Science Notes

ZZ 67, Magic, philosophy, science. Philosophy of science should perhaps make clear the distinction between magic and science as enunciated by Frazer. Not so as completely to reject magic, but to assign it its proper place.

YY 172, Payne Knight. With the loss of understanding of true religion comes distorted science. Geocentrism. Heliocentrism as I see it, especially when expanded into Bruno’s infinite worlds.
Geocentricism involves a certain limitation of perspective and tolerance. Payne Knight, we could say, produces an alternative conception of the perennial philosophy.

XX 345, Bourgeois science, i.e. truth and enlightenment, denied by those who feel the strength of some particular passion (envy and resentment). Instead they set up proletarian science, or some alternative body of “truth” (Lysenko, Horbiger etc) While one may find that for all purposes except for appeasing resentment proletarian science and psychology is an inferior instrument

AD 41, Weininger His dismissal of science is too cavalier, and of the analytical or empirical mode of thought.

251, Science worship. Behaviourism, logical positivism. The authoritarianism in it. Something like logical positivism may superficially seem emancipating. Ayer was kind of atheist. The prestige of science is obviously and justifiably very great. but it can be sued in a nihilistic authoritarian way, supporting crude dogmatism by denying any meaning to the attempt to criticise it or set up alternative positions.

VV 14, Einstein and Mach. Mach makes Einstein more intelligible. But there is a way in which Einstein is taught which is offensively paradoxical.
Eddington’s science. Aristotle’s science. Newton’s.

64, Sympathy with Winch’s attack on sociology. Of course, similar attacks have been made on scientific explanation in general, saying that it does not get to the real root of things,, that it misses the nature of reality.
As far as the physical sciences go I am doubtful of the value of such criticisms. But the social sciences are a different case.
One feels people are trying to measure what ought not perhaps to be measured.
Of course it is true that science is inevitably about the measurable.; it extracts what it can out of a mass of possible material. To what object? Making predictions? Is not there a suspicion that it is somehow sinister and arrogant?
Is it not the illusion of explanation it gives that is so sinister? It bestows and illusion of superior knowledge.
It reduces the individual to a statistical phenomenon. Etc etc AJ 356, Different aims of philosophy. Scientific, anti scientific, religious. Bradley, Russell, Descartes, Bacon, Wittgenstein. Scientifically orientated philosophies, following seventeenth century manifestos, all the way down to modern scientific philosophies, such as those concerned to incorporate the latest ideas in physics into philosophy.

UU 94, Modern science too has lost something when compared with certain older systems of thought. the irreligion is not noble and pagan. It is Christian irreligion the ideological ultimate man. Christian humility without the Christian hopes. AW 290, Scientism. The idea of actually replacing religion with science. Transferring religious emotions onto scientific objects.. this appalling project, but perhaps sympathetic to those who have had a scientific education. Perhaps for all its crudity many scientist are led to feel like this. Rationalism as a fantasy of power.. Why Dawkins so upset about religion? Because he has his won religion, . he wants not simply to kill religion and fill the gap with some scientific principles. He feels he has the truth. This is like being inspired by the truths of higher mathematics.

296, Reichenbach on Botzmann. Fascinating, entropy, irreversibility hypothesis.

312, Science demands to cover the whole of nature. Is science opposed to religion? It need not be. Religious thought is varied and creative. The trouble is the faith. Christianity requires a bit of nature for itself. BC 80 Scientific discoveries and the consolidation of orthodoxies. Scientific speculation in the 19th century, like Christianity before Chalcedon.

