Too deep for me.

Gettier cases prove that a reasonable approximation of knowledge
sometimes diverges from actual knowledge — PL Olcott

I drive down a forest road and see a bear beside it in the distance. No, as I approach it I see it is merely a small tree. What is so profound about this sort of thing?

what is the motivation by which a capitalist society would transform itself into a Democratic Socialist society? — Leontiskos

Perhaps purity of thought :roll: , or the attraction of living on the dole. :smile:

Most mathematicians brush aside the Russell Paradox and its circumvention by classes. For me, this book would be a challenging read. I went part way into it and bailed.

Does philosophy still contribute? — Pantagruel

. . . gauge whether the philosophy being conducted is any good or not . . . — Tom Storm

Depends upon how "any good or not" is interpreted. Clearly, Derr - a professor in the philosophy department at Clark - has done some good for humanity in his consulting. But if you mean just a philosopher arguing a point made by Aristotle for the umpteenth time, perhaps not.

Derr proves that the answer to "Is Philosophy still Relevant?" is yes. At least some philosophy.

Except that this doesn't seem to gauge whether the philosophy being conducted is any good or not, whether it is systematic or not, whether it builds purposefully on established traditions or not, whether it has learned from mistakes or not. — Tom Storm

I know the brother of this gentleman: Patrick Derr is an academic philosopher who has definitely contributed to society. He is relevant.

Professor Derr received a B.A. from Seattle University in 1972 and a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 1976. He has been at Clark since that time. He is a research professor with the George Perkins Marsh Institute and with the programs in Ethics and Public Policy, Environmental Science and Policy(ES&P) and Peace Studies. In 2007, Derr was awarded Clark’s Senior Faculty Fellowship for excellence in teaching and research.
Current Research and Teaching

Derr’s research interests are in the areas of medical ethics and health policy, philosophy of science, and environmental ethics and policy. As a member of the CENTED Hazards Group, he has been involved in interdisciplinary studies of radioactive waste management, occupational hazards, environmental hazard management and hazardous technology transfer.

Much of Derr’s work is directed to the explication and analysis of ethical issues, particularly issues of justice or equity. Derr’s current writing focuses on ethical issues related to the conduct of biomedical research on human subjects in less developed countries, on questions of justice related to national energy policy, and on the application of emerging veterinary reproductive technologies to human beings. Derr teaches the graduate course on Philosophy of Science which may be selected by ES&P M.A. students. Derr has been a mentor to several ES&P graduate students and has served as an advisor for MA theses. Derr is also available for graduate level reading courses on ethical issues.

My advice is to do that. Run free. See what happens. Life is all about picking your adventure. — Hanover

If you do this, please have health insurance. Don't expect society to give you a free ride. If you have an expensive medical procedure and can't pay, the rest of us have to pick up the tab one way or another.

“Apes don’t read PHILOSOPHY!” — Mikie

They could if they were not rabid about typing Shakespeare.

1. Read a philosophy text and attempt to understand it. — Moliere

According to my philosophy prof many years ago this is entirely the wrong approach. Read commentaries first, then the originals. You Kant fail.

Truth in the context of an axiomatic system is that which follows logically from that system.

Saw the film some time ago but don't remember much about it - something about crawling through cabinets.

Sounds amazing and maybe scary — plaque flag

Not at all. Powerful and illuminating. Highly recommended. :cool:

You are claiming a line through space is and isn't the effect of a cause? — ucarr

As a Platonic object it exists. It is describable by a contour function. Word babble IMO.

A line through space is continuous in the common sense of the word and exists without causality. But I can interpret the line as a contour "caused by" a function f(t).

We have internal perspective foundations, influenced by beliefs, that give us "feelings" about reality and are continuously refreshed by interacting with the physical and emotional world. But across the landscape of time these can be misleading. Try to imagine an event that occurred, say, a century ago. Do your best to place yourself in the context of the time, but it can never happen, no matter how carefully you surround yourself with the accoutrements of that period.

I have seen this in the world of climbing when a few modern day climbers attempt to replicate an ascent having taken place in the late 19th century, using the equipment of that period. It's never even close to reliving the original experience.

