depth of gravity in Gravity's Rainbow

[Mark Kohut]

Page,

Thanks much. 

Do you think the positivists, as informally indicated by the author with the Newton footnote, misused Hume's empiricism?

Misc. analogy:  It seems that many, including early TRP, he says himself, may have misused the concept of entropy when they generalized to society with it. (Although for TRP it is always a conceit so it is a question of its meaning in context--the range [see 
AtD of its "coverage"]  

Mark

----- Original Message ----
From: Page <page at quesnelbc.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 2, 2008 8:05:10 PM
Subject: Re: depth of gravity in Gravity's Rainbow


Positivism may have "promised a utopia of reason," but the positivists were not Cartesian rationalists. Newton notwithstanding, they explicitly acknowledged that their work was based on the extreme empiricism of the Immortal David Hume. 
 
 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Mark Kohut 
To: pynchon -l 
Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2008 10:58 AM
Subject: depth of gravity in Gravity's Rainbow


In the George Eliot chapter of a new book,
"Proust Was a Neuroscientist", Mr. Lehrer
writes:
 
""Positivism" , a new brand of scientific philosophy...
promised a utopia of reason...."
 
"like all religions positivism promised to explain everything"...
...."But the first question for the positivists, and in many ways
the question that would be their undoing, was the paradox of 
free will. Inspired by Newton's theory of gravity, which divined
 the cause of the elliptical motions found in the heavens,
the positivists struggled to uncover a parallel order behind
the motions of humans." *
 
We know how this concept plays out, updated, in Gravity's Rainbow.
 
 
 
"Newton, not so naive, said: "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but
not the madness of people". "
 
 
 
 
 



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