Entropy, with any motion energy is lost in the form of heat, which means the motion of tiny particle.This motion itself we imagine as losing some energy in the same way, and so ad infinitum.. the ultimate medium not exactly conceivable by this method, we may conceive as the real cause of all the motion in the universe,. And in another sense we might imagine this as will. Suffering unselfish will. Hinton etc WW 148, Powers book (Philosophy And The New Physics) was compulsive enough but disappointing. Too much physics, straight exposition, not done as well as Eddington, and far less philosophy than promised. In any philosophical treatment the oddness of Einstein’s concept of time should be more thoroughly explored. What is the connection of this with the commonsense a priori time? Shield these two concepts be covered by the same word? I can appreciate the breathless fascination of such books as having explained just about what Einstein, Bohr or someone meant at some particular point. one rushes on to the next bizarre and paradoxical teaching. But the intellectual fascination of such ideas, and the intellectual gymnastics they involve ( like the Athanasian creed) are no substitute for detailed philosophical analysis and dissection which is necessary at every point. Some of the most interesting philosophical issues are skimmed over far too lightly.
The question of whether it can be understood is not quite the same as to whether it makes sense and if so what kind of sense it makes.
Minowskis time diagrams are brilliantly explained by Eddington. I had difficult try with powers. Interesting in that he talks of 19th century ether scientist of which presumably Sidney Klein might be one. Interesting on Newton. Too respectful of scientists. I feel I wouldn’t like to have studied science. I would have strongly disliked much of its authoritarian procedure, what one might even call its corruption of thinking. One is forced to acquiesce in violating of logic. While logical reconciliation is possible is generally not treated as necessary.
Must explore further Kuhn’s scenic revolutions.
I hold that einsteinian time is simply not the same as ordinary time and that to say that it is nonsensical.. einsteinian times links together various phenomena and concepts in a way that the ordinary concept does not do. And is therefore presumably more scientifically useful but that is all. To say that einsteinian time is real and the other not is either false or senseless.
The ordinary concept of time is a simple thing like numbers 1 2 3 . Space, non Euclidean space. The terrible illusion is to believe that these new concepts are somehow corrections of our old ones.
Time and space are logical simples, settled by convention. Within time and space things happen and they can be shown to be related in accordance with Einstienian concepts that are different from time and space in this sense. I am not being obscurantist in this. We may choose our frame of interaction, traditional time and space or einsteinian time and space. If we stick to the former, there is not need to expect to run into paradoxes. Reality may appear very complex, we will not be able to run different phenomena together as effectively as Einstein doe, but all paradoxes arise in our terminology. It all depends on what you count as a satisfactory explanation. If you need ordinary time and space Einstein is not satisfactory if you are happy with his substitutions then he is.
To say that we are living in a non Euclidean universe, dies that make proper sense? Or is it a false assumption? there is a False element in it. It is false if it implies that we mare logically or scientifically compelled to reject Euclidean space and only think about einsteinian space. We are living in non Euclidean space rather than Euclidean space, what does it mean> Einstienian space links up observations and phenomena more effectively and economically than Euclidean space so what? Does this mean Einstienian space is real and so called Euclidean space unreal? But the concept of so called Euclidean space is not something that involves falsifiable predictions, How could it be real or unreal?
The concept we are living in non Euclidean space” may be useful in helping one to understand Einstienian relatedness.
Einstein says things behave in such and such a way. Nothing wrong in taking about geometry, it produces concepts which bring out interesting useful fascinating connections and relations.
But this is no reason for asking us to scrap or even modify our commonsense view of space and time.
Einsteinians falsely lay claim to an extra level of explanatory power. By trying to coalesce their special concepts of time and space into the everyday concepts. scenic understanding becomes a kind of mystery initiation. You have to jettison your most basic concepts of meaning. There’s a threat here, a sleight of hand. There is a natural demand for an explanation involving the traditional concepts. How much the more effective if one can eliminate the traditional concepts, make us unlearn them and replace them by the new concepts. Which work so neatly. Initiation programme not of logical argument but of unlearning. You unlearn your original demand.
AE 16, One might suggest that the authority of the church in the middle ages was rather like that of Einstein and higher physics today. The courage then to repudiate scholastic must have been quite considerable, a vast body of civilised knowledge was being attacked, Imagine someone today trying to repudiate Einstein from a position of relative ignorance.
Einstein, they say, got the bomb and got us to the moon. His ideas are supposed to have great practical consequences. Could not the church have said as much in the middle ages? Did it not have charge of all the sciences such as they were?

