two volumes.
Perhaps the best obituary for the late Morris Philipson
(see Nov. 10) is this text, by writer W.P. Norton
(not to be confused with the publishing firm W.W. Norton).
For the text in context, see a screenshot of the Norton
weblog (which was very slow to load this morning).
The Blogspot loading logo that did appear at Norton's
weblog suggests the following image—
LOGOS
 |
 |
The logo on the right is that of
The New York Times 's
philosophy weblog "The Stone."
Philipson, incidentally, reportedly died on the morning of November 3.
See the remarks of Tom Wolfe quoted here on that date.
From "The Stone" in Sunday's online New York Times—
Cosmic Imagination
By William Egginton
Do the humanities need to be defended from hard science?
Illustration of hard science —
Illustration of the humanities —
(The above illustrations from Sunday's "The Stone" are by Leif Parsons.)
Midrash by the Coen brothers— "The Dude Abides."
See also 10/10/10— The Day of the Tetractys—
* Update of 9:15 PM Nov. 8, 2011—
From a search for the word "Stoned" in this journal—
|
Sunday, January 2, 2011
m759 @ 6:40 PM Simon Critchley today in the New York Times series "The Stone"— Philosophy, among other things, is that living activity of critical reflection in a specific context, by which human beings strive to analyze the world in which they find themselves, and to question what passes for common sense or public opinion— what Socrates called doxa— in the particular society in which they live. Philosophy cuts a diagonal through doxa. It does this by raising the most questions of a universal form: “What is X?”
Actually, that's two diagonals. See Kulturkampf at the Times and Geometry of the
[Here the "Stoned" found by the search |
See also Monday's post "The X Box" with its illustration
.
At Heaven’s Gate
Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011, RSS at 23:59 EDT:
Peter Woit's weblog Not Even Wrong—
"Lisa Randall’s new book is about to come out, it’s entitled
Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking
Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World."
Angels & Demons (the film)—
As she enters the lab she reacts in horror
as she sees an eyeball lying on the floor…
Click images for some backstory —
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|
 |
"She has taken on the role of a public face of physics,
and has written a book which is in part a very general defense
of science and the materialist, rationalist world-view
that modern science is based on."
See also yesterday's "The Stone" column in The New York Times—
I prefer philosophy enacted by Reba.
* A reference to Dan Brown, not Marianne Williamson
A comment yesterday on the New York Times philosophy column “The Stone” quoted Karl Barth—
“Man is the creature of the boundary between heaven and earth.”
See also Plato’s theory of ideas (or “forms”) and the I Ching—
The eight trigrams are images not so much of objects as of states of change. This view is associated with the concept expressed in the teachings of Lao-tse, as also in those of Confucius, that every event in the visible world is the effect of an “image,” that is, of an idea in the unseen world. Accordingly, everything that happens on earth is only a reproduction, as it were, of an event in a world beyond our sense perception; as regards its occurrence in time, it is later than the suprasensible event. The holy men and sages, who are in contact with those higher spheres, have access to these ideas through direct intuition and are therefore able to intervene decisively in events in the world. Thus man is linked with heaven, the suprasensible world of ideas, and with earth, the material world of visible things, to form with these a trinity of the primal powers.
— Richard Wilhelm, Introduction to the I Ching
A comment today on yesterday's New York Times philosophy column "The Stone"
notes that "Augustine… incorporated Greek ideas of perfection into Christianity."
Yesterday's post here for the Feast of St. Augustine discussed the 2×2×2 cube.
Today's Augustine comment in the Times reflects (through a glass darkly)
a Log24 post from Augustine's Day, 2006, that discusses the larger 4×4×4 cube.
For related material, those who prefer narrative to philosophy may consult
Charles Williams's 1931 novel Many Dimensions . Those who prefer mathematics
to either may consult an interpretation in which Many = Six.
Click image for some background.
From this journal on Saturday, August 6, 2011—
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité….
— Baudelaire, "Correspondances " (in The Flowers of Evil )
From the New York Times philosophy column "The Stone" earlier that day—
"… a magnificent and colorful parade of disorganized and rhapsodic thoughts"
— Baudelaire
From Uncle Walt— (See yesterday's "Coordinated Steps")—
For a better organized, less rhapsodic parade, see Saturday's Correspondences.
