Keith Hudson wrote:
At 09:40 30/11/2003 -0500, you wrote:[snip]
Well, Charles Murray proposes an answer anent the classical Greeks
in today's NYT Week in Review: The invention of formal deductive
logic turned the classical Greeks' heads away from empirical
praxis [he probably would not use that word!] to abstracted
speculative deduction.
I can't see where Charles Murray has mentioned this,
I am simply paraphrasing from today's NYT Wek in Review, pp.WK1,WK3,
which I am sure in on their website.
> but if he's saying
that the Greeks were not practical people then I'm afraid he's quite wrong. He's believing in the usual myth. The Greeks developed some enormously intricate machinery -- steam driven toys, archimedes screw, cantilevered cranes, a navigator's guide to the planets with many gear wheels and highly accurate, Greek fire (they probably weren't far off developing explosive missiles either), etc. They probably developed as much technnology as they needed to, given their circumstances. They were principally traders and, as above, had developed superb navigation equipment. They were also suberb craftsmen in bronze and developed many advanced building techniques. But the period of their intellectual/technological development was relatively very short -- a few centuries at the most. If they had not been overcome by the Roman Empire and had extended their holdings into new sorts of terrain with different potentials, then I've little doubt that they would have developed many other practical things, as the Chinese did.
I certainly am not educate din this area, but my impression of "the
clasical Greeks" includes the Hellen*istic* period.
I have previously mentioned the "Antikythera mechanism"
http://www.giant.net.au/users/rupert/kythera/kythera3.htm
which suggests that the classical period may have accomplished
more than we know due to the immense amount of material
which has been destroyed (and merely "lost") in the interim.
Thanks. I was searching for that word.
I have recently come upon a European analog to the Antikythera
mechanism, from 18th century Europe: Jacquet Droz's automatons.
These "anticipated" the computer (the Jacquard(sp?) loom did
also). But anticipations are not accomplishments, at least
insofar as they are *recognized* to be such *by us in retrospective
projection instead of by the persons involved at the time*.
Hans Blumenberg addresses this topic at various places in his
_The Genesis of the Copernican Age_ (MIT). At one point he
argues that at least as early as Gotthold Lessing, the
way that theory shapes experience was argued -- and yet
Thomas Kuhn's 1958 _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_
was itself "revolutionary".
And then Newton turned modern Europe
toward the reduction of the human world of daily life to
physics. BUt all this happened as "unintended consequences".
It wasn't just Newton, of course.
Again, I was paraphrasing Murray in the NYT.
> It is now being realised that Hooke
was just as great as Newton and probably more versatile but didn't publicise himself as relentlessly as Newton. Some say he was a better physicist and that Newton plagiarised some of his ideas. Liebnitz developed a better calculus than Newton -- it is the direct ancestor of today's method. Newton was a towering figure but there were other towering figures also in England and Europe at the time.
Let's assume that Murray is right.
I'm therefore not at all sure that Murray is right if you've correctly summarised him above. Incidentally, I think some of Murray's main findings are wrong in /Human Accomplishment/. He's squeezed together two quite different effects to produce his scheme of greatness. But if you haven't read it then I won't specify now. It's still a magnificent book and is a goldmine of data for those who want to think about the sweep of hiuman achievement, but I'm not sure that it tells us anything very new.
(I specifically abstained from talking about "Murray's book", not
just because I haven'tread it but because I had erased your previous
email and was not sure they were the same person. Is the Charles Murray of
_Human Accomplishment_ (reviewed in this week's NYT Book Review) the
same person who wrote the book about China??? The NYT reviewer
blasts that book as precisely not saying anything new or even
important or even worse.)
Yes.
[snip]
I don't understand the rest of what you've written below I'm afraid. My apologies, but our vocabularies are so different, I can't get on your wavelength no matter how hard I try.
Keith Hudson
The question arises:
How could European civilization, for over 2,000 years
and continuing almost unabated today, have essentially
have lost track of the universal fact that all
ratiocination is human *activity* with motivations,
aspirations, intentions, etc.?
YOu do not understand the preceding paragraph I wrote???
Sorry, no.
To answer this question and to turn the Juggernaut
European humanity,
including our universities and research labs, etc. --
to answer this question and turn the Juggernaut
around, was Edmund Husserl's lifework, as well
as the intention of others who took the other
fork in the road to enlightenment at the end of the
Middle Ages: Erasmus, Rabelais... and in our time,
persons such as Stephen Toulmin.
Or the preceding paragraph?
Sorry, no.
Why doe almost nobody take of the fact that
typo: "doe" should be "does" (my computer is
still suffering from the large capachino it
drank a few monthe ago....)
all laws of physics which take the form:
If <whatever-1> then <whatever-2>
Really have the form:
If we do <whatever-1a> then we will
encounter <whatever-b>
Or the preceding paragraph?
Sorry, no.
It is impossible in principle to show, e.g., that
For every "action" [matter in motion..] there
is an equal but opposite reaction [matter in motion...]
Or the preceding paragraph? If you understand and
disagree with it, I'd like to hear the argument which
I presume would make some assertion about something
that, on principle, could not be an object
in experience and therefore could not be *collaborated*
by any experiment since al experiments are human
experiences.
But it may indeed be possible for us to
discover that:
Every time we look at matter in motion, we find
that when we observe one thing strike another thing
in a certain way, we observe that the first thing's
speed and direction of motion changes in an equal
measure but in the opposite direction of the
change we observe in the speed and direction of
the second object. AND, furthermore, each time
we make such an observation, we do so because
we have certain desires which we can describe for
ourselves and for others either immediately or
thru a process of self-reflection.
Or the preceding paragraph?
Sorry, no.
> HENCE, two
"sciences" are elaborated in every experiment
we do: (1) Physics, and (2) the interpretation
of daily life (See! This science is so little
practiced that it does not even have a name
that would be generally understood. Certainly
"Transcendental phenomnology" would not
make sense to many educatd persons).
The last sentence in the preceding paragraph asserts
that most educated persons would not understand it,
and I think your demurral collaborates that hypothesis.
The problem is indeed (seems indeed
to be...) massive and massively refractory.
Why is this almost never done? Or am I a member
of some small fraction of the population who have not yet
heard the good news?
Seems like you have not herad the good news, either,
so maybe there indeed ain't none.
Now, you've lost me completely.
Sorry.
Keith Hudson
\brad mccormickKeith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org <http://www.evolutionary-economics.org/>>
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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