Author Archives
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Manchester vs Athens
Mathematics is the combination of two traditions, the deductive greek science whose Idealtypus was geometry, and the manipulative algebraic techniques that Middle Age inherited from Arab science. Freeman Dyson, in the Gifford lecture “Infinite in all Directions”(1985) talks about a… Read More ›
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Kant’s Einbildungskraft, Popper and Lem
Another take on the same topic. Popper falsificationism amounts basically to a view of the scientific process where science in its march places increasingly more stringent bounds on the possible explanations that are supported by a verification process. It is… Read More ›
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Renaissance: Perspective and birth of mathematical Infinity
The birth of modern world in the Middle Age out of perspective in painting (Greeks did not have perspective) was due to innovations in Middle Age theology. The actuality of the infinite was born from Middle Age theology. See Paolo… Read More ›
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Deus Sive Natura
Whether an age or an individual will express itself in creative thinking or in repetitive pedantry is more a matter of desire than of intellectual power, and it is probably more the nature of their desires than of their capacities… Read More ›
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Halting problem
Q: I wonder why after having compiled a .tex file down to .pdf, the inverse operation is never easy to do, i.e. recovering the latex from the pdf itself A: You are basically asking why a solution to the halting… Read More ›
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Arretratezza e folklore (Gramsci)
From “Quaderni del carcere”, by Antonio Gramsci Einaudi 2001, vol. II, pp. 1375-1395 (here). In the English translation: In acquiring one’s conception of the world one always belongs to a particular grouping which is that of all the social elements… Read More ›
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The problem of power
Upon reading Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion; Civilization and its discontents Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art Hans Richter, Dada Lunacharski, Narkompros the following problem springs to the mind. It revolves around the concept of evil, but… Read More ›
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Characteristica Universalis
“Utile erit scribi pro omnia” (Leibniz, 29 October 1675, Paris, now in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Manuskript Analysis tetragonistica, 1675, Manuskriptseite, GWLB: LH XXXV, 8, 18, Bl. 2.) A new world was born. If numbers are just like stars in the… Read More ›
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Labyrinth (after Italo Calvino)
Italo Calvino talks about the labyrinth in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium (here), and about how one should accept its challenge to open himself to the world of possibilities. “Infinite in all directions”, a la Dyson. Sometimes it… Read More ›
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Stanislaw Lem: Revolution in the Mind
In Summa Technologiae, Stanislaw Lem of “Solaris” fame addresses some of the most pressing questions connected to the shape human life has acquired in the modern world because of technology, whereby the ontology of previous Weltanschauungen has been replaced in… Read More ›
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