Jacques Derrida died last Friday. Although it’s trendy these days to knock the man and his writings, I always found something of interest in his texts, and I was particularly fond of Glas.
L’essence de la rose, c’est sa non-essence: son odeur en tant qu’elle s’évapore. D’où son affinité d’effluve avec le pet ou avec le rotl ces excréments ne se gardent, ne se forment même pas. Le reste ne reste pas. D’où son intérêt, son absence d’intérêt. Comment l’ontologie pourrait-elle s’emparer d’un pet? Elle peut toujours mettre la main sur ce qui reste aux chiottes, jamais sur les flouses lâchés par les roses. Il fait donc lire l’anthropie d’un texte qui fait péter les roses. Et pourtant le texte, lui, ne disparaît pas tout à fait, pas tout à fait aussi vite que les pets qui le soufflent.
[J. Derrida. Glas pp69b–70b.]
Translation:
The essence of the rose is its nonessence: its odor insofar as it evaporates. Whence its effluvial affinity with the fart or the blech: these excrements do no stay, do not even take form. The remains remain not. Whence its interest, its lack of interest. How can ontology lay hold of a fart? It can always put its hand on whatever remains in the john, but never on the whiffs let out by roses. So the anthropy of the text does not itself altogether disappear, not altogether as quickly as the farts that blast, prompt, spirit off the text.
[J. Derrida. Glas pp58b–59b; translated by John P. Leavey, Jr., & Richard Rand.]
by jim at 08:14 AM | permalink | Comments (5)
If I had before me a fly and an elephant, having never seen more than one such maginitude of either kind; and if the fly were to endeavour to persuade me that he was larger than the elephant, I might by possibility be placed in a difficulty. The apparently little creature might use such arguments about the effect of distance, and might appeal to such laws of sight and hearing as I, if unlearned in those things, might be unable wholly to reject. But if there were a thousand flies, all buzzing, to appearance, about the great creature; and, to a fly, declaring, each one for himself, that he was bigger than the quadruped; and all giving frequent and contradictory reasons; and each one dispising and opposing the reasons of the others—I should feel quite at my ease. I should certainly say, My little friends, the case of each one of you is destroyed by the rest. I intend to show flies in the swarm, with a few larger animals, for reasons to be given.
[Augustus de Morgan A Budget of Paradoxes p. 1.]
Today, I cite John Ellis’ third and final misstep in theories of language:
The last initial misstep which we must consider is the asusmption that linguistic categories group like things together. Here we face an old paradox: if we look at the books on our bookshelves, we see immediately that they are all different in content, size, coloring, length, and so on. They are then not the same, but we still say that they are like each other. How are they similar? They are similar in all being books; and yet they are all still dissimilar. Categorization is the most fundamental operation performed by a language. To describe how it works means using ideas such as “similar” and “dissimilar” very carefully indeed, so that they are assigned their correct place in the understanding of categorization. This crucial matter [...] has prevented those who have taken it from understanding how categorization works. Categorization, it will be seen, will remain a mystery as long as we see it as grouping together of like things; we grasp the essence of the process of categorization only when we see it as the grouping together of things that are not the same in order that they will count as the same.
[Ellis, Language, Thought, and Logic, pp.24f.]
And, so ends his second chapter. I looking forwarding to reading this thin book with its extremely strange linguistic premises. To see if Ellis can hold up his provocations.
Continuing with John Ellis’ three initial missteps in theories of language, today it’s misstep number two:
I now turn to the second [misstep], which [...] has a form specific to language theory as well as a more general form that relates to inquiry in general. This broader form consists in a mistaken attitude that can be found in any field; it is the habit of assuming that one begins by taking simple cases and generalizes from them to derive principles that can then be used to break down the hard cases. The most important specific manifestation of this attitude in theory of language occurs in semantics; the easy starting point will be the descriptive words that appear to have clear correlations in physical reality—say, round, square, mile—while evaluative words are the hard cases, to be approached only when the basic principles of how words work have been extracted from the easy cases. The consequence of this way of beginning is that descriptive words will come to be seen as more basic to the functioning of language than evaluative words; this, as we shall see, is a mistake that has devastating consequences, for it has the hierarchy of descriptive and evaluative words the wrong way round. Another manifestation of the same underlying attitude to inquiry can be seen in the generative grammarian‘s whole approach to the understanding of language: syntactic patterns are easier to systematize than semantic ones, and thus syntactic analysis comes before semantics. Soon enough, this temporal priority has become a logical one, in which it is syntax that shows us how language works.
