Excluded Middles

[Mark Kohut]

"Electrification of thought" Henry Adams, a TRP fave. He would be agin it,
I say, and IS in his massively original
satirization of modernity through mathematics in AtD.

And this book excerpt is fantastic for other reasons, some to come, maybe.

On Sat, Apr 21, 2018 at 8:57 AM, jody1 <jody1 at protonmail.com> wrote:

> David Morris:
>
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/05/
> 16/i-wrote-the-art-of-the-deal-with-trump-his-self-
> sabotage-is-rooted-in-his-past/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.eefcda0fd0be
>
> Tony Schwartz (ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal), has written about
> Trump:
>
> "To survive, I concluded from our conversations, Trump felt compelled to go
> to war with the world. It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him: You either
> dominated or you submitted. You either created and exploited fear, or you
> succumbed to it."
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Hmm, very Boolean. It was George Boole (see Wikipedia), of course, who
> "mathematized" (weaponized?) Aristotle's logic,
> including The Law of the Excluded Middle, and thereby setting the stage
> for, well, "the electrification of thought" to
> steal a phrase from Hanjo-
>
> https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=
> CjA7Lan6Ca0C&oi=fnd&pg=PA203&dq=%22electrification+of+
> thought%22&ots=yifZ6sTvK3&sig=Xdzsya2ODJviZ650yPoUti92d78#v=
> onepage&q=%22electrification%20of%20thought%22&f=false
>
> (disclaimer: I have difficulty comprehending Hanjo)
>
> Boole's work, tiptoeing here, for lack of any thorough understanding,
> through the fields of Maxwell, Adams, Tesla, Turing,
> Wiener, Shannon and surely leaving out a few hundred, has finally led to
> the current room, if not the elephants therein,
> which we call: The Internet, with all its related switchery.
>
> But Boole was an interesting guy himself, living roughly contemporaneously
> with Sir William Hamilton, during the first
> half of C19, and preceding the epistemological countercurrent- which
> attempted to base all of mathematics on pure logic-
> conducted by Frege, Russell, etc. Boole died in 1864, at the age of, ahem,
> 49, but lived long enough to sire five daughters.
> The youngest daughter, Ethel Lillian Voynich (1864-1960) -TENDRIL ALERT-
> penned an interesting novel, "The Gadfly,"
> published in 1897, and sitting next to "The Princess Casamassima" on
> Pugnax’s reading shelf, I’m sure, given certain
> thematic similarities.
>
>  Read it here, online: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3431
>
>  From the end of chapter IV:
>
>      "This vocation is as the vocation of a priest; it is not for the love
> of a woman,
>       nor for the moment of a fleeting passion; it is FOR GOD AND THE
> PEOPLE; it is NOW AND FOREVER.”
>
>       “Ah!” Arthur started and clasped his hands; he had almost burst out
> sobbing at the motto.
>       “Father, you give us the sanction of the Church! Christ is on our
> side——”
>
>       “My son,” the priest answered solemnly, “Christ drove the
> moneychangers out of the Temple,
>        for His House shall be called a House of Prayer, and they had made
> it a den of thieves.”
>
>        After a long silence, Arthur whispered tremulously:
>
>       “And Italy shall be His Temple when they are driven out——”
>
>       “'The earth and the fullness thereof are mine, saith the Lord.'”
>
>  ______________________________________________________
>
> Cf. Foley Walker:  "Jesus is Lord"..... BANG!
>
> So much for true believers, in religion, science, math, logic, or anything
> else.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>