I practiced forms of meditation over the years, and once, not too long ago, had the astounding adventure of inadvertently slipping into the consciousness of another person, very briefly. Instead of an old man in Colorado, I found "myself" in the mind of a woman living in a cabin in Ireland. The experience goes beyond words to express, and it lasted only a few brief moments. "I" looked out the window onto rolling green hills and everything was changed for me - I saw through another's eyes what I would not see through mine.

My conclusion: There are no common internal perspective foundations. Even common beliefs vary from person to person.

Two cents worth.

I am questioning the notion that philosophy has a distinctiveness that holds throughout its changes. What may be true of one philosopher may not be true of another. — Fooloso4

Not being presumptuous, but perhaps that gives it vitality to survive. Academic incestuousness diminished.

Odd that you don’t remember the warnings about global warming from back then. Talk about selective memory — Mikie

I'll answer this. There were so many other things happening during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, it must have slipped right past me. I do remember the oil embargo. Maybe you can pull up some of those articles from those eras, warning of global warming. I'm curious.

Likely impeachments will be the new norm for US administrations. You already have the theater of the debt ceiling, hence what could be more useful than have impeachment hearings every then and now? — ssu

Well, we do seem to be more and more a Banana Republic, like some of our fellow South American countries. So Trump could go briefly to prison then be elected president.

For example, one point in space can be represented as being continuous with another — ItIsWhatItIs

I'm curious how you can do that. :chin:

I had thought that Descartes’ discovery of algebraic geometry - the idea of dimensional co-ordinates - was of absolutely fundamental importance in the ‘new sciences’ — Quixodian

Analytic geometry. Algebraic geometry is fairly recent and difficult to digest.

In a way the future does affect the past, or our knowledge of the past. As time passes we lose information that exists at that point in time. No matter how carefully we document an occurrence bits and pieces fall away, swept by the relentless river of time. We then try to reconstruct the past, but we live in the present in a different environment, social and otherwise, than those from the past.

"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there" {The Go Between)

a more contemporary way of thinking about the real (intra-action that creates material phenomena rather than interaction between pre-existing objects) that has made its way from philosophy into the social sciences. — Joshs

I hope that will satisfy an adolescent's wanderlust. — Vera Mont

:clap: :rofl:

If you want to go off on your own and be a nomad, either on the road with the physical thrills thereupon, or in your apartment thinking great thoughts, be sure you can support yourself. As an ancient on this forum I've seen it all, especially in the world of mountain and rock climbing, where being a "dirtbag" is revered in some quarters - a little like a divine incarnation.

And then something happens and you run up a hospital bill in six figures and need a GoFundMe to survive.

And I have seen the twists and turns life makes, in one instance a friend who lived on fifty cents a day in 1960 and is a billionaire today. And another who started the same and died in a run-down shack, poverty stricken. So, if you want to be a nomad, don't expect society (while it's busy adjusting to intra-action excitement) to come to your rescue.

Scientific realism seems able to say things like: "fundamental particles don't really exist, they are just mathematical descriptions of standing waves, and it's the mathematical structure that is most real," — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't believe that is the consensus among physicists. Such particles exist but a predictive mathematical description of their behavior overrides any sort of ontological speculation. Virtual particles are another issue.

It's my understanding that retrocausality is only a speculative interpretation of certain things observed at the quantum scale, where cause and effect concepts either don't exist or are muddled. So, in every instance where reversal in time might offer an explanation, other explanations exist.

In math all one has to do is put a negative sign before a time variable to go "backwards".

As a high school student in 1954 I wrote a short paper for my physics class on the interpretation of a positron being an electron moving backward in time, a concept Feynman and a few others entertained for a while. Of course, I hadn't a clue, but I loved science fiction.

I've mentioned before a mathematical structure in which one observes at present time the result of an experiment, only to discover going backward step by step in a causal chain that the further one looks into the past the less significant a specific "starting" point seems, until in the distant past almost anything would have triggered the result at present. A dynamical system not so otherworldly as one might suspect.

But that is precisely what has been called into question by experiments . . . — Quixodian

A lot depends upon the idea of "superposition", which has a simple mathematical interpretation. I remain unconvinced, and Wigner himself criticized "Wigner's Friend". I refuse to succumb to the woo surrounding this - but that's just me and I don't have a physics background.