40, I am sure Russell understood Einstein quite well. But Russell is a good stylist and to an extent a popularise. Certain points of style recall contemporaries such as Shaw and Crowley. A certain didacticism, a faith in educating the layman.
The didactic mode can be quite a pleasing mode to apply. Russell’s book on relativity is well written, a good book of its sort. It presupposes a type of reader whom one proposes to influence by means of thought. Etc etc

270, Schopenhauer’s criticism of modern science, Of modern atomism, which he traces back to Condillac. One understands how many of the fundamental assumptions of modern science have been proved right, and how many have just become part of the language through force of habit.

298, Nature of a science museum, Much of what is in here is of as much aesthetic interest as the exhibits in the v and a. Is there paradox here? Schopenhauer’s aesthetic comes in useful what we contemplate is the form of the will, One could say I take anti-scientific contemplative interest. In the worlds of science, the value of it is in the feeling of resistance overcome.. the delight of discovery is one of t triumph of the will. This is something of permanent value insofar as it is preserve dim memory. The form of the will. This is an aesthetic phenomenon. AF 344, Hawking’s book. Much better read than most of these popularises. of course I have a lot of reservations. The use of he uncertainty Principe to conjure up something out of nothing is decidedly metaphysical. It seems that the uncertainty principle is central to modern science. Precisely what status is such a law supposed to have? Is this the great fundamental god given law? But why this? Its power to generate seems positively kabbalistic. When he talks of “imaginary time” is not this idea perhaps simpler than he make sit sound. IN his talk on entropy as the arrow of time, he does not mention Boltzmann.
But it is all very interesting & I defend the right of physicists to talk like that. Such physics is interesting and exciting, but if one day it might become too complicated for anyone to grasp. AI 165, the Back Death. Scientific theories about corruption of the air. Primitive science one might say. Qualities of things classified in a way that relates to human emotions. Like Boehme, the kabbalah, Hegel. AK 99, Science of slave morality. Science is not only a product of master morality, it may serve a conformist or servile outlook.. Need for suspicion of he sociological perspective. It seems to usurp the function of philosophy. Its claims that it is uniquely modern perspective. Sidestepping the need for Socratic dialogue. Introduction of a dogmatic element.

211, Greek idea of science so clearly different from our own. Plato was perhaps just not interested in the sort of psychological understanding we are interested in. He had no desire for that kind of enlightenment. It was not part of his programme so it is possible that he was not in error. One reason for this may have been the institution of slavery. Oppression denial of rights may have seemed to be simply the law of life. ….His theory of knowledge does not have to be universally acceptable. Even though he probably did more than anyone else to create the demand for the universalisable, he does not appeal to it. In this respect he is still half oriental world of prophets and revelations. Reading Plato see how knowledge & the concept of knowledge had to advance beyond Plato. How a doctrine has to be universally persuasive. Pleasure of tyranny being no longer possible….true knowledge rather than an egotistical opinion one desires to impose upon others for ones own satisfaction….what was not fully developed in P. & what he helped to develop. A community of truth seekers….

214 Will to power, every ecologically possible position will find an occupant. This is the foundation of the possible of knowledge. Even on Popper’s test, falsification comes about only through the existence of a will to falsify. Such is hardly an abstract will to truth. Can one even make sense of such a thing? Is it an intelligible motive?
The truth of motives is the will to power.
Truth is the universalisable possibility of agreement.

241, Plato in Laws, His contempt for the wildness of the young. The anarchic insistences of youth. Alcibiades. Apply to the rock culture of the late sixties. That ideal of individual freedom with its claim to validity, He dismisses that claim absolutely from the viewpoint of age.. the views of the young are like those of children, not to be taken seriously.
He does not respect the other point of view. A terrifying tyranny, What I wrote about Nietzsche and freedom of argument.. this applies to Plato well enough, but in but in Plato argument is too unrestrained. This great mental energy, this philosophers will to power,, has no check on it. find the checks you have the beginnings of scientific enterprise, as with Aristotle.

