The Quantum Moment, Roads to Reality, Wittgenstein and All That
On the cultural impact of quantum mechanics, physical reality and the completion of quantum mechanics, and the wonderful life of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Mathematics
Logic and the Mechanisation of Reason
Michael Shenefelt and Heidi White, If A Then B: How the World Discovered Logic, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). This is a truly unique book. It is a history of logic, but it is not a normal history. Not too many existential quantifiers here nor barbers requiring a shave. […]
Algebra and A General Theory of Logic
Michael Friedman’s Reconsidering Logical Positivism, which I have read before but recently got in the mail, is a very good and important book which argues, persuasively, that the dominant interpretation of logical positivism within the Anglo sphere is wrong. It’s not just the empiricists who have got logical positivism wrong, […]
Why Thomas Nagel Is Almost Certainly Wrong
Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materalist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012). Thomas Nagel was born in Belgrade so I can’t help but have a certain affection for his writing, even though I recognise that none other reason can stand as […]
The Ecology of Big Science
The interface and interlinkages between science and society has long been of especial interest to me, and much on the topic has been written since the 1960s. For example, work on the different attitudes of physicists and computer scientists toward ballistic missile defence, on the development of the navigation systems […]
The Structure of Mathematical Revolutions
Discussion of Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions often focuses on the physical sciences, which is unsurprising given that Kuhn was a physicist by training. I have also felt that this physics based focus also is a reflection of how physics has become the king of the sciences. The modern world […]
The Riemann Hypothesis as a Counterexample to Coherentism in Epistemology?
Coherentism is the main alternative account of justification to that of foundationalism. With the latter, justification is based on beliefs, much like with axioms in mathematics, which are held to be basic and self evidently true. From those beliefs a system of knowledge is built in linear fashion. With coherentism, […]
Forms at Home in the Universe: On Two Problems of Body
The mind-body problem we are familiar with, so let us not tally with this too much; at least, not yet. There is another problem of body, most famously formulated by Eugene Wigner, in his oft cited paper on the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in the physical sciences. How comes it […]