| Thursday,
October 13, 2005 I have received
a letter regarding, and quoting from,
Murray's article (recently published in Commentary and now
republished in
Opinion Journal). That letter has caused me to write a reply on the
subject. You can read it all in Mail.
I suspect it will generate considerable controversy.
At dinner last night, we were discussing a well known popular political
philosopher. Steve Sailer said "If he hadn't spent so much time studying
Hegel, he'd be a lot more sound."
To which Greg Cochran remarked, "That's true of everyone."
A very interesting evening. Cochran and his partner look to have genetic
data that will go far toward explaining a number of cultural trends and the
explosion of Western Civilization; their theory is falsifiable and so far
fits the historical record quite well. Fascinating.
Continuing the discussion, Cochran said "If philosophers had developed
anything useful, physicists would use it."
Which is of course true, and a capsule summary of the history of Western
philosophy. Magic and Science were born twins. One of them worked.
Philosophy, "natural philosophy," and science were at one time all one
thing, as Neal Stephenson has so brilliantly shown in his huge three volume
"Baroque Cycle" (the third volume is called The System of the World; the
characters are Newton and Leibnitz). Science moved away from philosophy, and
what is now called philosophy tends to be studies of all the theories of the
world that didn't work very well. That's not universally true, but it's a
first approximation.
===============
And let me recommend:
Subject: The Second Amendment in Action
My Dear Dr Pournelle,
May I call to your kind attention the following. I
think you will find it amusing as well as a proper use of weapons in self
defense.
http://www.chumfm.com/MorningShow/bits/march24.swf
Jim Keaton
Warning! Do not listen to this while drinking coffee!!
=====================
Back to a former topic:
A number of you suggested that I look into Netmeeting, which is built
into Windows software. I find that it certainly was built into Windows
2000, but I have been unable to get a clue as to how to make it work in
Windows XP Professional. Anyone know more about this? It might
be handy indeed.
[THANKS FOR ALL THE ANSWERS. I'll have a definitive answer on this posted
shortly.]
================
Subject: Schopenhauer on Hegel
Sailer's and Cochran's remarks on Hegel bring to
mind Schopenhauer's timeless remark on Dr. Dialectic as quoted in Vol. 2 of
Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies":
Should you ever intend to dull the wits of a
young man and
incapacitate his brains for any kind of thought
whatever,
then you cannot do better than give him Hegel
to read. For|
these monstrous accumulations of words that
annul and
contradict one another drive the mind into
tormenting itself
with vain attempts to think anything whatever
in connection
with them, until it finally collapses from
sheer exhaustion.
Thus any ability to think is so thoroughly
destroyed that the
young man will ultimately mistake empty and and
hollow
verbiage for real thought. A guardian fearing
that his ward
might become too intelligent for his schemes
might prevent
this misfortune by innocently suggesting the
reading of Hegel.
--
John Walker
http://www.fourmilab.ch/
Thursday TOP
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