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Everything on philosophy related to Maier files series. Posts and Thoughts examining existence, change, properties, space, time, causality, and possibility.

A secret message to Goethe

Goethe had quite an important influence on Otto Maier. Goethe, a poet and at the same time a scholar, who seemed to offer the model of an approach to nature that was both scientific and aesthetic. Let’s take a look at a peculiar dedicatory page in a published book of Humboldt and Bonpland. From July 16, 1799, to March 7, 1804, the German scholar Alexander von Humboldt, together with the french botanist Bonpland, had embarked...
Aletheia

Aletheia is truth or disclosure in philosophy

Aletheia, the Greek word for truth, typically stands for the correctness of a thought, perception, or assertion, and, in fact, as early as Homer, a cognate of correctness, homoiosis, served as a synonym for it. According to Heidegger, this construal of aletheia derives from its more basic meaning as un-hiddenness, where the privative prefix ‘un-’ apes the corresponding privative Greek prefix ‘a-’ in ‘a-letheia’ and ‘letheia’ derives from words for the hidden or forgotten. For...
brain conscious mind

Brains in Vats Paradox

Penfield’s classic brain experiments of the 1930s inspired a certain famous riddle, long since dubbed “brains in vats” by philosophy students. It goes like this: You think you’re sitting there reading this post. Actually, you could be a disembodied brain in a laboratory somewhere, soaking in a vat of nutrients. Electrodes are attached to the brain. And a mad scientist feeds it with a stream of electrical impulses that exactly simulates the experience of reading...
Contradictions and paradox

Can truth be a liar?

When it is exclaimed that contradictions may very well be true, numerous analytic philosophers will screw up their face into an appearance of discomfort, and say ‘But I just don’t see what it could be for a contradiction to be true’. They could mean numerous things by this. ‘See’ might just mean ‘understand’, by which case they might be complaining that traditional two-valued semantics leaves no room, as it were, for something to be both...
Ishtar

Crescent Moon and Star

It was Rodin who stated that “Man never invented anything new, only discovered things.” Although it’s correct to say that certain symbols have been man-made for a particular purpose, it’s just as correct to argue that everything is somehow inspired by the natural world around us, by the forms of nature, plants, animals, the elements. Even a reaction against the fluid forms of nature is usually inspired by a desire to offer an alternative. Occasionally...

Deciphering Accelerationism

Accelerationism, an intriguing concept rooted in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and embraced by some Marxist theorists, is a radical idea proposing that the best way to bring about significant change is by pushing a system to its extreme limits, hoping to induce its collapse. In this article, we’ll delve into the essence of accelerationism, simplifying its complex theories with relatable examples. The Reductio ad Absurdum Principle Accelerationism draws inspiration from the reductio ad absurdum...
Otto Maier

Do you know what time it is?

Do you know what time it is? That question may perhaps be asked a lot more these days than ever. In our clock-studded modern society, the answer is only a peek away, therefore we are able to “blissfully” partition our days into ever smaller sized increments for ever more neatly scheduled jobs, assured that we will always know it really is now 7:03 a.m. Contemporary scientific revelations regarding time, however, turn the question indefinitely frustrating....
Rothbard

Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature

Rothbard’s “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature” displays a remarkable organic unity: the book is much more than the sum of its parts. Points made in the various essays included in the book mesh together to form a consistent worldview. The system of thought set forward in these essays, moreover, illuminates both history and the contemporary world. In the book’s initial essay, whose title has been adopted for the whole book, Murray Rothbard raises a...
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