Continued from this morning's "The Game"—
"Relativism is not always a coherent way of responding to the rejection of a certain class of facts. When we decided that there were no such things as witches, we didn’t become relativists about witches. Rather, we just gave up witch talk altogether, except by way of characterizing the attitudes of people (such as those in Salem) who mistakenly believed that the world contained witches, or by way of characterizing what it is that children find it fun to pretend to be on Halloween."
— New York Times philosophy column "The Stone" today
AND: Logical conjunction, symbolized as… ∧
OR: Logical disjunction, symbolized as… ∨
AND/OR: Logical confusion, symbolized as… 
according to a woman Lacanian analyst in this journal.
See also another female disciple of Lacan
writing as co-author with a philosophy professor
in Saturday's online New York Times 's "The Stone"—
Let Be: An Answer to Hamlet’s Question."
Perhaps they thought the question was…
|
|
Wikipedia portrait of New School "To be and/or not to be?" |
For a more philosophically respectable approach to
the same shape, see Sunday morning's Wittgenstein's Diamond.
"We're gonna need more holy water." —Hollywood saying
From an obituary of choreographer Roland Petit, who died on Sunday, July 10, 2011—
"Ballerina roles had for more than a century been largely made on pale romantically suffering virgins or royal princesses; Petit’s women were liberated and exciting, modern and tangibly real— and yet archaic femmes fatales . Probably his most popular ballet worldwide is Le jeune homme et la mort , in which a young bloke lazing around in his room is visited by an enigmatic, seductive female— at the end of which brief encounter he hangs himself.
The young man’s role was seized upon by the great ballet stars of the next decades, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov notable among them. As with Carmen, the role of La Mort, the death goddess, has been sought out by a pantheon of great ballerinas, in Paris, Russia and the US as well as in Europe." —Ismene Brown at theartsdesk.com
From the philosophy column "The Stone" in Saturday's online New York Times—
Let Be: An Answer to Hamlet’s Question"—
"Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice
in New York. She is the author of
'The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis'
forthcoming from Karnac Books."
Related ART WARS material:
The New York Times now offers a sequel to its philosophy series "The Stone"—
From the Times City Room this afternoon—
"One wild rhapsody a fake for another."
— Wallace Stevens, "Arrival at the Waldorf," in Parts of a World (1942)
On a conference at the New School for Social Research on Friday and Saturday, December 3rd and 4th, 2010—
"This conference is part of the early stages in the formation of a lexicon of political concepts. It will be the 5th in a series of conferences started in Tel Aviv University. The project is guided by one formal principle: we pose the Socratic question "what is x?", and by one theatrical principle: the concepts defined should be relevant to political thought…."
[The conference is not unrelated to the New York Times philosophy series "The Stone." Connoisseurs of coincidence— or, as Pynchon would have it, "chums of chance"— may read the conclusion of this series, titled "Stoned," in the light of the death on December 26th (St. Stephen's Day) of Matthew Lipman, creator of the "philosophy for children" movement. Many New York Times readers will, of course, be ignorant of the death by stoning of St. Stephen
Beloit College Nuremberg Chronicle
commemorated on December 26th. They should study Acts of the Apostles— Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.]
Meanwhile, in this journal—
For some background on the Dec. 4th link to "Damnation Morning," see "Why Me?"
For some political background, see "Bright Star"+"Dark Lady" in this journal.
* The title refers to a story by Fritz Leiber.
Simon Critchley today in the New York Times series "The Stone"—
Philosophy, among other things, is that living activity of critical reflection in a specific context, by which human beings strive to analyze the world in which they find themselves, and to question what passes for common sense or public opinion— what Socrates called doxa— in the particular society in which they live. Philosophy cuts a diagonal through doxa. It does this by raising the most questions of a universal form: “What is X?”
Actually, that's two diagonals. See Kulturkampf at the Times and Geometry of the I Ching .
Also known, roughly speaking, as confluence or the Church-Rosser property.
From “NYU Lambda Seminar, Week 2” —
[See also the parent page Seminar in Semantics / Philosophy of Language or:
What Philosophers and Linguists Can Learn From Theoretical Computer Science But Didn’t Know To Ask)]
A computational system is said to be confluent, or to have the Church-Rosser or diamond property, if, whenever there are multiple possible evaluation paths, those that terminate always terminate in the same value. In such a system, the choice of which sub-expressions to evaluate first will only matter if some of them but not others might lead down a non-terminating path.
