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Come on Keith. I don't think its that hard.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2003 5:21
PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] A glimpse of
medieval Hangzhou and the Song civilisation
At 16:11 30/11/2003 -0500, you wrote:
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
mccormick
--
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. /
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Keith
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Keith
Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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