I think the difficulty here is the red herring of independence of physics and its objects from any particular embodied physicist — plaque flag

A group of physicists devise an experiment, including a device to measure the outcome. They perform the experiment, then cluster around the computer screen to read the result - they all agree they see the same thing. The experiment is replicated numerous times, with the same result. How is this "dependence" upon a particular "embodied" scientist?

Perhaps I'm not interpreting what you say properly.

I grew up in an educated family in the Deep South, and was taught to be polite and respect others. No Southern Pride.

I very much think that a mathematician or physicist or biologist can do genuine 'ontological' work themselves — plaque flag

It's better they are unaware that's what they're doing. :roll:

Possibly advances in mathematics were catalyzed by the discovery of fossil fuels — Janus

Hmmm. Never thought of that. More like the surge of science in the 14th century, including measuring velocity over short periods of time, then resurrecting the ancient Greeks' notions of approximating volumes of objects by adding very small parts. After the firming up of calculus things moved pretty fast.

What can the philosopher offer ? — plaque flag

Not much these days. But being philosophical might help smooth out the bumps in life.

The teaching of the sciences embodies the appropriate philosophical ideas for those subjects.

Dutiful, taking pains, loving, hoping not to get run down today by a man in a hurry. — unenlightened

Yesterday, upon the stair,
A hurried man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

The abandonment of belief in what is merely imagined and what seems merely intuitively "right" with no other supporting evidence seems to be the essential element of scientific method . . . — Janus

I wouldn't be too sure about the "abandonment" in actual practice . . . . down deep scientists have ideas they hope will be substantiated by experiment or shown to be wrong. Preferably the former. They are, by and large, human and hope to get there first. On the other hand pure curiosity can be a driving force.

Very nice presentation. Metaphysics in the sciences goes on all the time, although most come from actual scientists.

I was curious about mathematical metaphysics, thinking I had some inkling of what that might be. I have in the past thought of infinitesimals in this light, but searching I came across Mathematical Metaphysics by a prominent academic philosopher and a PhD math student. It is both dense and lengthy, hallmarks of the profession I assume, and seems to boil down to something akin to Tegmark's Mathematical
Universe. Every object, physical or otherwise is mathematical, and defined by a structure in which it resides. But I lost interest and perseverance after a few pages of the 32 page paper.

Lengthy, dense papers appear in math journals as well, and they sometimes owe their lengths and convoluted nature to attempts to fill every intellectual crack so no one else can benefit from their discoveries and/or to answer all questions in advance. But it's late and I wither and dither.

Putting things into perspective.

I'm 86 and have talked, argued, debated with myself all my life. As a mathematician that internal dialogue goes on forever.

When I was a rock climber and free soloed unknown territory I was my own companion, reasoning with myself constantly. When things got dicey I imagined an invisible cord suspended from the heavens having me on "top-rope".

What human being does not converse with themselves?

How much is the quality of the experience of the present enhanced through understanding of the past? — Pantagruel

Good point. If I answer as a mathematician, I would say a little, but not very much. I already had a PhD before I looked carefully into the subject as it existed two thousand years ago. I did ponder platonic entities for a brief spell, and the fatigued conundrum of whether math is created or discovered.

How much does understanding enhance experience? — Pantagruel

The "understanding" of the ancients is pleasant to contemplate, but largely eclipsed by what has been discovered in recent times. Understanding is debatable.

As for answering as a human being, I got very little out of philosophy until I read Sartre and found I was an existentialist.

Good thread. :up:

When you are reading it, do you feel you are contributing? — Pantagruel

More so when you write or speak it I suspect. Where does philosophy drift into reflection and, in the sciences, speculation? Are there lines of demarcation?

How much more can one learn by reading and rereading works produced hundreds if not thousands of years ago? At least the thread on agential reality has a freshening quality.

Barad explains that this has not been lost - it’s just not what Newton (or even Einstein) assumed it was. Rather, it’s relation all the way down — Possibility

Succinct. But merely a curiosity in physics and math. Perhaps most meaningful in sociological settings.

Regarding teaching of math Barad and others speak of removing or blunting "sharp edges" of definitions and concepts to enable students "entanglement" with the subject.

Sound familiar? Exactly what happens here on TPF when math pops up.

On the other hand this happens frequently amongst professional mathematicians. It's one way the subject advances.