Philosophy, culture, philosophy of culture, and other stuff as needed
Friday, October 06, 2006
Get yer philosophy dissertations here!
Or, if you've written one yourself, you can make it available to others. (I'm thinking about it...). Here's the link.
HT: Leiter
6 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Why not make your dissertation available? Either it'll be read or it won't be read. If it isn't read, then it's not much different than if you hadn't made it available -- you've wasted a few minutes of your time, big deal. If it is read, then, hey, people are reading your work!
Also: I'm still waiting to find out about the last book you found in that one post. The one that was so interesting that it needed its own post.
(the best used book I've found was a 1903 edition of Hegel's World History Lectures. The introduction is by Hegel's son, who sounds surprisingly normal.)
W/r/t the latter disjunct, the question is whether that (i.e., that people would then be reading it) is really what we want. I'm not convinced it's really ready for prime time, as the saying goes. If it established nothing else, the defense showed that the author's intentions are (*cough*) clearer in his head than they are on the page (ch. 5 especially, where the handwaving-to-argument ratio spikes).
But I'll think about it.
Thanks for reminding me about **** **** ***** (not Hegel's World History Lectures). I was trying to get an article out of it, but I'm not sure how it would go, exactly. Let me take another look at what I've got. Stay tuned.
Here's a dissertation from a philosophaster I'd like to see: how to justify the "law" of the excluded middle (LOTEM). Analytic a priori? Synthetic a priori? Can any a priori truths really be established? Difficult--except for saying empiricism doesn't seem to account for certain givens (in terms of logic and mathematics) thus they are a priori: which is hardly a necessary argument. Is the LOTEM a posteriori.....and inductive? Thus a matter of observation.....and contingent.
Note too that the traditional definitions of tautology using language (and thus of the LOTEM)--something like "it is raining, or it is NOT raining"--can be called into question with numerous counter-examples.
Rain itself it not really an on or off switch ("the light is on OR it is off" (not-on) seems a better tautology) ; Nor is say "Ren loves Stimpy, OR Ren doesn't love Stimpy." Tautology? I don't think so. He could love Stimp. to some degree; that state of love could constantly change, etc. OK, trivial perhaps, but what is wrong then? The problem is that many words--nouns, verbs, adjectivals--have built in parameters which keeps them from working in a purely truth-functional manner. Thus when the logician puts them in propositions--or predicates--he is really doing it only to show the logical form, but in some sense the semantics doesn't take a truth-functional form (ie. based on the LOTEM). Wittgenstein hints at this issue somewhere in the PI, but in his usual obtuse manic style doesn't really cough it up.
Danke. I have encountered Brouwer's ideas previously, in Quine's discussion of "deviant" logics in his Philosophy of Logic. Quine does not think the damage of intuitionism (or the results of quantum physics) is critical--others do. But the intuitionist's conceptual thrust--one doesn't predicate about shiete one doesn't know shiete about---seems quite cogent, as does the anti-platonism, even if we, like, WVOQ object to some of the Brouwerian alternatives to the LEM. WVOQ himself, not completely absent of nominalistic tendencies, granted that Int. logic was "[intolerant] of methods that lead to affirming the existence of things [like Fregean abstract entities, perhaps, WVOQ?] of some sort without showing how to find one."
Paraphrasing Quine [again], the conceptualist (a more accurate term than "intuitionist", really) holds that classes are invented, whereas the realist/logicist camp holds they are discovered. Universals are mind-made for the conceptualists (including Brouwer, it seems), and that position seems a bit more copacetic and, well, inductively sound-- if a bit less sublime--- than the realist's Platonism.
However, I am not down with Brouwer's more mystical aspects (as evidenced in early writings): but he seemed to move away from the mysticism in later years.
6 comments:
Why not make your dissertation available? Either it'll be read or it won't be read. If it isn't read, then it's not much different than if you hadn't made it available -- you've wasted a few minutes of your time, big deal. If it is read, then, hey, people are reading your work!
Also: I'm still waiting to find out about the last book you found in that one post. The one that was so interesting that it needed its own post.
(the best used book I've found was a 1903 edition of Hegel's World History Lectures. The introduction is by Hegel's son, who sounds surprisingly normal.)
W/r/t the latter disjunct, the question is whether that (i.e., that people would then be reading it) is really what we want. I'm not convinced it's really ready for prime time, as the saying goes. If it established nothing else, the defense showed that the author's intentions are (*cough*) clearer in his head than they are on the page (ch. 5 especially, where the handwaving-to-argument ratio spikes).
But I'll think about it.
Thanks for reminding me about **** **** ***** (not Hegel's World History Lectures). I was trying to get an article out of it, but I'm not sure how it would go, exactly. Let me take another look at what I've got. Stay tuned.
Here's a dissertation from a philosophaster I'd like to see: how to justify the "law" of the excluded middle (LOTEM). Analytic a priori? Synthetic a priori? Can any a priori truths really be established? Difficult--except for saying empiricism doesn't seem to account for certain givens (in terms of logic and mathematics) thus they are a priori: which is hardly a necessary argument. Is the LOTEM a posteriori.....and inductive? Thus a matter of observation.....and contingent.
Note too that the traditional definitions of tautology using language (and thus of the LOTEM)--something like "it is raining, or it is NOT raining"--can be called into question with numerous counter-examples.
Rain itself it not really an on or off switch ("the light is on OR it is off" (not-on) seems a better tautology) ; Nor is say "Ren loves Stimpy, OR Ren doesn't love Stimpy." Tautology? I don't think so. He could love Stimp. to some degree; that state of love could constantly change, etc. OK, trivial perhaps, but what is wrong then? The problem is that many words--nouns, verbs, adjectivals--have built in parameters which keeps them from working in a purely truth-functional manner. Thus when the logician puts them in propositions--or predicates--he is really doing it only to show the logical form, but in some sense the semantics doesn't take a truth-functional form (ie. based on the LOTEM). Wittgenstein hints at this issue somewhere in the PI, but in his usual obtuse manic style doesn't really cough it up.
Here you go, Uncle Meat; complete with bibilography and links. That should keep you out of trouble for a while.
Danke. I have encountered Brouwer's ideas previously, in Quine's discussion of "deviant" logics in his Philosophy of Logic. Quine does not think the damage of intuitionism (or the results of quantum physics) is critical--others do. But the intuitionist's conceptual thrust--one doesn't predicate about shiete one doesn't know shiete about---seems quite cogent, as does the anti-platonism, even if we, like, WVOQ object to some of the Brouwerian alternatives to the LEM. WVOQ himself, not completely absent of nominalistic tendencies, granted that Int. logic was "[intolerant] of methods that lead to affirming the existence of things [like Fregean abstract entities, perhaps, WVOQ?] of some sort without showing how to find one."
Paraphrasing Quine [again], the conceptualist (a more accurate term than "intuitionist", really) holds that classes are invented, whereas the realist/logicist camp holds they are discovered. Universals are mind-made for the conceptualists (including Brouwer, it seems), and that position seems a bit more copacetic and, well, inductively sound-- if a bit less sublime--- than the realist's Platonism.
However, I am not down with Brouwer's more mystical aspects (as evidenced in early writings): but he seemed to move away from the mysticism in later years.
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