NP Alabama Pi

[Terrance]

Move over you dusty philosophers and virgin men of the cloth
there is room in that post-modern grave for the scientist
too. But wait
a minute, maybe this has nothing to do with philosophy or
science, or theology itself, perhaps the "gap in human
understanding" is not a gap at all but only one way of
looking at the world.   

What happened to the "Platonic Creed" in the christian
medieval world?  

This a question implicit at least, in GR. 

 Wasn't it in part subordinated to the orthodox (the
biblical) creationist ideas of Augustine, Anselm, and
Bonaventure and to the various strains of Neoplatonic
thought that reiterated Plotinus's idea of the ONE and
Aquinas's reflexivity? 


Also, that white folk law stuff, wow, what nonsense, the so
called "Platonic Creed" is not unique to the West.  What
would a Confuscian say about all this?  

I-ching feet for this one anybody? 

The perfect number ten appears in both Chinese and Japanese
mumerologies and signifies, the same semantic intention--a
comprehensive all embracing totality or the "WHOLE" that GR
characters seek and Pynchon ridicules in for example Leibniz
(combined  perfect number--namely, god the supreme monad,
and a creationist's "infinite series of numbers") 
and Nazi architecture, or Mondaugen's 
Hericlitian/mystical/electronic flux. 

This goes to the gnostic earth or universe, right? Carried
along with the "Platonic Creed" is the idea of a perfectly
structured universe:

"In the universe everything is fitted together and
harmonized out of the limited and the limiting--both the
universe and the whole and all the things that it contains." 

This Pythagorean idea  is found in Einstein's "cosmic or
religious feeling" that  rejected an indeterministic
interpretation of quantum physics, saying that God doesn't
throw dice. 

> 
> The reason I bring this up is that there are philosophers of
> science who want to argue that these formal systems which are
> identified with the real ones are "in" the systems - they
> are formal properties of them in much the same way their
> structural integrities, e.g., are physical properties. This
> is an odd but compelling argument; I don't think I believe it
> but it's a tough one. A lot of the problems revolve around how
> much identification is being done, as above in the more traditional
> systems.
> 
> I can probably dig up a couple references if anyone's interested.
> 
> Josh


 
In  philosophy those that argue the formal are "in" the
systems may be called "essentialists." In ontological
concerns the "estentialists" are directly opposed to the
"existentialists" (by which I mean those philosophers that
place an ontological priority on historical data--on the
acts and affairs of human experience, each of which is, in
Hume's phrase, "Vivid and Intense", as it makes its
appearance in the stream of an individual or social
consciousness, Wittgenstein and Foucault can be counted as
examples). The essentialist philosopher sees ideal
forms and general, continuous, or enduring traits of nature
and experience in the form of graduated patterns, functions,
and values. The essentialist describes these as realized or
realizable "in" nature and experience (as opposed to Apart,
as they would be in the "Platonic" noumenal reality or
ontological focus.  This ontological position separates
Plato from Socrates and is how we can identify Plato's
character from the historical Socrates, it is also the
position of Whitehead
(some one mentioned him here recently), and Aristotle. 
The Platonic or Comprehensive whole is easily traced from
Einstein
through Leibniz, Kepler, Copernicus to Plato and back to the
Pythagorians.