Philosophy Now Forum

What infuriates me....slightly.....is that I see Pirsig's ' Lila' mentioned, but how to find her....you have no Index !!! was that Deliberate ? Thanks for the congrats. The lack of index reflects the view that the names are not really the things worth tracking down, and that it is hard to find usef...

Hello Tom

I am very glad that your surgery was successful.

I shall wait until a few comments have accumulated, and then respond as best I can.

It is worth having a look at Turing's 1950 paper, which is available here: http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.php His emphasis is on whether machines could think, rather than on whether they could be conscious. it is, however, a very interesting question whether thinking implies consciousness, or ...

Oh no AS, I have corrupted you! I blame the British education system. When I was at school, Catullus was for some reason considered to be a suitable set text for teenage boys studying Latin. For those in the UK, here is a link that should work: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-daily-show-with-...

Wondering if anyone has some recommendations for a book on Quantum Theory that is relatively user friendly. I am by no means a physics buff, but am interested in the topic. Thanks! Given that thinking about quantum mechanics means thinking in strange ways, I would not start with a single book. Diff...

OK, so it's the indefinability part of Tarski's work that you are bringing in. That's helpful. But I still won't have anything useful to add without more of your thought process. Sorry about that.

I don't think I can help more without a better understanding of how you see Tarski as coming into this. Are you thinking of his work on the undefinability of arithmetical truth within arithmetic? Or about his work on the definition of truth in general? Could you expand on your thoughts so far?

I've gotten the word that one of Euclid's axioms has been either proven to be false or to be excessive Are you thinking of the parallel postulate? It is independent of the other axioms. If it holds, you have Euclidean geometry. If its negation holds, you have a non-Euclidean geometry. Perhaps these...

Hello Emily Good stuff. Nietzsche would have approved: not that Zarathustra was diabolical, but he is also the voice to whom polite society dare not give audience. Another point of comparison is Milton's Paradise Lost . We hear Satan speak, and we hear what he does, but we do not, so far as I recall...

Hello SGR I thought that you were challenging Einstein, with your words: "Einstein’s proposal to consider two points on a rigid body has always appeared flawed to me". So I thought it worthwhile to point out that so far as I could see, he was not at that point telling us what he thought, b...

First he says three points are on a straight line if one can superimpose them from some position by looking at them through one eye ... That sentence starts "We are accustomed further to regard three points ...". He seems to be talking about how we casually think, not about how we ought t...

The first rule of book club is you do not talk about book club. The second rule of book club is you do not talk about book club! But perhaps we can, without breaking either of these two rules, mention (not use) the name "book club" and then rely on other people's tacit, and arguably non-a...

The theorems are not controversial, but their interpretation (going beyond the mathematics) is controversial. And yes, the sense of "incompleteness" involved is not the everyday sense. Adding axioms is fine, and plugs one negation-incompleteness, but gives rise to another. I recommend Fran...

I wonder that AS, or myself, did not jump on your : 'As to mind-reading, Goethe knew better than most how to read minds, bodies and their follies'. What makes you say so ? He had the psychological insight of a Shakespeare. Dip into Faust. It is not about one guy who happens to be offered an unusual...

Please help with the translation on the words zungelchen and fotzchen because I couldn't find a direct translation. Zunge = tongue, Fotze = pussy, and -chen is a diminuative ending, so little tongue and little pussy. Is Goethe talking about Rome or an actual woman? Did Goethe mean to imply she/Rome...