geopolicraticus

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Friday 07 March 2025

Grand Strategy Newsletter

The View from Oregon – 331

The Boundless Ocean of Unlimited Possibilities

…in which I discuss interdisciplinarity, univocal sciences, appearance and reality of subdisciplines, starting over from scratch, de-centering, Copernican re-foundings, Einstein on the limiting case principle, weak and strong formulations, axioms and postulates, and the science of science…

Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/the-boundless-ocean-of-unlimited

Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/the-boundless-ocean-of-unlimited-possibilities-2b14c10ed0e3

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1jcyei1/the_boundless_ocean_of_unlimited_possibilities/

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The Unity and Continuity of European History

The Sinews of Western History.—Schopenhauer held that reading Herodotus was a sufficient exposure to history, but he might have said with equal or greater justification that the Alexander Romance is sufficient history, since it was the Alexander Romance of late antiquity that was copied, circulated, translated, and adapted countless times throughout the Middle Ages, serving as the historiographical bridge between antiquity and modernity. It is the Alexander Romance that is the sinews of Western civilization, establishing the continuity of that tradition over expanses of historical time punctuated by gaps and ellipses. Like many books of late antiquity, the Alexander Romance is a strange pastiche of history, legend, fantasy, and myth. With each re-telling it gained in miraculous events, making of it a collective receptacle of the West’s historical imagination. Much of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César is taken up with the Matter of Rome, largely consisting of the heavily embroidered lives of Alexander and Caesar, together with the Matter of Troy (the Trojan War), the Matter of Britain (King Arthur), and the Matter of France (Charlemagne)—essentially, the same heroic story reenacted in the many geographical regions of Europe. In this way, the unity of European history appeared as an alternative formulations of a single categorical history, each individual episode of which was demonstrably equivalent to any other episode.  

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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Vasconcelos and the Cosmic Race of Mexico

Friday 28 February 2025 is the 143rd anniversary of the birth of José Vasconcelos Calderón (28 February 1882 – 30 June 1959), who was born in Oaxaca on this date in 1882.

Vasconcelos has been enormously influential in Mexico, not only as a philosopher, but also in terms of his institutional legacy, since he was rector of the national university and served as Secretary of Public Education. Vasconcelos laid out his vision of the distinctive destiny of Mexico and its people in his 1925 book The Cosmic Race, which continues to be influential a hundred years later.

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:               https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Text post:        https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/vasconcelos-and-the-cosmic-race-of

Video:              https://youtu.be/hCDL9trPubI  

Podcast:          https://open.spotify.com/episode/3DJl35WVedcGjspT0vSn0z?si=uwk109hqQHuZ7xUi4Y5wdg

Episode:          S02EP16

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Mircea Eliade on Archaic and Historical Man

Historical Beings.—Modern man, according to Mircea Eliade, whom he also calls historical man, is characterized by being consciously and voluntarily historical. This begs the important question of how we are, or how we become, or how we ought to become, consciously and voluntarily historical. There are many paths to becoming consciously and voluntarily historical, and different civilizations have followed different paths to historical being. Being an historical being supervenes on being a biological being: we are biological beings before we are historical beings, and we become historical beings by being underdetermined by our biology. That is to say, we are further determined by history addition to being determined by biology. Eliade’s Archaic man shares with modern man the property to being a biological being, and both moreover share being something above and beyond being a biological being. Archaic man, not yet historical, is however something more than biological. A biological description of archaic man does not fully capture the life of archaic man, so there is some sense, even if it remains elusive to us, in which archaic man has raised himself above the fate of a strictly biological being. To take Eliade at his word, the event that precipitates this division between the biological and the historical is cognition—voluntaristic cognition. It was a thought that raised archaic man above the deterministically biological, and as the thoughts of archaic man accumulated, eventually they exceeded the threshold of history, and historical man was born from archaic man. The unfolding of history in human history, as human beings become increasingly historical, is cumulative, and there may come a day when our cumulative thought exceeds the next threshold and we cease to be deterministically historical.

