The Sociology of Philosophies

sequences. In China, India, and Greece alike, fairly early in the abstraction- reflexivity sequence there arose the question of ...

Free will is only a semi-deep trouble; it arises from tensions which derive from accepting a particular theology. Over a period ...

an illusion, since they were aiming not at a Buddhist nirvana, but at anthro- pomorphic moral salvation. The next round pushed f ...

implies that there is no substance, no river into which one can step twice. Parmenides’ follower Zeno of Elea turned the infinit ...

the reality of the self and of other aggregates, moved onward to the destruction of all substances and all reals. Nagarjuna atta ...

working through a similar family of deep troubles. The similarity in the context is that here too a rationalized monotheism was ...

events or substances, God intervenes to connect the succession of subjectively experienced qualities. This position is equivalen ...

But the basic deep trouble remained, to be re-exploited whenever the motiva- tion arose to construct a new metaphysical system. ...

deeper troubles about plurality and substance, causality and relation. Mono- theism is not the only way some of these questions ...

so; nor should we regard it as a tendency of philosophy to become “scientific” in its maturity. Mathematics is not identical wit ...

requires a sociology of mathematics. The history of mathematics is the purest case of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence. The ...

Descartes was the network member who reaped the first great fame for this revolution. He set out the general methods for what he ...

of previously accepted concepts of mathematical reality, strange mathematical beasts which outraged traditionalists. A self-gene ...

of Descartes’s system; issues of the cogito and of the relations among dual substances became the deep troubles on which specifi ...

lytical but synthetic, while remaining a priori. It follows that there does exist a form of knowledge which is both certain and ...

The history of higher mathematics is a piling on of levels of abstraction as the search for greater generalization goes on. In e ...

between sense and reference. In this spirit Frege undertook a reform in the entire system of notation and operations which made ...

higher mathematics has been central to the various branches of anti-positivists; the postmodernism of the late 1900s loudly echo ...

the dead hand of technique. Against this we get the anti-technicism of Heideg- ger, and Sartre’s identification of existence wit ...

upward to the heavens but downward and inward. This endless digging no more dissolves philosophy into nothingness than Leibniz’s ...