bhritchie

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen."

(That's the Wittgenstein, not the German saying.)

And have been! Careful attention to stylistic features has allowed us to get a pretty good idea of the chronological groupings of Plato's dialogues, for example, which helps us understand things like how his views evolved over time. That's a typical sort of use of stylometry.

And then using latinized words also makes normal things sound more technical or scientific than they really are. For example you can say "let's implement business process improvements" or you can say "let's do things better."

It is interesting to notice that when people want to sound official or authoritative (in business documents, for example) they tend to lean more on long, latin-derived words rather than the plainer, earthier words of Germanic origin.

Philosophers tend to be interested in the "foundational" questions about math and other sciences. In the case of math, in practice this means that good philosophy departments will often teach courses on first order logic and set theory, and philosophers such as Frege and Russell made major contributions in these areas. But they may also get more interested than mathematicians would in the questions about about the nature of logic - the nature of truth, propositions, the viability of alternative or non-classical logics, and so on. And then for example various modal logics can be helpful for thinking about possibility, epistemology, ethics, and so on.

Historically there is also a lot of overlap as well. Formal logic was invented by Aristotle. Leibniz and Descartes are equally large figures in mathematics and in philosophy.

Plato is certainly very approachable, and perhaps Athanasius is as well; of course there are examples on the other side as well - Aristotle leaps to mind. Better, probably, to read an account of his logic than to try to read the Prior Analytics, for instance.

The first paragraph reminds me of the great example by which J.L. Austin distinguished precision from exactness: a stick could be exactly, but not precisely, six bananas long.

In the present case we could say that six random bananas could accurately but not precisely represent the length of a stick.

This is really neat in concept. However, I would be cautious about the substance here. I took a look at one philosopher that I know well---Socrates---and several of the entries seem very doubtful to me.

> We need to know how to conduct our lives and ourselves.

Sure, but doesn't everyone think that?

> Things like 'justice' do exist; not materially, but in some sort of essence.

This is getting metaphysical, something quite foreign to Socrates.

> There can be no cut and dried answers; answers themselves are open to question.

This reads to much in to the conversational aspect of the dialogues. Socrates is always pointing out that in many areas of life there are experts who know the correct answers and can be appealed to. In the moral realm, sadly, there seem to be no experts (though there are pretenders, hence lots of questions), but the point is that it would be great if there were experts here too!

> To the man who preserves his integrity no real, long-term harm can come.

"Integrity" sounds too personal or individual; this should be "the just man", or "the righteous man". And it does not need to "long-term" qualification.

That is four out of seven items. There rest of the list seems broadly ok, though it is a rather eccentric selection of Socrates views. Gotta start somewhere though, I guess.

One the other hand Socrates presents unusual problems of interpretation, so this may well not be a representative entry.

I dropped out of a PhD in philosophy and am now a software developer. Tinkering with some of my old papers is my main hobby these days. I also have little kids, so I don't get a lot of time for it, but I'm hoping to have at least one significant item ready for publication in the next year or so.

Dave Morton left after one month.

I think Austin would consider the "I take it that I'm sitting before a desk" in the second sentence of this article to smuggle in the offending suggestion right at the start. We say "I take it" when we have a general working assumption about things, likely based on second-hand evidence, and on topics about which we are not ourselves experts. On the Austinian view, scepticial doubts tend to rely on intimations like this one: that sitting right in front of something and looking at it is somehow just like hearing about something and then building out some unreflective inferences. And then no doubt it is hard to certify the chain of evidence. But why start there?

Anyway Austin is great, and funny too.

I was just reading a history of the Hellenistic world, and something like this seems to have been common in towns in Ptolemaic Egypt, and functioned as the main check on otherwise rapacious taxation.