[Ellis, Language, Thought, and Logic, pp.20f.]
So, he’s dropped the awkward pieces of languages—so as to side-step the whole lack of definitions of phrases, clauses, sentences, utterances, etc. problem—and now writes of words unproblematically. More later. Earlier entries: degré zéro and language != communication.
Well, I continued plowing on through chapter two in Ellis' Language, Thought, and Logic, and it's getting funnier. In this chapter he lists the three most common initial missteps made by those who theorize about language. Here's number one: "It is the assumption that the purpose of language is communication." So, he got my attention, but what does he mean?
The most common and simple version looks at language in terms of its information content: a piece of language means whatever information it contains, and an adequate analysis formulates as completely as possible what that information is. The variant that uses such words as message and encode is essentially similar. [...] A more philosophical version of essentially the same view speaks of the truth claims made by a piece of language.
[Ellis, p.16.]
I guess the question is whether a piece of language contains anything. Is a word a container? I'd always felt that a sign doesn't contain its meaning anymore than a tool contains its function. In fact, tools and words are often used against their functions or meanings. Pieces of language are interpreted, i.e., meaning is assigned to them by some hermeneutic process on the listener's end of the phonic chain.
Nothing seems more reasonable than the assumption that the purpose of language is communication. But there is a subtle trap here: granted , a particular act of language use may result in communication between two people, but much must have happened before they could get that far.
[Ellis, p.17.]
OK, now he's lost me, but it becomes clearer later on that Ellis feels that language divies up the world of its speakers and gives them a way of making sense of it, and it just happens that we can use that to communicate. I am reminded of Searle's US GI trying to convince Italian soldiers that he is a German officer by reciting a piece of Goethe, but perhaps I'm reading too much into it. Did speech precede language? Did thought precede language? But Ellis continues:
The distinction I am making will become clearer if we go back to the vocabulary used by scholars who think of language as the transmission of information, and therefore use the vocabulary of
code, encoding, and message. This language certainly fits well with that of communication and information, the latter term substituting for message without difficultym while coding and encoding seem to describe well enough the process by which the message is conveyed from one person to another. Nevertheless, as soon as we look closely at languages and codes it becomes clear that they are very different things, so much so that the linguistic situation is completely distorted if we we speak of it in this way. Codes are only devices for disguising pieces of language so that their meaning is not immediately recognizable without removal of the disguise. [...] What is in Morse is only inforSo, imative only because it is English. The surpising fact is the very vocabulary of code and message, used so often as a model of how language works, has nothing whatever to do with language.
[...]
The essential and distinctive feature of a language is not its ability to transmit information—for this would not distinguish it from Morse code—but a logically prior attribute, the process of analysis, evaluation, and organization of experience which must have taken place before communication can occur. It is because a code lacks this stage that it is not a language. To function at all, a code has to latch on to something that has already done what languages do. Codes encode messages; language do not. Codes merely transmit information; languages make information what it is.
[Ellis, p.17f.]
So is grammar a code? More to come later.
I started reading a provocative and out of print book the other day called Language, Thought, and Logic by John Ellis. He takes linguists, philosophers of language, computer scientists, and anthropologists to task for attempting their assaults on the theory of language by always starting at zero. In chapter one he parodies this attitude:
The mood can be summed up thus: There is Saussure—but that does not really work, for it seems to suggest that categories of things are a fiction of our language, and it is unable to deal with our strong intuitive sense that there are natural kinds of things in our world; there is Wittgenstein—but that, though suggestive, is full of enigmas; there is Chomsky, but the latest model of generative grammar is constantly being recalled for redesign of structural flaws, and it still breaks down regularly after it is supposed to have been fixed; there is Whorf—but that is imaginative without being sound. Therefore, given this confusion, we may as well start at the beginning all over again. This mood weakens the sense of obligation that scholars usually have to know and build on their predecessors; first because there is so much that has been said in so many contexts that nobody could master it all, and second, because the only result of all this activity seems to have been confusion that suggest that there is something wrong with all of it. Thus we arrive at the strange condition of linguistic theory at present in which, no matter how much sophisticated thought has taken place in the past, we are still constantly asked to consider yet another attempt to begin again at the conceptual beginning with a theorist who wants us to look at his or her version of the basic language situation in which there are speakers, listeners, sounds, things, and so on, to see how he or she will build the conceptual base of linguistic theory from the ground up. Predictably, the proliferation of these new beginnings means that they will all suffer the same fate as their forerunners: they do not achieve th sought-for basic conceptual clarification but instead add to the confusion.
