Negative Dialectics

In Aesthetics with DKJ, we were discussing very briefly Theodor Adorno who, according to DKJ, comes up in almost every discipline and what interested me mostly (he interested me quite a bit otherwise) was what he put forth in his Negative Dialectics, a kind of critique of Hegel's dialectic in which there is not such a hopeful resolution into synthesis. I was wondering whether anyone knew anything more on this or has any notable anecdotes of experiences with Adorno.

Ortega Hypothesis

The Ortega hypothesis (after Jose Ortega y Gasset) states that average and mediocre scientists contribute over time to the development of science and that the major breakthroughs happen through a culling of all this work, yet one name is usually recognized. I'm wondering whether you could apply this to the humanities as well. Literature doesn't seem to work in this way. Frequently, commentators draw connections between works from any time and I wonder what would happen if this connective way of understanding the progression of ideas can work with the sciences. It doesn't seem likely. In a way, and I'd like people to poke holes in this, I think the sciences are the farthest away from culture as an intellectual pursuit.

Ethical Arguments

I'm not entirely sure how to express this accurately, philosophically. But I've thought about this lately. In rhetoric revolving around the environment and issues surrounding it, I've noticed a kind of extension of care ethics that says simply "you should care about the environment and how you affect it because the earth's survival is contingent on your care." This is simplistic. But the arguments seem to want outsiders to its ideology to care because it is either morally wrong not to or detrimental to the whole human race (which is supposedly morally wrong). I hope I'm quantifying this correctly. I'm sure there are much stronger arguments than what I'm hearing because frequently people don't care and if we proposed compelling arguments, there may be different effects. May be.

Galileo

In the beginning of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, one of the characters, Salviati, states: "Yesterday we resolved to meet today and discuss as clearly and in as much detail as possible the character and the efficacy of those laws of nature which up to the present have been put forth by the partisans of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic position on the one hand, and by the followers of the Copernican system on the other. Since Copernicus places the earth among the movable heavenly bodies, making it a globe like a planet, we may well begin our discussion by examining the Peripatetic steps in arguing the impossibility of that hypothesis; what they are, and how great is their force and effect. For this it is necessary to introduce into nature two substances which differ essentially. These are the celestial and the elemental, the former being invariant and eternal the latter, temporary and destructible. This argument Aristotle treats in his book De Caelo, introducing it with some discourses dependent upon certain general assumptions, and afterwards confirming it by experiments and specific demonstrations. Following the same method, I shall first propound, and then freely speak my opinion, submitting myself to your criticisms -- particularly those of Simplicio, that stout champion and defender of Aristotelian doctrine."

If I'm not mistaken, this and the bolder statements that follow are part of the reason Galileo was tried. It looks long-winded but the concise language Galileo (or Galileo's translator Stillman Drake) uses makes his initial point of criticism clear. I'm not sure I follow his argument about the celestial vs. the elemental maybe because of lack of knowledge of Aristotle. Is there a connection I'm missing between Aristotle and Copernicus that he's making?

C.S. Peirce (post that was supposed to be published two weeks ago)

In a short essay "The Red and the Black", C.S. Peirce (who Prof. Silliman said was the smartest person to walk these shores) claims that "to be logical men should not be selfish; and, in point of fact, they are not selfish as they are thought. The willful prosecution of one's desires is a different thing from selfishness. The miser is not selfish; his money does him no good, and he cares for what shall become of it after his death...
   Now, it is necessary for logicality that a man should himself be capable of the heroism of self-sacrifice. It is sufficient that he should recognize the possibility of it, should perceive that only that man's inferences who has it are really logical, and should consequently regard his own as being only so far valid as they would be accepted by the hero. So far as he thus refers his inferences to that standard, he becomes identified with such a mind" (347).
   For a logician, this appears very emotive. Also, this an essay on probability which he takes half the essay to get to (perhaps his own idiosyncrasy). I didn't find it dumb but I found it peculiar and cool; he is very smart, evidenced for me in just this one essay but I'm more curious now on this topic of the selflessness of the logically minded and the logicians. He does err at the beginning by just throwing his claims out there with "the willful prosecution...is a different thing from selfishness" and then later "it is necessary..." Well, how is it different? Why is it necessary?