The untyped lambda calculus is confluent. So long as a computation terminates, it always terminates in the same way. It doesn’t matter which order the sub-expressions are evaluated in.
A computational system is said to be strongly normalizing if every permitted evaluation path is guaranteed to terminate. The untyped lambda calculus is not strongly normalizing: ω ω doesn’t terminate by any evaluation path; and (\x. y) (ω ω) terminates only by some evaluation paths but not by others.
But the untyped lambda calculus enjoys some compensation for this weakness. It’s Turing complete! It can represent any computation we know how to describe. (That’s the cash value of being Turing complete, not the rigorous definition. There is a rigorous definition. However, we don’t know how to rigorously define “any computation we know how to describe.”) And in fact, it’s been proven that you can’t have both. If a computational system is Turing complete, it cannot be strongly normalizing.
There is no connection, apart from the common reference to an elementary geometric shape, between the use of “diamond” in the above Church-Rosser sense and the use of “diamond” in the mathematics of (Cullinane’s) Diamond Theory.
Any attempt to establish such a connection would, it seems, lead quickly into logically dubious territory.
Nevertheless, in the synchronistic spirit of Carl Jung and Arthur Koestler, here are some links to such a territory —
Link One — “Insane Symmetry” (Click image for further details)—
See also the quilt symmetry in this journal on Christmas Day.
Link Two — Divine Symmetry
(George Steiner on the Name in this journal on Dec. 31 last year (“All about Eve“)) —
“The links are direct between the tautology out of the Burning Bush, that ‘I am’ which accords to language the privilege of phrasing the identity of God, on the one hand, and the presumptions of concordance, of equivalence, of translatability, which, though imperfect, empower our dictionaries, our syntax, our rhetoric, on the other. That ‘I am’ has, as it were, at an overwhelming distance, informed all predication. It has spanned the arc between noun and verb, a leap primary to creation and the exercise of creative consciousness in metaphor. Where that fire in the branches has gone out or has been exposed as an optical illusion, the textuality of the world, the agency of the Logos in logic—be it Mosaic, Heraclitean, or Johannine—becomes ‘a dead letter.'”
– George Steiner, Grammars of Creation
(See also, from Hanukkah this year, A Geometric Merkabah and The Dreidel is Cast.)
Link Three – Spanning the Arc —
Part A — Architect Louis Sullivan on “span” (see also Kindergarten at Stonehenge)
Part B — “Span” in category theory at nLab —
Also from nLab — Completing Spans to Diamonds
“It is often interesting whether a given span in some partial ordered set can be completed into a diamond. The property of a collection of spans to consist of spans which are expandable into diamonds is very useful in the theory of rewriting systems and producing normal forms in algebra. There are classical results e.g. Newman’s diamond lemma, Širšov-Bergman’s diamond lemma (Širšov is also sometimes spelled as Shirshov), and Church-Rosser theorem (and the corresponding Church-Rosser confluence property).”
The concepts in this last paragraph may or may not have influenced the diamond theory of Rudolf Kaehr (apparently dating from 2007).
They certainly have nothing to do with the Diamond Theory of Steven H. Cullinane (dating from 1976).
For more on what the above San Francisco art curator is pleased to call “insane symmetry,” see this journal on Christmas Day.
For related philosophical lucubrations (more in the spirit of Kaehr than of Steiner), see the New York Times “The Stone” essay “Span: A Remembrance,” from December 22—
“To understand ourselves well,” [architect Louis] Sullivan writes, “we must arrive first at a simple basis: then build up from it.”
Around 300 BC, Euclid arrived at this: “A point is that which has no part. A line is breadthless length.”
See also the link from Christmas Day to remarks on Euclid and “architectonic” in Mere Geometry.
From "The Stone" (a philosophy series) in today's New York Times —
Louis Sullivan, in his Kindergarten Chats , on the pier and lintel as basic elements of architecture:
… [Sullivan says that the pier] embodies “the simplest physical beginnings"….
Add the lintel and “presto!” ….
But he has a question: what is this sudden coming-into-being of a way of being?
“We have no true name for it in the language. But if you fix the phenomenon well in your thought,
the absence of an exact word for it need not matter much.”