[pp.8f.]
More later, as I uncover it.
A couple of days back, I was looking over entries at a great blog, new to me, [Thoughts Rants and Arguments], when I ran across the term perdurantism (here and here). I paused, and then off I went to the OED: perdure to endure, continue, or last. Little did I realize that perdurant and endurant had entered the rarified world of formal onotology. Brian had been set off on his entries by a critique of the conjunction of perdurantism and universalism in paper by Achille Varzi of Columbia. In his opening paragraph, Varzi writes:
Perdurantism is the view that objects are temporally extended. An object, on this view, has spatial as well as temporal parts, or stages, and to say of an object that it persists through time is to say that it has different parts that exist at different times. Typically (though not necessarily) this view goes hand in hand with the principles of classical extensional mereology. In particular, perdurantism is usually associated with universalism, i.e., with the thesis that any old class of things has a mereological fusion—something composed of just those things. This combination of perdurantism and universalism may strike some as absurd.
Perdure and endure go back to a passel of Latin verbs (induro, induresco, obduro, obduresco, and perduro, all pretty much meaning to endure) based on the root durus 'hard' that is cognate with tree and truth in English and drus 'tree; oak' in Greek and ultimately druid. Googling around, I found these succinct definitions of perdurant and endurant online:
In a nowadays almost mythical passage of his On the Plurality of Worlds, [David] Lewis distinguishes between two ways of persisting, i.e. existing in time, namely endurance and perdurance. A perduring object persists by having a different temporal part at each time, while an enduring object is wholly present at each instant of its existence.
[Luc Schneider. 2002. Formalised Elementary Formal Ontology, p.58]
Ah, now I know better. Some of the sample sentences in these and other papers would give Chomsky and his inquiring hoard the run-around just on literary merit, e.g., the following are from Varzi's paper:
Other words are called into the fray, e.g., in a paper by Josh Parsons with the postmodern title, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a turnip:
Perdurantism is sometimes stigmatised as the view that persisting objects are not literally identical from time to time. That criticism is a mistake. According to perdurantism, Pavarotti is a perduring space-time worm, with some temporal parts in, say, 1940, and some in 2003. Pavarotti himself exists at both these times, and never fails to be identical to himself (how could he?) It is literally the very same Pavarotti who exists in 1940 as in 2003.
If this is an example of ontology coming to grips with tense, then just imagine the fun to be had when they find out about aspect or ergativity.
Clay Shirky has written an elegant denunciation of the semantic web. He asks "What is the Semantic Web good for?" And answers himself later on:
The Semantic Web's philosophical argument—the world should make more sense than it does—is hard to argue with. The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to admit.
The gist of his argument is that the semantic web is basically about reasoning (i.e., good old fashioned syllogistic deduction) from meta-data to provide answers to users' queries, and that deduction, in general, and meta-data, too, have little in the way to offer in a real-world kind of way to solve the kinds of questions that people really ask, or want to ask computers. AI is impossible and so is information retrieval in the Popular Mechanics starry-eyed sort of way. Too bad. [via Akma]
[Addendum 11/13/03: Mamamusings has collected a bunch of links that respond to Shirky. Should make good reading.]
Back in August, Maciej Ceglowski at Idle Words pointed his readership at an article by Max Tegmark that had been published in the May issue of Scientific American. A quick trip to Mad Max's website got me a slightly expanded version which I printed it out and took to read on the local light rail. Hmm, it was a good read. I discussed it with a friend who pointed out that cosmologists and theoretical physicists were, in general, quite mad. But, I liked what I'd read about the four theoretical levels of multiple universes:
I found Tegmark's prose a pleasure to read and found myself following his argument. Here's how he sums up his paper:
We have seen that a common feature of all four multiverse levels is that the simplest and arguably most elegant theory involves parallel universes by default, and that one needs to complicate the theory by adding experimentally unsupported processes and ad hoc postulates (finite space, wavefunction collapse, ontological asymmetry, etc.) to explain away the parallel universes. Our aesthetic judgement therefore comes down to what we find more wasteful and inelegant: many worlds or many words. Perhaps we will gradually get more used to the weird ways of our cosmos, and even find its strangeness to be part of its charm.
