Re: OT Re: DISAGREEMENTS and THIS LIST was goo now Sercret Chord

[HarryEsq@aol.com]

Although I'm a lawyer, and therefore interested in and sometimes bound by logic, I must say that the only philosophy class I took in college was an intro class taught by a guy named T.D. Perry at the State University of New York at Buffalo .  And the only thing I remember from the class (other than torching the books once the final exam was over - the only time I've ever destroyed a book) is this pithy sentence meant to challenge us to answer the question: How do we "know" anything?: "The pain must be acute, said A to B, appropos the manifestly suffering C."  My answer to the question "How do we "know" the feeling of pain" or more aptly, how do we know when someone else is feeling pain, was simple: If you get knocked about the head with a bat, let's say, do you not understand, nay, know, the feeling of pain?  If so, you can logicaly assume that another person, "C" in this case, would feel pain if s/he were to befall the same unfortunate circumstances.  That's the end of the inquiry as far as I'm concerned.  Please help me: Is there something more to this?

 

This little anecdote is definitely NOT intended to dis anyone who has studied philosophy or for whom that study has proven fruitful.  Just to share a long ago memory that was triggered by this discussion.

 

Holiday Greetings To All,

 

Harry

 

 

Harry Weinberg, Esq.
Law Offices of Harry Weinberg
11 Beach Street - 8th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10013
(212) 989-2908

 

In a message dated 12/22/2008 10:47:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, info@krispenhartung.com writes:

----- Original Message -----
From: "andy butler"
> In UK while I was a pre-teen schoolkid for some reason the powers that
> be decided that symbolic logic (in it's guise as Set Theory) needed to be
> taught
> as a pre-cursor to maths.
> I don't know what the other kids made of this (or indeed the teachers) but
> I found it incredibly easy to draw the diagrams and get the answers, ...it
> felt like cheating.

Leave it to the Brits to think of something as brilliant as that.  Logic,
especially set theory should by all means precede mathematics. Maybe you can
thank your famous Bertrand Russell for that (one of my favorite
philosophers, btw, though I never had the patience to read the the three
volume mammoth work Principia Mathematica, which he wrote with Whitehead).

You have to love Russell's set theory paradox though:
"It might be assumed that, for any formal criterion, a set exists whose
members are those objects (and only those objects) that satisfy the
criterion; but this assumption is disproved by a set containing exactly the
sets that are not members of themselves. If such a set qualifies as a member
of itself, it would contradict its own definition as a set containing sets
that are not members of themselves. On the other hand, if such a set is not
a member of itself, it would qualify as a member of itself by the same
definition. This contradiction is Russell's paradox"


Kris

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