The source —
A related passage —
"Crucial here is the concept of emergence , the sudden coming into being of something that is greater than its component parts (like water is greater than its component parts, hydrogen and oxygen; therefore, water is an emergent property)."
— Article on Bakhtin in The Cervantes Encyclopedia , by Howard Mancing (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004)
See also "strong emergence" in this journal.
"Even before Thales fell into the well, and the ancient Greeks laid the foundation
for Western philosophy, humans were engaged in the search for wisdom…."
— Introducing "The Stone," NY Times, May 16, 2010, quoted here this morning
Some have Wisdom thrust upon them.
Context— Happy Birthday Reba, 2009, and "I'll Follow a Star."
The New York Times version of the philosophers' stone:
In the Times 's latest sermon from THE STONE, Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, discusses
"…the specific and robust claims of Judaism, Christianity and Islam about how God is concretely and continually involved in our existence."
A search shows that Gutting's phrase "specific and robust" has many echoes in biotechnology, and a few in software development. The latter is of more interest to me than the former. (The poetically inclined might say that Professor Gutting's line of work is a sort of software development.)
"As a developer, you need a specific and robust set of development tools in the smallest and simplest package possible."
— EasyEclipse web page
Here are two notes on related material:
Specific— The Pit:
See a search for "harrowing of Hell" in this journal.
("…right through hell there is a path…." –Malcolm Lowry)
Robust— The Pendulum:
See a search for "Foucault's Pendulum" in this journal.
(“Others say it is a stone that posseses mysterious powers…. often depicted as a dazzling light. It’s a symbol representing power, a source of immense energy. It nourishes, heals, wounds, blinds, strikes down…. Some have thought of it as the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists….”
Those puzzled by why the NY Times would seek the opinions of a professor at a Catholic university may consult Gutting's home page.
He is an expert on the gay Communist Michel Foucault, a student of Althusser.
John Allen Paulos yesterday at Twitter—
"Plato's code cracked? http://bit.ly/ad6k1S
Fascinating if not a hoax or hype."
The story that Paulos linked to is about a British
academic who claims to have found some
symbolism hidden in Plato's writings by
splitting each into 12 parts and correlating
the 12 parts with semitones of a musical scale.
I prefer a different approach to Plato that is
related to the following hoax and hype—
HOAX:
From Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons (2000)—
HYPE:
This four-elements diamond summarizes the classical
four elements and four qualities neatly, but some scholars
might call the figure "hype" since it deals with an academically
disreputable subject, alchemy, and since its origin is unclear.
For the four elements' role in some literature more respectable
than Dan Brown's, see Poetry's Bones.
Although an author like Brown might spin the remarks
below into a narrative— The Plato Code — they are
neither hoax nor hype.
NOT HOAX:
NOT HYPE:
For related non-hoax, non-hype remarks, see
The Rational Enterprise: Logos in Plato's Theaetetus,
by Rosemary Desjardins.
Those who prefer hoax and hype in their philosophy may consult
the writings of, say, Barbara Johnson, Rosalind Krauss, and—
in yesterday's NY Times's "The Stone" column— Nancy Bauer.
— The New York Times
“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
— Gravity’s Rainbow
The above text on Joyce’s theory of epiphanies:
“It emphasizes the radiance, the effulgence, of the thing itself revealed in a special moment, an unmoving moment, of time. The moment, as in the macrocosmic lyric of Finnegans Wake, may involve all other moments, but it still remains essentially static, and though it may have all time for its subject matter it is essentially timeless.”
— Page 17 of Stephen Hero, by James Joyce, Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Herbert Cahoon, Edition: 16, New Directions Publishing, 1963
Related epiphanies —
“Joyce knew no Greek.”
— Statement by the prototype
of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses,
Oliver St. John Gogarty,
quoted in the above
New Directions Stephen Hero
“Chrysostomos.”
— Statement in Ulysses
by the prototype
of Stephen Dedalus,
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
See also the link to
Mardi Gras, 2008,
in yesterday’s entry,
with its text from
the opening of Ulysses:
“He faced about and
blessed gravely thrice
the tower,
the surrounding country
and the awaking mountains.”
Some context:
(Click on images for details.)
and
“In the process of absorbing
the rules of the institutions
we inhabit, we become
who we are.”
— David Brooks, Jewish columnist,
in today’s New York Times
The Prisoner,
Episode One, 1967:
“I… I meant a larger map.”
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