I meant to write an entry about it, but then I got busy with other topics, and finally it fell off my to-do stack entirely. Today, hard put to write about something, I turned to Google to find out about multiple universes and, as a result of a link near the top of the heap, I went and read this withering retort by Karl Stephen.
Stephen's starts with:
Tegmark's main argument is that, far from being a shadowy, speculative corner of cosmology, the parallel-universe idea has been increasingly confirmed by recent experiments, and we should get used to it because it appears that it will be around for a while.
I'm not sure I'd agree with him. I thought Tegmark did a thorough job of saying that his popular essay was concerned with a description of current cosmological speculation. But Stephen sees evidence of a greater evil in the article and the popular magazine in which it was published.
Whether or not Tegmark's work constitutes a direct assault on the principle of specified complexity is a discussion for another time. The thing we have established beyond reasonable doubt is that in an article purporting to be about empirical science, Tegmark smuggled in more than a little scientism, a variety of philosophy currently favored by the editors of Scientific American. And to parade philosophy as science is never a good idea.
I cannot really say anything about the content of either paper, other than one amused me in an enjoyable manner, while the other made me wrinkle my brow frowning. Tegmark came across as the fun sort of guy you might meet at a party who has fun describing what he does. Stephens came across as a humorless stick in the mud that you end up avoiding at the chips and drinks table. Then it dawned on me that when I get going on some linguistic rant, I probably come across more acridly than I'd like to imagine, causing people to mentally roll their eyes and wonder what those smiling people are doing over by the big sofa.
An entry over at Desbladet on Baudrillard's justly famous Disneyland observations shook loose a memory or two of a couple of strange days in Billund, Jutland. First a Danish business dinner in a Kro. (After the proper quantities of øl and akvavit, I swear I witnessed an argument between Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Hansen about what constituted a lie.) The next day I visited Legoland. It was a bright and hot day, and at first I thought I was in Anaheim, but no I wasn't. The Danes not being satisfied with their ersatz beachhead in Solvang have since then built a Legoland in California, as well as ones in Germany and the UK. Of course, Americans shouldn't complain as we blithely go about turning the world into an imperfect simulacrum of our own air-conditioned nightmare.
Miladus ad Usum Delphinorum has brought my attention to an interesting interview in Figaro Magazine with an actual living, breathing French Academician, Professor Marc Fumaroli. Besides being a blurb for his latest book on Chateaubriand, it sums up French sentiments about their not being world leaders, culturally, anymore. There is also, perhaps more seriously, his observation that the French have lost their love of joy, particularly their joy of conversation.
Je montre le décalage entre la France d'avant 1789 et la France d'après, celle du triste XIXe siècle, né avec la Révolution française. Ce qui n'a pas empêché un effort merveilleux à Paris pour restaurer ce qui pouvait l'être. Marcel Proust se moque des salons et de la vie de société, mais il y a trouvé un élément relativement nutritif. Malgré tout, les salons du début du XXe siècle n'ont plus rien à voir avec ceux du XVIIIe. Il y a un mot de Tocqueville que je trouve merveilleux pour caractériser l'Ancien Régime et que je cite souvent : "Les Français aimaient la joie." Une des causes de leur décadence est peut-être d'avoir cessé d'aimer cette joie!
[Marc Fumaroli. "Les Français ont perdu la joie."]
Miladus' entry quotes another of the professor's bons mots: "On ne sait même pas qui [Shakespeare] était, ni de quelle manière il vivait. La conversation chez Shakespeare, c'est le dialogue tragique, comique ou pastoral." This not knowing anything about a famous author bothering folks is what is at the heart of the whole Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare movement. One doesn't know anything about Rabelais, the person, and, yet, that doesn't stop us from reveling in his works. It is interesting that the first literary criticism of Shakespeare by Thomas Rymer was a scathing review of his failures as a playwright along French classical lines. It is sad about the French losing their joy, but perhaps some young filmmaker can remake How Stella Got Her Groove Back à la française.