Alfred

Alfred North Whitehead makes this claim in his The Axioms of Descriptive Geometry; I found it one of the more brilliant parts (so far) of the book:
"The independence of the Dedekind axiom of the other axioms, combined with the negation of the Euclidean axiom, is proved by considered as in section 12, Descriptive Space to be atetrahedral region in Projective Space, but confining ourselves to the points whose coordinates are algebraic numbers, as in the corresponding proof for Projective Geometry.
   The independence of the Dedekind axiom of the other axioms, combined with the Euclidean axiom, is similarly proved by considering Descriptive Space to be the region in Projective Space found by excluding a particular plane; and further, as before, we confine our consideration the points whose coordinates are algebraic numbers" (14-15).

I don't want to misexplain any of the terminology he uses (which I'm getting a grasp on myself) so I'll be lazy and say that you should look it up. But I want to know what everyone thinks on this statement. He seems pretty logically consistent although I think you'd have to start at the beginning of the book and go through to do sensical logical proofs.

Moby-Dick

Early on in MB, before Queequeg's and Ishmael's homoerotic relationships, there's a good old puritanical sermon. Father Maple claims this:

"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly."

So, the argument:

J implies P
S implies F
:./
(V implies P) implies ~F

J = judges openly and encapsulates the first sentence
P = pauper, poor, penniless
S = Sin
F = free
V = virtue

Do you think this works? Or do could we say for sin ~V so that we don't have this floating variable?

Nobel Prize Winner

Since the Nobel Prize for Literature is always something to scoff at and be like "Really?", I'm excerpting what seems to be a gross over-simplification of Alice Munro's prose and personality. She's the 13th woman to receive the Nobel; that's not the only reason to declare "Really, Sweden?"


"Munro is one of those writers who, no matter how popular her books are, is our writer. This may have to do with the frank intimacy of her tone, which is stripped of ornament and fuss, yet also, in its plainness, contains huge amounts of terrible, sublime, and contradictory feeling. It may have to do with the fact that she writes mostly about women who want to escape some kind of confinement, who are hungry for experience above all else, and who attain it at a dear price, so that we can read about it. They are elegant, wry, determined women. They are also subversives, and because they allow us into their lives, we’re dusted with their secret glamor" (Sasha Weiss; 10/10/13).

 Munro is our WRITER. (WR)
FRANK intimacy of her tone and PLAINNESS
Writes mostly about WOMEN (WO)
ELEGANT women.
SUBVERSIVE and DUSTED with secret glamor.

(F + P) +  WO
E
S + D
---------
WR

The argument here is all over the place. It also doesn't help that Weiss starts her sentences with "this may" and "it may" because she seems to be just throwing possible supporting facts in there. Does anyone see salvation here?

This is not because it's October

In a dialogue incorrectly labelled a short story, Edgar Allan Poe has his character Agathos say: "There are no dreams in Eden--but it is here whispered that, of this infinity of matter, the sole purpose is to afford infinite springs, at which the soul may allay the thirst to know which is for ever unquenchable within it--since to quench it, would be to extinguish the soul's self."

Oinos, the other character, stated before this:"I clearly perceive the infinity of matter is no dream" to help clarify the obscure subject.

To give this some form:


P1: not D  (tacitly: not D implies I)
P2: I (infinity of matter) & IS (infinite springs)
P3: Q (quench) implies EX (extinguish)
Conclusion: not Q (unquenchability of knowledge)

We don't want to extinguish our souls; I hope that's tacit also. I'm having a bit of difficulty with the variables. I want to prove this but I can't extract EX from Q implies EX without it elsewhere in the form. Does anyone else see how I can fix this?

Walter White's Political Term Differs Slightly from Lyndon B. Johnson's

I already know two other people in class watch Breaking Bad; they're probably more caught up than I am. In this New Yorker article, Ian Crouch argues for the similarity between Bryan Cranston in the role of Walter White to his role of Lyndon B. Johnson in All the Way, which just premiered. The idea, and more viscerally, the picture here (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/09/bryan-cranston-lyndon-johnson-breaking-bad.html) are beautiful.

