CapitalistImperialistPig

Chapter 10 of The Open Society and its Enemies, also titled TOSAIE, is a reward for some of the past labor.  Popper is both eloquent and expansive here, clearly describing his vision of the open society, and giving much needed background on Athens in the 5th Century BCE.  He introduces a pantheon of heroes of the open society: Protagoras, Democritus, and, above all, Pericles and Socrates. Given that much of what we know of Socrates comes to us from Plato, it is a little curious that he seems to ultimately be the most fundamental betrayer of Socrates and his philosophic thought.  It seems clear that the "Socrates" of The Republic and other late dialogues is so at odds with the Socrates we see in more personal dialogues thought to be early. Popper tries to analyze this betrayal, and comes up some interesting ideas, including some supposed signs of guilty regret, but I won't pretend to evaluate them.  It is his final chapter devoted to Plato, and I have to say that he c...

And as imagination bodies forth  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen  Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing  A local habitation and a name.  Such tricks hath strong imagination,  That if it would but apprehend some joy,  It comprehends some bringer of that joy.  Or in the night, imagining some fear,  How easy is a bush supposed a bear!...................Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Scene 1 Sometimes the pen belongs to a physicist or a mathematician. Are virtual particles real?  Are imaginary numbers real?   How about negative numbers? As usual, it all depends on what we mean by real.  Not many mathematicians, physicists, or engineers would quarrel with the reality of imaginary numbers, but most of us would admit, I think, that the natural numbers are a bit more "real" than all those other numbers, including the Real Numbers. The world is constructed of such figments of our imagination, and ...

How a state gets transformed into an oligarchy: SOCRATES: That storehouse filled with gold we mentioned,169 which each possesses, destroys such a constitution. First, you see, the timocrats find ways of spending their money, then they alter the laws to allow them to do so, and then they and their women disobey the laws altogether. ADEIMANTUS: Probably so. SOCRATES: Next, I suppose, through one person seeing another and envying [e] him, they make the majority behave like themselves. ADEIMANTUS: Probably so. SOCRATES: After that then, they become further involved in moneymaking; and the more honorable they consider it, the less honorable they consider virtue. Or isn’t virtue so opposed to wealth that if they were set on the scale of a balance, they would always incline in opposite directions? [551a] ADEIMANTUS: It certainly is. SOCRATES: So, when wealth and the wealthy are honored in a city, virtue and good people are honored less. Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Th...

OK, I've only read the first three books of Plato's Republic, but I'm not one to let that dissuade me from an opinion. The tone of the Republic seems much different than the dialogs, possibly indicating that Plato is no longer attempting to recreate Socrates, but express his own thoughts, even though he still attributes them to Socrates. The Socrates of the Republic is far more didactic, declaiming his ideas and mostly winning the equivalent of "Well duh" from his interlocutors. I suppose we can credit Plato with the invention of the totalitarian state, at least as an intellectual concept. He argues that by systematic thought control, a few well chosen big lies, and a bit of selective pruning of the unsuitable, the ideal governors and guardians of the state can be educated and entrusted with its governance. My reaction was that this represents a woeful misreading of human nature, but one that continues to be made pretty widely even in our day - what Steven P...

...the uneducated, when they engage in argument about anything, give no thought to the truth about the subject of discussion but are only eager that those present will accept the position they have set forth. Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle (p. 187). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition. Since I have been dissing the man, I ought to give credit now and again. Another: After this, he said, when I had wearied of investigating things, I thought that I must be careful to avoid the experience of those who watch an eclipse of the sun, for some of them ruin their eyes unless they watch its reflection in water or some such material. A similar [e] thought crossed my mind, and I feared that my soul would be altogether blinded if I looked at things with my eyes and tried to grasp them with each of my senses. So I thought I must take refuge in discussions and investigate the truth of things by {192} means of words. Readings in Ancient Greek Philosop...

After reading Plato's account of a dialog between Protagoras and Socrates, I've got to say I've lost a lot of respect for all concerned. The question under debate is whether wisdom and virtue can be learned, with Protagoras initially taking the affirmative. Socrates then chases him around the rhetorical map with what seem to me to be pointless word games, getting P to concede that this and that have similarities or similar opposites. A better Protagoras, I think, would just have said: "Socrates, Socrates, hang up your word games. Let's just say that different words have different meanings, and that even the same word can have different meanings in different contexts." P, in Plato's telling, never points out some of the ridiculous weaknesses in the argument of Socrates, like the absurd chain by which Socrates gets Protagoras to equate courage with knowledge. Frankly, I consider it unlikely that the minds who created Greek geometry could have bought in...