Translation:
I show the shift between pre-1789 and post-1789 France, that of the sad 19th century, born of the French revolution. This which did not prevent a marvellous effort in Paris to restore what it could. Marcel Proust makes fun of the salons and society life, but he found there a relatively nourishing element. Despite everything, the salons at the beginning of the 20th century do not have anything anymore to do with those of 18th. There is a saying of Tocqueville's that I find marvellous in its characterization of the Ancien Régime, and which I often quote: "The French loved joy." One of the causes of their decline is perhaps they have ceased loving this joy!
[Marc Fumaroli. "The French Have Lost Their Joy."]
"One does not even know who [Shakespeare] was, nor how he lived. Conversation in Shakespeare is tragic, comic, or pastoral dialog."
Carole Desbarats / Jean Paul Gorce: "Croyez-vous que l'oeuvre de Jean-Luc Godard ait exercé une influence sur votre propre travail ou encore sur votre imaginaire?"
Jacques Derrida: "Pas la moindre influence, à ma connaissance. Pardon pour la brièveté et la sincérité brutale de la réponse. Si le temps et les forces m'en étaient donnés, je dirais peut-être davantage, mais je n'en suis même pas sûr."
[Carole Desbarats & Jean Paul Gorce, eds., L'effet Godard. Paris: Milan 1989, p. 102/110; via Derrida Online, via wood s lot's happy birthday, JD]
Maybe it was because of his earlier, more bourgeois films ...
Translation:
Carole Desbarats / Jean Paul Gorce: "Do you believe that the work of Jean-Luc Godard has exercised an influence on your own work or else on your imagination?"
Jacques Derrida: "Not the least influence. Excuse the brevity and brutal sincerity of the reply. Perhaps given the time and the forces, I might say more, but I am not so sure about that."
The Making of a Physicist: A Talk with Murray Gell-Mann [via Arts & Letters Daily]
Uncharacteristically, I discussed my application to Yale with my father, who asked, "What were you thinking of putting down?" I said, "Whatever would be appropriate for archaeology or linguistics, or both, because those are the things I'm most enthusiastic about. I'm also interested in natural history and exploration." He said, "You'll starve!" After all, this was 1944 and his experiences with the Depression were still quite fresh in his mind; we were still living in genteel poverty. He could have quit his job as the vault custodian in a bank and taken a position during the war that would have utilized his talents — his skill in mathematics, for example — but he didn't want to take the risk of changing jobs. He felt that after the war he would regret it, so he stayed where he was. This meant that we really didn't have any spare money at all.
I asked him, "What would you suggest?" He mentioned engineering, to which I replied, "I'd rather starve. If I designed anything it would fall apart." And sure enough when I took an aptitude test a year later I was advised to take up nearly anything but engineering. Then my father suggested, "Why don't we compromise — on physics?"
Interesting bit in the article about his first wife, archaeologist J. Margaret Dow, and her connection with the discovery of Linear B tablets. As for the coining of the term quark, I'd always heard that Gell-Mann got it from Joyce, but there are some who say this is apocryphal:
Did Murray Gell-Mann take the word 'quark' from James Joyce? This origin, as related by Thomas Jones (LRB, 24 August [2000]), may be apocryphal. But if Finnegans Wake is indeed the source, there arise two questions: where did Joyce get the word, and how should it be pronounced? As an old German word still in use, the masculine noun, Quark, has the meaning: 'curd(s)'; and, figuratively: 'trifle', 'trash', 'filth', 'slime'. In Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles, conversing with God in the 'Prologue in Heaven', says contemptuously about humans: 'In jedem Quark begräbt er Seine Nase.'
[Paul Pfalzner, letter to the London Review of Books, vol. 22, no. 18]
"Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer," or so wrote Voltaire. So, it seems that some memes are just too tasty and choice to be eradicated, (e.g., the great Eskimo snow hoax, or the hundredth monkey), but the one that caught my eye today was the boiling frogs metaphor. [via the original Wiki] Whit Gibbons chased down a zoologist, Dr. Victor Hutchison at the University of Oklahoma, to answer a German reporter's question about the boiling frogs meme.