AM 115 Suggestion I find from Ryle that a logic can be found for any belief. Basic implication of Wittgenstein, one way of looking at it. From this, the need to repel ideas that are self defeating and threatening. Proposed ways of dealing with this. . 1 arbitrary convention. 2 some kind of linkage to what has to be agreed. The trouble with positions like Kuhn's (1922 –1996)is that they are insufficiently philosophical. Argument cannot cease. Reader and writer are closely involved, they each have a position. I must argue that my position should have a hold on you. Absurdity of rejecting a concept of truth. Even the humility of not venturing a truth claim. Philosophy is not science, it is not that it is less complex, rather that it is more fundamental. Persuasion is not a question of tricks, it must seem inevitable. It must relate to the indisputable, not to some questionable theory that may or may not be accepted., its antithesis being no less plausible. There is no room for free choice. If there were, then that there is free choice would be the determinate fact. To rest content with any gulf of disagreement is ultimately unphilosophical. Philosophical theories are not hypotheses to be picked according to taste. AN 220, Haeckel on ether as positive demonstrated fact.

358, Comparing science to religion and myth. The creation of science, the original discoveries are greater than the creations of religions and myths. But the effects are far less inspiring of living in the scientific framework rather than the mythical. the opportunities f life opened out are so much the less. Except in the way of wealth.. where creation is the really worthwhile thing, the real worthwhile opportunity. FF 186, G J Whitrow on the nature of time. In many ways a unsatisfactory little book. From his discussion of Kant, which I can understand, he falls gravely short of logical rigour. One must always be suspicious of scientists who claim to solve age old questions of philosophy. They try to lead us into paradoxes where we are too ill equipped to follow. The scientist, not being a philosopher, and satisfied with confusions which nevertheless bring the sense of power associated with scientific knowledge, is content to present his paradoxes without the feeling of pain contradiction of which haggle speaks. He often turns “time” into a special concept as if startling new discoveries have been made about “time” as normally understood. It is possibly unsatisfactory that science should be left in its present state, a kind of super laputa where we are supposedly compelled by the weight of scientific authority to accept paradox, something encouraged by science fiction habits of being thrilled by certain partially understood disturbances of logical category.

225&, Science is mathematics as applied to qualities, Newton’s science as dealt with by Hume made certain unwarrantable assumption, notably that the concept of a cause was self explanatory. And there was light. But what is a cause but an observed regularity. RR 19, ant Darwinism, cladisitics. Structuralism in biology Break up of the unity of science. Some disturbing signs. What science all boils down to is what we are to count as an explanation. “biological field theories” would let too much in. BA 80, Bacon. Locke, modern science. Vienna circle. Answers to the ultimate questions, where to look? Modern science does leave open a lot of problems. It does not have answers, with mere technique and a built in facile optimism. Heidegger, Nietzsche.

141, A religious perspective does not or will not simply go away because of its dissonance with view of scientific rationality,.. It will make itself deeper, subtler.
Scientific rationality is just one form of elitism It does not satisfy everyone’s desire for power, often it suppresses it.

AT 220, projecting this onto nature, that nature is not to be trusted to produce a desirable progressive result. The Darwinian school tended to take it that it did.
Malthus the pessimist.
To trust scientists is as bad as tot trust nature,
That there is a substantial field in which we may take the invisible hand as working,
Malthus and Adam smith
That get the basic right and egoism may be given free range.
But these conditions are not satisfied by a free for all struggle for power, or the authority of a committee of experts.

301, Hawking lecture at the institute of education

BE 162 Open questions and philosophical doubt,. Certain matters are not open questions.. suspension of belief.. Open questions and how to resolve the, the scientific attitude. The scientific suspension of all belief.. the solution is not a case of producing empirical evidence, but of overcoming the distorting factors, demonstrating the lies.
Scientific rationalism comes across as itself a strange ideology. Attempting to abolish metaphysics, it is like something driven by a strange metaphysic. Rather than asserting strange dogmas, it denies swathes of what might pass for normal commonsense,. A strange abscising ideology A cult AH 249, Scientific philosophy of life. Pure research.. the idea that it is good for mankind, dubious and irrelevant. Obviously it has its uses, but really it is an extremely aristocratic pursuit.. I would call it pagan in that it offers complete intellectual and emotional, that is to say spiritual, satisfaction. The joy in discovery.. benefit to mankind is not the primary consideration. A 63, Spengler and Goethean science.

