Logicomix, An Epic Search For Truth
By Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna
I have enjoyed comics since I was a child, when, fascinated and entranced by Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, I argued heatedly with my friends, who all preferred Asterix.
I still read Tintin occasionally, and I enjoy more consciously grown-up graphic novels, but I never thought I’d be treated to a comic-book account of Bertrand Russell’s quest to establish the foundations of mathematics. The idea of such a book is incredible, yet here it is, a story told passionately and illustrated beautifully, which does justice to the men and their ideas. And they’re all in here: Frege, Hilbert, Cantor, Gödel and Wittgenstein….
Read the rest on my philsophy … read on »
Archive for the ‘ideas’ category…
Certainly Not My Kind of Book
Oddly for someone whose political affiliations have always lain in the left tradition, I’m more and more fascinated by, and attracted to, the philosophy of Roger Scruton, who is a conservative. I find his manner of setting forth arguments – both in writing and on television – to be irresistible. It’s somehow both gentle and passionate. But it’s more than that: I really do agree with many of his ideas.
Anyway, I was looking at Mark Dooley’s biography of Scruton on Amazon and noticed this 5-star review:
This certainly is not my kind of book. It is a Christmas present for which I was asked so clearly it IS the kind of book enjoyed by the person who asked for it.
Everyone a Philosopher King
There’s an old adage that wanting to become a politician should disqualify you from becoming one. I just found it in Plato’s Republic, Book 7 520-521. Perhaps that’s where it comes from?
The state whose rulers come to their duties with least enthusiasm is bound to have the best and most tranquil government, and the state whose rulers are eager to rule is worst.
For Plato this means that rulers must be philosophers: those who have attained the knowledge of the absolute Good, which resides in the heavenly realm of eternal fixed forms of which the so-called real world that we live in is but a poor reflection. These philosophers, as well as being more just, wise and good than others owing … read on »
The Resources of The World Are Limitless
I struggled to come up with a web development angle for this one. I had a brief hope of executing some dazzling metaphorical sleight of hand when I read Thomas DeGregori’s discussion of the “usability” of rocks among proto-humans, but in the end I gave up and decided just to roll with it…
The world’s resources are limitless. I’m not joking. In a world of finite materials – and a finite 88 keys on a piano – resources are no more limited than are melodies and harmonies. Even if we stick to the Western musical scale, we will never run out of tunes. This is because tunes are not raw materials, somehow just there, waiting to be discovered: they come into … read on »
Fear and Trembling
It is facile to mock or criticize philosophy for its difficult language, and I like to think I’m not a facile thinker, but I had an “oh sod this” moment while reading Kierkegaard this morning. The obscure, tangled, repetitive and willfully paradoxical language is just tedious – at least, so it strikes me so far. I know a little bit about philosophy: I’ve read some Plato, Hume, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and recently Roger Scruton. So I can be quite confident that my repugnance is not a knee-jerk reaction to difficult arguments. I don’t know, perhaps it just isn’t to my taste. Like Nietzsche, it is rhetorical and poetical rather than clear and elegant. I suppose that you can find truth, … read on »
Chemicals and Complexes
As I wrote in the last post, I’m a tangle of complexes. Why didn’t I know this before? Lately I’ve been examining how my own self-awareness has changed over the years. I suppose you could call this self-awareness-awareness.
For years I would sometimes have bad moods of a particular kind, and during those moods my thoughts would turn to violence. Sometimes while walking in town on my way to or from work I would slip into a self-righteous rage, but lacking a very good reason for it I would fantasize about people offending me more than anyone in fact was doing, and about what I would do to them if this happened (normally involving a beating of some kind, but nothing … read on »
In Praise of Argument
I’m argumentative, it’s true. Is that bad? I can’t resist taking a stand, taking sides and making a case. So, in that tradition, in this post I’m going to make a case for argument itself, because I feel it’s under threat. Actually, I feel a rant coming on, rather than a reasoned argument. So be it…
I’ve got into trouble for my argumentative reactions to the statements of others. I might say “nonsense!” or “no, that’s not the way things are at all,” and then I’m criticized for my arrogance. Apparently I should have said “my humble opinion is – and you don’t have to believe it, because it’s just my humble opinion, I mean, what do I know really? and … read on »
The Great Man-Made River Project and Libyan Democracy
I listened to a Radio 4 programme on the Great Man-Made River project in Libya. For the moment at least, you can listen to it here. It’s the mother of all water engineering projects, and as I’ve said before in this blog, I have an odd fascination with this kind of thing. Apart from anything else the project is beautifully simple, audacious and progressive. According to Unesco it’s the largest engineering scheme currently being carried out in the world, and it has also been described as the eighth wonder of the world. From where I sit in mean little Britain, which made such a cynical fuss about the Channel Tunnel and the Scottish Parliament building, it’s very inspiring.
In the sixties, … read on »
Anniversary of The Slave Trade Act, 1807
March 25th is the 200th anniversary of the Slave Trade Act, “An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade”, the Act of Parliament which outlawed the trading of slaves. It was the first of three Slave Trade Acts, and slavery was actually abolished only with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. The Central Office of Information says:
“Although it would be another 30 years before slaves gained their final freedom – when slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire – the Bicentenary in 2007 gives the opportunity to remember the millions who suffered; to pay tribute to the courage and moral conviction of all those – black and white – who campaigned for abolition; and to demand to know why today, … read on »
Russell, Proust and Peake
Reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy I’m struck by his intellectual generosity and fairness. He goes out of his way to extract the best from all kinds of ideas, including those that are easily rejected in the modern era, in the light of science. The book is a classic but it is widely criticized for its treatment of certain philosophers.
[Russell] treats Nietzsche with supreme cruelty as Nietzsche was a thinker that broke from the Enlightenment tradition and refused to play with numbers.
Russell’s bias and his dismissive treatment of philosophers that he does not agree with.
(Reviews at Amazon.com)
On the one hand it is obtuse not to see the (non-causal) connection between Nietzsche and Hitler, and on the other hand it … read on »
©2010 Alistair Robinson