Vic's answer was as follows: "The legend is entirely incorrect! The 'critical thermal maxima' of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so." Naturally, if the frog were not allowed to escape it would eventually begin to show signs of heat stress, muscular spasms, heat rigor, and death.
As with many things in this world, I posit a literary origin, in this case Dante:
E come a l'orlo de l'acqua d'un fosso
stanno i ranocchi pur col muso fuori,
sì che celano i piedi e l'altro grosso,sì stavan d'ogne parte i peccatori;
ma come s'appressava Barbariccia,
così si ritraén sotto i bollori.[Dante. Inferno, xxii, 25-30]
I started with a French author, and I must end with one.
Il ne suffit pas à un sage d'étudier la Nature et la Vérité, il doit oser la dire en faveur du petit nombre de ceux qui veulent et peuvent penser; car pour les autres, qui sont volontairement esclaves des préjugés, il ne leur est pas plus possible d'atteindre la Vérité qu'aux grenouilles de voler.
[Julian Offray de la Mettrie. 1748. L'Homme machine]
There’s a good article by somebody over on Kiro5hin site about infinity. Not just any layperson’s infinity though, but the real thing ™ as in mathematics. It’s a nice example of the kind of semantic dodgery one can expect from natural languages. The great thing about language is you can say (or type) “infinity is a number” or “infinity is a cat” and get away with it, but not so in mathmagicland.
Given that:
QED: “Infinity is a number.” Anonymous
Update: The quotation “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” is cited by Joshua Shikel Fishman in the Mendele Yiddish Literature and Language list (6.087). [It appeared first in print in Uriel Max Weinreich, 1945, der yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt. (“YIVO and the problems of our time”) in yivo-bleter 25.1.13.] There’s more information and a translation here. 2. Also, it’s not Uriel but his father Max who wrote the article. Sorry about that. Another link.
[Addendum 07/20/05: I’ve finally got around to posting a scan of the passage in question.]
Finally, a blog entry, neither too ranting nor too fawning, on postmodernism. Got there [via Stumbling Tongue via Ad Usum Delphinorum].
If I were forced to make a choice between the postmodern stance and the high modernist stance, I'd choose the postmodern, and I'd do so very quickly. Why? Because there's much about the postmodern stance I find useful. It can be a way of keeping your poise in the midst of media chaos, and a way of opening up to the various sets of terms these realities present too. It reminds us to take things for what they are -- to identify the category a work belongs to before judging it rather than measuring all works against a single standard.
I like the distinction made between prescriptive and descriptive postmodernism, but I don't think that academia has any particular rights to this turf. In fact, ideology is just a human condition.
I was googling for some information on pattern recognition, feature extraction, and linguistics, when I noticed a sponsored ad in the upper right-hand corner of my browser called Deep Chomsky. Turns out it's the blog of a retired programmer-mathematician, Steven H. Cullinane. Besides being a dyed in the wool opponent of Noam Chomsky, he's also the inventor defender of the Diamond Theory of Truth. He has multiple domains from which to spread his diamond gospel, while battling the demons of postmodernism and leftism. Funny thing is that I almost felt like defending Chomsky, even though I had studied linguistics at Cal where I had been nourished by staunch anti-Chomskians. I finally came to my senses, as Professor Chomsky is more than capable of defending himself. One has to wonder though if Cullinane pays for these ads himself or if he's being funded by somebody else.
Here's a snippet of his writing, under the title Plato's Beard versus Occam's Razor: "Richard J. Trudeau, in The Non-Euclidean Revolution (see above), opposes what he calls the Story Theory of truth [i.e., Quine, nominalism, postmodernism] to the traditional Diamond Theory of truth [i.e., Plato, realism, the Roman Catholic Church]. This opposition goes back to the medieval "problem of universals" debated by scholastic philosophers." These groupings of good against evil have made my day.
I propose a sequel to Augustus De Morgan's justly famous book, A Budget of Paradoxes, about the diverse attempts to square the circle, to create a perpetual motion machine, etc. This new volume could touch on various applications of mathematics to age-old epistemological and ontological problems, cutting as it were through all the bothersome verbiage of less adequately equipped philosophers such as Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Husserl, et al.
[Addendum 07/15/03: Mr Cullinane was kind enough to correct my error in this entry in attributing the invention of "diamond theory of truth" to him. Plato invented the concept and Richard J Trudeau coined the phrase.]