142, futurists, their position was plain, they were extremists and did not pretend to be scientists of metaphysical philosophers.
Science. People feel drawn to accept the truth of Freud because they feel convinced by it, it seems it must be true, even though it might not meet up to strict c=scientific criteria. Freudian same boat as religion AP 45, Mobius. Idea of a standard that is a statistical average.. this scientific contribution to the democratic obsession.

117, Crowley’s rational scepticism. Far from being a creature of mere superstition. Scientific rationalism was art of his mental baggage. It has a place, Everything in its place. AS 46, GM future. Science as going, as having gone too far. Some article in the observer last Sunday full of praise for science, saying that we are the great age of science, that science speaks to us today as once did Raphael and Shakespeare.. this scientism. Analyse why science is supposed to be so wonderful. The article spoke of the beauty of science. Think what Wittgenstein said on the dubious beauty of mathematics. Or even Coleridge’s response to Wordsworth in dejection.. the scientific project contains a number of different strains. What is so great about science? This atheistic project.
Science is not nature, certainly, certainly not Wordsworthian nature. Someone like Dawkins who make such a big deal about atheism has a childlike faith in beauty and goodness that sound theistic. Why should we trust in progress?
There is technology. Idea of expanding the human lifespan to 130 years.
Scientific achievements like elimination of tb and smallpox. Those we praise but we must get al our reasons precisely clear. Etc etc

68, essential irrelevance of scientific progress to the really important thing, what there really is to be got out of life. Scientific progress creates an illusion that the really important progress is being achieved.. so how are we to combat such scientism?

74, the scientist and his crude rationalism. Identification with this as a form of power. Gottfriedn Wagner and this identification with Jews.

Berdyaev. Writing on socialism and anarchism. anarchism as springing from want and deprivation. anarchism in that sense is hardly a serious issue. This idea of some flaw in renaissance humanism. His historical scheme is not unattractive, but I suspect it is dishonest.

Prince Charles attacking gm food. Scientific confidence in the ability of man to solve his problems. Philosophical objections to this

Berdyaev. His philosophy actually quite good. He seeing the moral bankruptcy of socialism and anarchism as rooted in the humanism of the renaissance and I can see there might be something in that. AQ 84 Richard Dawkins on tv. Now I understand why I dislike him, and that I am justified to do so. His Oxford smugness. Punting along the river with his wife who illustrates his book of which he is so pound. As if all this happiness is given him by science rather than his oxford privilege.. the extraordinary elitism of he scientific philosophy. He lacks insight, Dawkins the militant atheist preaching the joy of science that he simply cannot see springs simply from his privileged position.. teaching a class of children about the vat spans of prehistoric time. Trying to make us wonder at man’s insignificance.. But so what? What’s a billion years of empty time?. What is its vastness, A human construction no doubt. Etc etc

195 Hinton’s scientifique romances. Something admirable about this popular science of 100 years ago. Idea of the absolute, relating to Bradley et al.. see how in a way Einstein put paid to that kind of popular understanding.. so much authority in it,. One might explore a power motive that is not directly derived from pure science.

AR 36 Schiller on Mobius. …who accepted that degeneration was s deviation from a standard that could only be statistical. His pathographies.

111 Recall a reference to table turning in Lombroso’s men of genius in which he says he might be wrong in dismissing it. He died a spiritualist.. se how little incidental ideas can grow into enormous ones.

AV 55 This other idea of religion, like religion as esotericism. The view of religion primarily as morality, a product of our own rebellious protestant sprit.. the coercive aspect is something we resist. And we want the whole of history and nature to be covered by our scientific principles we don’t want top spare any bit for miracle.

The inventors of religion always thought we might spare them a bit, just a fragment of reality, where miracle and imagination might rule. In the past this might not have mattered much. A rational scientific outlook as no doubt acknowledged as very useful, but it would have been thought greedy for it to demand the whole of reality, leaving no place for the myths with religion wants to employ to stimulate other aspects of our nature.

HH 67 Paracelsus, forerunner of Bacon in one sense, that of fieldwork as we may perhaps call it, as distinct from scholastic speculation. Much of his work came form the systematisation not so much of facts, but of beliefs, which he found in all kinds of unlikely places. Thus he records popular ideas about witches as if they were facts, but he systematises the,
He finds relations not so much between hard material facts as between the psychic movements of magic, those thoughts which express the relation between man’s wishes and the world, fantasy as it were. He uses a vast database of free floating fantasy as found in popular magic and superstition, and reaches a kind of scientific religion. The magical texts of the middle ages were crude, the renaissance refined them His evidence was not so much facts as beliefs, his system one to coordinate these beliefs. Thus a science which allows for the soul of man which allows it freedom in all its movements.

183 American scientists close to discovering the elixir of life.

231 scientific explanation is ultimately concerned with the resolution of perplexity, so how can it ignore the religious and ethical problems that inevitably obsess the whole man?
Why did I not choose science? Because of the very great difficulty of doing any momentously original work at the present time. I agree with much of what Feyerabend had to say. It is not uncommon to find children who can pursue certain forms of intellectual activity to perfection, chess and mathematical prodigies, children with a good understanding of Einstein. The understanding of modern science is not itself a proof of real mental superiority. IN a way there is something curiously worthless about it unless it is properly integrated with a philosophy of life, etc etc.

Science is attacked today from an ecological standpoint, which is a complete red herring. Science must not simply be constrained, it must be integrated into a more complete cultural framework.

227 Skinner

239 time light gravity last judgement

AX 3 Science education, complaints of not enough scientists. Education boringness of science. Geekiness.culutre of scientists. Crazy beliefs some of the entertain, science fiction. Pushing children towards science because the country needs scientists maybe to deprive them of a more satisfying form of culture. Bad arguments will only be rejected when there I a strong motive for rejecting them, a clear discontent with the second rate.

41 Nietzschean thought does not presuppose or demand the establishment of scientific enlightenment to make sense. On his principles a scientific atheism or materialism may be a good or desirable development but it is not a sine qua non of understanding or accepting him.
What happened with Hellenism. Irruption o Persian and Egyptian culture.

50 in the hunt for truth the committed may have interesting perspectives even if they are lying perspectives. How do we identify lying ultimately? The question is much to do with science and the growth of science. There are standards of truth that derive form science.. then think how the movement in science and the movement in art may be essentially the same thing.

QQ 121 renaissance scientist, like Paracelsus, as accepting any story, however bizarre, and seeking an explanation for it, i.e. making the explanation fit the story rather than vice versa.

B 109 Remy de Gourmont. “The pathology of love is a Hell of which the gate must never be opened”, Physique de L’amour. A new science on new philosophical principles. Sexual perversion must not be analysed solely in the light of normality. In many cases it represents and argument against that normality.

C 61 Reading Joseph Needham’s book on Chinese science. The Great Titration, It is in many respects interesting, but in others repellent. It reflects the limited sensibility of a modern scientist. The limited sensibility, or philistinism, reflects an all consuming passion for scientific theory and fact, an obsession which on a lower levels manifested by the “mechanical mind”, Everything is subordinated to the requirements of science, consequently historical pictures emerge which are depressingly concentrated upon one narrow sphere of human activity,. Scientists are of course not content to restrict themselves to theory own spheres, believing in the extension of science as they conceive it to everything sphere of human activity, they form political theories based on their own very narrow conception of mankind. They often make good Marxists. Apparently many of the communist fellow travellers of the 30s were attracted to Stalinism the enlightenment idea; of dictatorship by scientifically educated class of benevolent despots. A pseudo rational form of society.

F 57 Scientists overlooking questions of value

CC 70 To understand the nature of the idea of scientific explanation go back to Pythagoras. “an orderly system. A mathematical pattern. This is what counts as an explanation. Aristotelian science has essentially the same basis. Different forms of poetic metre, syllabic, accentual, alliterative. different categories of musical pattern, melodic, rhythmic etc. different forms of scientific explanation. What is an explanation? Substance, James’ neutral monism. Language games logical categories. Scientific explanations patterns of words. Predictive element in sconce, result of discovering patterns. Hume quite right on the explanatory force of the concept of causation. Perhaps we tend to subsume it in our minds under the law of identity. Different forms of scientific explanation. Mechanical physics, Freudian psychodynamics, Aristotelian scholasticism. The discovery of different patterns leading us on to new things of the same type or category, not an absolute and total deduction. Kant wrongness about eh necessity of and universality of the concept of causation.

II 174 Einstein and commonsense. Michelson Morley. Light, potential light perhaps takes no time to travel. What we perceive as light is something we can only perceive in a given mediums, as travelling at a given speed. At different relative speeds it is different light that is being perceived.. search for analogies. At a different speed the beam of light I saw before had become imperceptible to me., just as one man’s rainbow is imperceptible to another, who sees one of his own,. Why should light be perceptible only under the form of a certain speed?
Forms of communication which take no time. Telepathy.
It is hard to imagine light, or anything travelling instantaneously Imagine a cataclysmic explosion at the centre of the universe. That would take time before we could perceive it, time before we could se it and also time before we cold feel it. experience it. the tactile as well as the visible takes time. by altering my speed relative to a light source can get significantly closer to that source.

PP 106 How important mathematics and mathematical reasoning have been for philosophy. Why was I never taught other ways of expressing pi than the seemingly random decimal?

Vico on mathematics.

144 Compare Levi Strauss style of anthropology with j g Frazer. Is Levi Strauss altogether an advance? Or does he, for example effete a judaising of ancient Greek culture? can we say that he resents the influence of Marx, as against Nietzsche? This cultural relativism as a way of repudiating Nietzsche? Evolution of western culture. The aristocratic principle. The life and education of he gentleman. The idea that we can do away with gentlemen and the aristocratic ideal., Jews as capitalists and as communists, opposed to this ideal. This ideal maintains a certain conception f what is most desirable in life. In itself this acts as a guiding and inspirational principle in science and scholarship

DD 1 Idea that science might actually be able to provide a means of reversing decline. Science has shown the construction of the world to be surprisingly simple, so far as it has been able to reach and much that was supposed undirigeable has been fathomed and directed.

10 Pure science isolates the knower from the known. Perhaps the ancient Egyptians really knew more than we do, more about states of mind and their place on as spiritual map, more about such things as the form of the object of all striving. A personal relationship with the forces of nature, and emotionally satisfying understanding of the cosmos. The next stage is Pythagoras’ efforts at understanding the same intellectually.

58 Esoteric science. The appalling psychological repression to which we are now subject, that happiness of none. The important thing is to break through this repression, to develop our latent faculties without smashing ourselves sup in the process.

NN 185 Think of all the ingenious cosmologies before Newton. the superiority of Newton was merely predictive power, there is simply no other way of assessing the truth of a theory,. Intrinsic plausibility just will not do. The abstractions, the constructs that may be made, whether they correspond to realities or not, is a metaphysical i.e. a chimerical question. It is not possible to tell a priori which of our abstractions seem to stand for forces which have real, i.e. measurable effects.
Natural scientists, the abstract, I tend to dislike, modern ones that it, because their time is spent taking all kinds of ideas and theories on authority. They a re certain that electrons exist because it is part of the great scientific tradition

186& the occult order integrates very well with the “natural” order. What about electivity integrating with the laws of physics? Lightning, magnetism. Static, fringe phenomena that no one suspected might contradict Newton.
Why then it is asked can’t occult science duplicative natural science? Why are not its results publicly repeatable? Because they are wholly concerned with and relative to the individual and his will etc etc

JJ 50 If the sciences in the meddle ages were all the handmaidens of theology, the sciences today are all the handmaidens of mathematics.. Mathematics gives our criterion of rightness. Art is something largely outside the conscious will of the artist, a language to express what has to be expressed. The philosopher is a being cold and abstracted, often he is inhuman. He is like the mathematician in that he deals with abstractions. The philosopher is not really to be thought of as slave of the truth in the way that nay authentic artist must be. He is the juggler in the Tarot pack, he makes the intangible manipulability.
When he seems to impoverish the world, he is merely condensing it, and when his abstractions are unpacked we have a new range of intangibles.

137 selfish gene

OO 194 No a priori science. Take economics. Why it is not yet an accurate science,. The data on which it makes its generalisation s is not yet large enough and admits of differing interpretations.
Wittgenstein’s examples of numerical sequence. There appears to be contingency in the structure of nature. There is no way of knowing how the first six terms of the example will progress when it gets into treble figures.. on et sub atomic level perhaps all might be in principle predictable but then how to deduce form one category of speech to another? We think there are so many brilliant people working on economics, surely they can find our something for definite. But perhaps until there is more data i.e. more historical examples of long term capitalist and socialist economic policies, there is no way, however intelligent they are, that the experts can discover for certain the true economic relations that subsist.

GG **
53** “as opposed to its immediate predecessor late 20th century science has given up al philosophical pretensions and has become a powerful business that shapes the mentality of its practitioners. Good payment, good stranding with the boss and the colleagues in their “unit” are the chief aims of these human ants who excel in the solution of tiny problems but cannot make sense of anything transcending their domain of competence..

I still think there is a place for the kind of Popperian analysis that he attacks. It is to do not with a criticism of scientific procedures, no even with their justification, but with a formal logical description of the meaning of scientific statements. A ground for their logical acceptability.

97 After Galileo the movement of philosophy was to place reality as something utterly independent of any observation of it. Ordinary language as resuscitated by Austin and Wittgenstein could not convey this direct simple independent quality of reality.

268 Theories of relativity. Magic. Perhaps the area of reality, truth in the immediate environment is affected by the will to some extent, as by gravitational force. Perhaps that would explain Rhine’s experiments.

EE 69 pseudo science, often a means of reacting to sets of phenomena as much as, or rather than scientific theories. thus perhaps we may see all kinds of historical theories, Spenglerian, the progress theory the retrogression theory as all equally applicable according to the purpose required.

74 ancient Egyptian science, concerned to establish a relationship with the outside world. Aristotelian science of qualities similarly a science of total sensual participation, with something like “correspondences”.

115 Capra’s book, most illuminating on physics, weak on oriental mysticism. N study of western philosophers, no mention of Kant. Mysticism has been linked up with science before and farmer effectively as by Sidney Klein in science and the infinite.. Looking into atomic physics for the ultimate truth of things is fatal.

136 science museum poetry by computer an alarming prospect the drift into senselessness Science itself as a body of knowledge. Why are the young repelled by scientific causes? Because it is presented as a mere body of facts, the idea behind them is missing. It is a second rate disposition that delights in the what without the wherefore.. before the wonders of science eon is expected to be humble, it is the scientist who know it all. Science is detached form idea. Inculcation of servile disposition, what without the why.

MM 43 Why does modern sociology condemn the Victorian anthropologists? They are attacked for what is considered to be their cultural arrogance., their belief in progress.. I do not altogether believe in absolute progress but |I do believe in higher and lower. to disbelieve in higher and lower its to refuse aspire, to believe that life is essentially all right as it is. This is very remote form the viewpoint of the savage, it is a sophisticated form of modern decadence. It despises all assumptions of superiority its only ground for this is the denial that there is such a thing as superiority and such doctrine must surely come form the illusion of contentment with ordinary life,.
Last man blinks

BF 5 Enlightenment principles were discovered, but they were fought against and resisted.. ground zero is a state of doubt. Rather than getting on with filling out enlightenment we keep having to fight new forms of superstition. Is philosophy just this battle? It is as if nothing is known. But it is. Our culture, the crassness of science, the limitation of a scientific education. Forms of enlightenment, moral political, mystical.

154 Berkeley's Siris. Fascinating work for the early days of modern science. Speculating free, not like the received bodies of knowledge a scientific education gives today. The atmosphere as a living thing. Scents as spirits.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License