The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. So began...
Philosophy
Everything on philosophy related to Maier files series. Posts and Thoughts examining existence, change, properties, space, time, causality, and possibility.
Heretic Middle English: from Old French heretique, via ecclesiastical Latin from Greek hairetikos ‘able to choose’ (in ecclesiastical Greek, ‘heretical’), from haireomai ‘choose’. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica one can read:“The word heresy is derived from the Greek hairesis which originally meant an act of choosing, and so came to signify a set of philosophical opinions or the school professing them. As so used the term was neutral, but once appropriated by Christianity it began to...
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...
Socrates sometimes spoke of his daemon, meaning a good spirit who guided him through life. This might seem an alien concept for most of us today. But one can not deny as a matter of historical fact that folks who believed in idealism as a philosophy of life have always tended to trust in spirits, gods and angels. When it comes to the great-weaving cosmic thoughts, the active principles behind the appearances of things, many...
Otto Maier and his theory about waves, reality and time curves are rooted in the works of the men he looked up to, Leibniz and Descartes. In his “First Meditation” (1641), French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes decided he could not be absolutely sure he wasn’t dreaming. Most people would probably disagree with Descartes. You’re not dreaming right now, and you know it because experiences in dreams are different from those in waking life. A...
In the Maier files puzzle and quest everything adds up to something and there are several intertwined levels that will eventually result in solving the Otto Maier enigma. One clue and deeper meaning can maybe be found in the history of Saga because a Saga records the history of a people’s soul. Saga is one of the Norse goddesses who are numbered among the Asynjur. Snorri (Gylfaginning, ch. 35) lists her as the second goddess...
Envision for a minute that there is a Very High and amazingly old Civilization. It has achieved the summit of its social and logical accomplishment. At that point, in an erupsion of frenzy and greed, it destroys itself in a Great War. As the untold annihilation achieves its peak and the colossal complexity of its science and innovation — the very science and innovation it has used to wage its war — can never again...
TIDBITS The sophists were skeptics who doubted the possibility of attaining true knowledge of anything. They emphasized the practical application of rhetoric in civic and political life. Some claimed that they could teach both a thing and its opposite, simultaneously arguing both thesis and antithesis. One of the founders of sophism was Gorgias a Sicilian philosopher, orator, and rhetorician who settled in Athens where over his long life of 108 years he made large sums...