But the argument:
 "Cranston plays L.B.J. big: he barks, whines, guffaws, and, in a few moments of manic despair, cries, wondering why his political enemies and other human obstacles won’t simply give him the one thing he really wants: love. His Civil Rights Act will lessen the scourge of racism and help bring the South into the modern era, he says, and he’s baffled and enraged when critics on the left dismiss him as a redneck and those on the right call him a traitor. Can’t they see that the choices he’s made, the things he’s had to give up or give away, have all been for them? Alert to his despair, his wife rushes to his aid, but he most often shouts her out of the room.
"Walter White’s foray into meth began as a desperate money grab for his family, protection for when he was no longer around. But that pretense didn’t last long—by the first episode, he was already marveling at the thrill of being an outlaw (“I am awake”)—and later, after he’d gone headlong into the business, the notion that he was working for anyone but himself was a lie that only he believed. All of which makes his constant refrain—some version of “all the sacrifices that I’ve made for this family”—so hollow and false. And like Johnson’s cruelty toward Lady Bird in the play, Walter White’s love of his wife often seems more notional than real—just another emotional lever.
Both are skillful and flexible manipulators."

This argument pulls a classic New Yorker argument style by heaping on so much evidence that a reader couldn't possibly dream of disagreeing with the writer or his article. In case you're wondering, Mr. Crouch italicizes his comparison point. First, from this conclusion, it looks like Crouch's just working with the fact that Cranston fulfills both roles. (Someone didn't pass his media studies class). The point of having these two annoying paragraphs is to demonstrate how someone can put verbosity as an argument and hope that it makes a general claim look revelatory.

Perhaps other Breaking Bad watchers differ and agree with this argument totally. Thoughts?

German Modernists Can Actually Be Logical

"[1]It is always wrong to explain the phenomena of a country simply by the character of its inhabitants.[2] For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional one, a national one, a civic one, a class one, a geographical one, a sex one, a consciousness, an unconsciousness and perhaps even too a private one; [3]he combines them all in himself, but they dissolve him, and he is really nothing but a little channel washed out by all these trickling streams, which flow into it and drain out of it again in order to join other little streams filling another channel. [4]Hence every dweller on earth also has a tenth character, which is nothing more or less than the passive illusion of spaces unfilled" (Robert Musil 34, The Man without Qualities).

The way I formally show this argument is 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 1. 1 is the conclusion, 4 is the sub-conclusion from 2 and 3 used to get to 1. So: (2 +3) --- 4 --- 1 to make it simpler.

Past the metaphor, at its very bareness, I think this argument is well-formed and provides compelling evidence, even if it is all observed evidence, perhaps even based on coherence. As an ex-philosopher, Herr Musil isn't really clear about "the man flowing into the trickling streams" part and other parts may need further clarification but as a simple argument for not generalizing a whole nation by one characteristic, it's pretty decent. And later on Musil uses this argument to discuss patriotism.

Logical rhetoric, despite the lack of logical rhetoric in most other places, does exist in literature; sometimes.

Quoting from Emerson to give an example of argument from a literary perspective is kinda cheating. But here: "Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion; that every globe in the remotest heaven, every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life, every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coalmine, every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore is Nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment" (from "Nature", p. 21). We have a lofty couple of statements that very messily conclude into the two therefore-sentences.

Emerson's logic is very flawed but he also lived during a semi-religious period that accepted theories of religion like this one. Mysticism aside and looking at what Emerson does employ, his use of correspondence theory throughout the whole essay is stellar. It's when he leans over to his private diaphanous world of coherence theory that things get muddled. It's unfortunate for Emerson that he can't really prove that this connection exists apart from using a very old analogy of God manifesting himself in nature. Emerson also depends upon the reader's connectability to nature and then to God (and having a conscience to begin with). We need more compelling evidence from Emerson to believe this but to simplify the argument so it actually looks like one and not semicolon-ridden word-spinning: 1. The world (and its objects) shares connection with reason and conscience; 2. The world's objects are moral even if they change; 3. Therefore nature is wonderful in all aspects and explains laws (i.e. the Decalogue) to humankind; 4. Therefore nature's part and parcel of religion.

He's almost there. I'm going to say that this thesis is epistemologically flawed more than anything else and again, religion aside. This argument needs needs to make its statements valid in order to be logically sound, since Emerson is considered a philosopher if and only if theologians count as philosophers.

This post is a bit belated. I'm Chris(topher) Johnson, literature and philosophy major. I don't know if there's anybody in this class who's not taking it for a requirement but I'm super excited about it, requirement aside, because my relationship to math and logical concepts has been Kafkaesque throughout high school and up to recently. I'm hoping this course will teach me some math as well as plenty of logic (i.e. I'll be up til 3:00 AM struggling over the more difficult concepts). Also, I like having philosophical or non-  conversations outside of class.