Socrates, I mean. In Plato's Crito , Socrates imagining the Laws of Athens speaking to him: ...Or are you so wise that it has escaped your notice that your fatherland is more worthy of honor than your mother [b] and father and all your other ancestors; that it is more to be revered and more sacred and is held in greater esteem both {112} among the gods and among those human beings who have any sense; that you must treat your fatherland with piety, submitting to it and placating it more than you would your own father when it is angry; that you must either persuade it or else do whatever it commands; that you must mind your behavior and undergo whatever treatment it prescribes for you, whether a beating or imprisonment; that if it leads you to war to be wounded or killed, that’s what you must do, and that’s what is just—not to give way or retreat or leave where you were stationed, but, on the contrary, in war and law courts, and everywhere else, to do whatever your city or [c] fath...

I've been thinking about what classes to take next semester, and one prospect is Ancient Greek Philosophy. So I've started Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle by S. Marc Cohen and Patricia Curd . So far I've read the Presocratics and the first part of Plato, concerning the trial and execution of Socrates. The Presocratics survive only in fragments and testimonia - accounts of their writings by later writers. My uncharitable conclusion is that they were mostly tedious and pointless. Most of them could have clarified their thought if they had studied the words of the great Twentieth Century Sophist, W. J. Clinton, who noted that: "it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." The exceptions are Democritus and the Pythagoreans, who actually had some ideas of enduring worth (atomism and number in physics). I give the others an "E" for effort, in that they actually tried to analyze the world in terms of fundamental co...

Arun links to an interesting article by A. K. Ramanujan entitled "Is there an Indian Way of Thinking?" It's a subtle article, and I hesitate to try to summarize, but he emphasizes the idea that compared to Western thinking, Indian thinking is more contextual, Western more context free. I don't claim to understand exactly what this means, but some of the examples suggest that this is a difference between saying something like "the governor, speaking to the maid in the bedroom said ..." (contextual) and the context free "the governor said ..." The author also suggests that the Indian mode is more comfortable with simultaneously holding two apparently mutually contradictory views of the same phenomenon - giving as an example, his father, an astronomer, also doing astrology. There is much more, but I recommend the article. At any rate, I was reminded of the discussion of the role of metaphor in cognition by Lakoff and Johnson. They argue that, ...

Lakoff and Johnson have a bone to pick with the traditional view of metaphor, much of which they attribute to Aristotle. Here is how they describe that traditional view: 1. Metaphor is a matter of words, not thought. Metaphor occurs when a word is applied not to what it normally designates, but to something else. 2. Metaphorical language is not part of ordinary conventional language. Instead, it is novel and typically arises in poetry, rhetorical attempts at persuasion, and scientific discovery. 3. Metaphorical language is deviant. In metaphor, words are not used in their proper senses. 4. Conventional metaphorical expressions in ordinary everyday language are "dead metaphors," that is, expressions that once were metaphorical, but have become frozen into literal expressions. 5. Metaphors express similarities. That is, there are preexisting similarities between what words normally designate and what they designate when they are used metaphorically. This is not an ac...

... or are you just simile to somebody I used to know? A major theme of Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Philosophy is the notion that abstract thought is metaphorical and that the metaphors are grounded in the neural circuity of our sensory motor systems. Thus we may tackle the subject of metaphysics, see its key ideas, or have them go over our head. The apparatus of deductive thought is itself encapsulated in metaphor. Premises are starting points, deductions are a journey, and conclusions are a destination that follows from them. According to the authors, the core metaphors are grounded in simultaneous activations: Part 1: Johnson's theory of conflation in the course of learning. For young children, subjective (nonsensorimotor) experiences and judgments, on the one hand, and sensorimotor experiences, on the other, are so regularly conflated-undifferentiated in experience-that for a time children do not disting...

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy......................Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5 You probably know that the Prince of Denmark was not talking to or about Immanuel Kant - he hadn't been born yet. Despite the title, I'm not either. I have in mind the thought that we humans quite naturally sort things into categories. In their book, Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought , George Lakoff and Mark Johnson note that categorization is a fundamental characteristic of life. Every time an amoeba decides to move toward what it senses as food, or a bacterium turns on some enzymatic system in response to a change in local chemistry, it is, in effect, making a decision, characterizing or categorizing its environment. For creatures with brains and nervous systems, the categorization can be made more explicit. Our eyes, for example, have about a million sensory cells, but only 100,000 fibe...

Well, probably not, since he has apparently just been hired by the world's top philosophy department . Physicists of my generation often have a deep distain for philosophy, especially, perhaps, for philosophy of science. I thought maybe we might have caught that from our hero, Feynman, but I remember debates and recriminations with my philosophy of science prof well before I knew much about Feynman. Be that as it may, why does Prof Maudlin say something this stupid: What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolu...