are usually overstated; this approach also omits consideration of why intellectuals
in one community would be motivated to pay attention to arguments from else-
where. We should notice the difference in the intellectual organization of two
scholarly enterprises: historians typically operate on a fairly modest level of the
abstraction-reflexivity sequence, with a concrete conception of intellectual causality
(an idea is transmitted from one person to another). Sociological analysis operates
at a somewhat more abstract level, looking for the general principles which explain
intellectual production, and hence taking similarities in ideas as a challenge to find
similarities in conditions within intellectual life.- A foreshadowing of this came with Cusanus in the mid-1400s, at the very begin-
ning of the mathematical revolution. Cusanus describes the world by extending
geometrical forms to infinity, where all forms merge into one another; hence the
famous formulation that the universe is a sphere whose circumference is nowhere
and its center everywhere. Leibniz turns every physical and logical quality into
positions along a continuum: rest is infinitely slow motion; equality is infinitely
small differences. - Despite the many parallels between the higher levels of the abstraction-reflexivity
sequence in India and in Europe, there are no distinctions made between a priori
and a posteriori, and between analytical and synthetic, in Indian philosophy
(Potter, [1963] 1976: 259). This is a consequence of the divergence between
mathematical and philosophical networks in India, and their convergence in
Europe. - It is more than straws in the wind that Derrida comes from the later generations
of the Husserl network and that his first publication (Derrida, 1962) was on
Husserl’s work on the philosophy of geometry. - There have been no specifically anti-mathematical philosophies in the traditions of
China and India because mathematics was never a significant part of those philo-
sophical networks.
Epilogue
- There are other kinds of thinking, such as in imagery, but these are not at issue
here; it is thinking in verbal statements which yields some irrefutably true state-
ments. - What this argument does not prove is that space must have three dimensions. The
various numbers of dimensions conjectured in physics such as string theory are
compatible with the argument so far developed. - And since thinking depends on the meaning of concepts, it is impossible to formu-
late the notion of dreaming unless one is embedded in a discourse which distin-
guishes dreaming from waking experience. Dreaming could not exist if non-dream-
ing did not exist. - In medias res passes the test of Cartesian doubt. To deny in medias res is still to
affirm an instance of it in the very act of thinking the denial. - I am not disputing here whether such translation can in fact always be carried out;
the point is merely that translation does not escape from discourse. In social
1032 •^ Notes to Pages 851–865