jimmy spako wrote: Fri Sep 29, 2023 2:33 pm I'm now 20 pages into Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet. It's incredibly charming!

This book is such a delight.

Four books into John Le Carré's George Smiley series, I hadn't read anything by him before this (nor a whole lot from the spy/thriller genre).

So far they've all been fun. Good short/easy nightcaps for an otherwise hellish couple of weeks at work.

chanced upon kim gordon's girl in a band while rummaging for an emergency scarf in a british heart foundation charity shop earlier this afternoon. i'd borrowed it from a work colleague about five years ago and, until my hands closed on it, had no idea how badly i'd wanted to read it again. got home much later and could not do anything untill i'd finished it.

i ... i think it's just so fucking good. so vigilantly uninterested in the easy way of accounting for things. on this reading, the things kg has to say about her physical experiences of making music, of motherhood, of life beyond her marriage and the group, really leapt out at me.

Anthony Flack wrote: Sun Oct 01, 2023 5:57 pm I haven't read Hagel, but I imagine that Godel, Bertrand Russell and Alan Turing had plenty to add when it comes to this matter of contingent knowledge and proof. Hagel wouldn't have suspected, but this quest to create a unified, formalised philosophy would seem to have Incompleteness Theorem and Halting Problem written all over it. If it breaks on maths, good luck applying it to ethics.

Yeah... I'm not sure where Hegel would come down on that. When formal logic really took off it did so in contexts which had decided to drop Hegel entirely. For legitimate reasons possibly. But the project in Carnap's Logical Structure of the World for example seems similarly extensive in ambition, and graspable in roughly the same terms, just more modest in scope (what counts as knowing is comparatively restricted) - a thought-modelling system that can justify itself by reference to itself. afaik that one is deemed superceded by development.

What I'm wondering about is what attitude Hegel would take to that kind of system construction, and if he would propose a different method. He argued against trying to found philosophy on mathematics - I'm not entirely clear on the argument, but possibly it's that such a system supposes an interpreter, a mind-context in which it is made intelligible and meaningful, but this relation is not included in the system itself. Could there then be a system which includes within itself such meta-systemic premises?

It also depends on what is the goal of Hegel, of what kind is the "knowing" which is actually being sought. Thinking has within it the possibility of looking back on itself and splitting open its own categories - the categories on which whatever conception of the world at hand is founded - and reform itself within new parameters, so that some particular development of the system might on a surface level be unrecognizable to a previous version. In other words it's not a question of simple completion. The system can change in response to challenges from outside itself (only that "outside" is included as a category of the system, the "not" or the "other").

Some of the grapplings with Hegel in the mid-20thC seem to have been around this question of completion, conceptions of knowing and attitudes to the world and others informed by those, for both ethical and epistemological reasons. Adorno and Levinas in the 1960s seem to be in that vein.

kokorodoko wrote: Fri Oct 06, 2023 2:11 am[Hegel] argued against trying to found philosophy on mathematics - I'm not entirely clear on the argument, but possibly it's that such a system supposes an interpreter, a mind-context in which it is made intelligible and meaningful, but this relation is not included in the system itself.

Phenomenology of Spirit, §42 wrote:Yet, even in mathematical cognition, the essentiality of the proof does not have the significance and nature of being a moment of the result itself; when the latter is reached, the demonstration is over and has disappeared. It is, of course, as a result that the theorem is something seen to be true; but this added circumstance has no bearing on its content, but only on its relation to the knowing Subject.

The movement of mathematical proof does not belong to the object, but rather is an activity external to the matter in hand.
[...]
The way and the means by which the result is brought forth belong entirely to the cognitive process.

§44 wrote:But what is really defective in this kind of cognition concerns the cognitive process itself, as well as its material. As regards the former, we do not, in the first place, see any necessity in the construction. Such necessity does not arise from the notion [concept] of the theorem; it is rather imposed, and the instruction to draw precisely these lines when infinitely many others could be drawn must be blindly obeyed without our knowing anything beyond except that we believe that this will be to the purpose in carrying out the proof.

In retrospect, this expediency also becomes evident, but it is only an external expediency, because it becomes evident only after the proof. This proof, in addition, follows a path that begins somewhere or other without indicating as yet what relation such a beginning will have to the result that will emerge. In its progress it takes up these particular determinations and relations, and lets others alone, without its being immediately clear what the controlling necessity is; an external purpose governs this procedure.

kokorodoko wrote: Fri Oct 06, 2023 2:11 am

Anthony Flack wrote: Sun Oct 01, 2023 5:57 pm I haven't read Hagel, but I imagine that Godel, Bertrand Russell and Alan Turing had plenty to add when it comes to this matter of contingent knowledge and proof. Hagel wouldn't have suspected, but this quest to create a unified, formalised philosophy would seem to have Incompleteness Theorem and Halting Problem written all over it. If it breaks on maths, good luck applying it to ethics.

Yeah... I'm not sure where Hegel would come down on that. When formal logic really took off it did so in contexts which had decided to drop Hegel entirely. For legitimate reasons possibly. But the project in Carnap's Logical Structure of the World for example seems similarly extensive in ambition, and graspable in roughly the same terms, just more modest in scope (what counts as knowing is comparatively restricted) - a thought-modelling system that can justify itself by reference to itself. afaik that one is deemed superceded by development.

It should be kept in mind though that Hegel deals with thinking as a living, concrete reality, and the way things unfold in and as this reality - unity, distinction, selfhood (isolation, independence); grasping oneself as a separate consciousness which, as this same consciousness, also grasps itself as in and of a unity; the process by which all these "moments" unfold... "Logic" in its proper form is one that is integrated, expressing its object (thinking) as this living reality - thus expressing itself such, since it thinks itself in the process of its elaboration. So it's shaky to try to draw too close comparisons to later developments. There might be differences in focus and scope.

... I suppose also that developments in linguistics came to put into question the feasibility of an identity between thinking, word (expressed fact) and thing (bearing that fact), as some of this assumes.

kokorodoko wrote: Fri Oct 06, 2023 2:11 amCould there then be a system which includes within itself such meta-systemic premises?

Doubtful, apparently.

In epistemology, the Münchhausen trilemma is a thought experiment intended to demonstrate the theoretical impossibility of proving any truth, even in the fields of logic and mathematics, without appealing to accepted assumptions. If it is asked how any given proposition is known to be true, proof in support of that proposition may be provided. Yet that same question can be asked of that supporting proof, and any subsequent supporting proof. The Münchhausen trilemma is that there are only three ways of completing a proof:

- The circular argument, in which the proof of some proposition presupposes the truth of that very proposition.
- The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum.
- The dogmatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts which are merely asserted rather than defended.

The trilemma, then, is the decision among the three equally unsatisfying options.

… any purported justification of all knowledge must fail, because it must start from a position of no knowledge, and therefore cannot make progress. It must either start with some knowledge, as with dogmatism, not start at all, as with infinite regress, or be a circular argument, justified only by itself and have no solid foundation …

Clyde wrote: Mon Oct 02, 2023 8:32 pm

jimmy spako wrote: Fri Sep 29, 2023 2:33 pm I'm now 20 pages into Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet. It's incredibly charming!

This book is such a delight.

It is, isn't it? Seventy pages into it now, perfect little novel for commuting and starting the day.
Naxos has a 6CD audio book set, samples sounded well done, so I ordered it for my mom's 80th, coming up in a couple weeks, hope she gets a kick out of it.

Gaston Bachelard: The New Scientific Spirit

Picked up by chance at a used book store.