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THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN CIVILIZATION

In Search of Lost Civilizations

In the second thought experiment of this series, I speculate on the problems that would be involved in searching for extinct agricultural (non-industrialized) civilizations on alien worlds. I consider three climatological scenarios that have forced the extinction of civilizations—snowball worlds, water worlds, and desert worlds—through the disruption of settled agriculturalism. To set this up I discuss some methodological preliminaries on satellite archaeology, and I finish with some of the methodological lessons learned.  

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:               https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Video:              https://youtu.be/P-8VMQhHM30  

Podcast:          https://open.spotify.com/episode/7xvj7pmafJCOJvDtWNWlZ1?si=EpWqgxqfT3-gYkrfjn7PmQ

Episode:          S02EP20

#civilization #ThoughtExperiment #SpaceExploration #archaeology #ExistentialRisk #RemoteSensing #Snowball #slushball #waterworld #desertification #aridification #technosignatures   

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Exemplary lived value is a condition of exemplary eschatological value.  

Alexandrian Exemplarism.—Conquerors have imagined their legacy as the empire that they leave to their descendants, but empires rarely endure as imagined by their founders. Alexander the Great’s life was short, and his empire did not survive his death, but his legacy as being among the great conquerors of human history has survived every ephemeral empire since his time and continues to the present day. Alexander the Great endures as an exemplar, but Alexandrian exemplarism isn’t a mere accident of history. The lives of conquerors are liberally embroidered in later tellings, remembered with advantages as Shakespeare had Henry V say, and Alexander’s life as well, but even if the accretions of poets and historians are stripped away, some lives remain remarkable. While short, Alexander’s life was marked by great triumphs—experiences shared by only a handful of men through history—such as most of us can only attempt to imagine, and that poorly. Thus the shortness of Alexander’s life cannot be counted against its lived value, which extended in non-temporal dimensions of greatness. The lived value of Alexander’s life was an essential component in the eschatological value of Alexander the Great as a figure of history. Without his greatness in lived value, including the greatness of his flaws, his Achilles’ heel that was his undoing (hubris is the other side of the coin of greatness, and the two are minted in a single strike of fate), the eschatological value of his life would corresponded to nothing exemplary. Exemplary lived value is a condition of exemplary eschatological value. Lived value is the primordial fons et origo of value, which may overflow into further forms of value that transcend the individual life and become exemplars.  

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Friday 28 February 2025

Grand Strategy Newsletter

The View from Oregon – 330

The Re-Founding of Univocal Sciences

…in which I discuss reticulate science, Haskell Fain, interdisciplinarity, univocal disciplines, as-yet-unformulated sciences, polluted white dwarfs, planetology, exogeology, astrobiology, re-founding univocal sciences, and the siren song of universality…

Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/the-re-founding-of-univocal-sciences

Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/the-re-founding-of-univocal-sciences-deb3fc97af21

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1j4irdc/the_refounding_of_univocal_sciences/

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Deferring Gratification to Another World

Eschatological Value and Lived Value.—How ought one to assess the value of one’s legacy in relation to the value of life as it is lived? The value of a legacy is the naturalistic parallel of eschatology, and as such we could call it the problem of the eschatological value of life. It is also the problem of deferred gratification extrapolated beyond life, as in traditional eschatology, to a fulfillment not experienced in this life. Fulfillments experienced in this life could be called the lived value of life. The eschatological value of life is lived only in the imagination of the individual, who knows, even as he imagines it, that it will not likely come to pass as imagined. Eschatological value is thus as unknown as the salvation of a hopeful soul that seeks after signs of divine election in this life, the difference being that eschatological value is realized in a future state of this world. The future is as inaccessible as another world, but in both there is the possibility of a legacy derived from this world that extends far beyond any possible lived value. In a theological context, eschatological value is eternal, qualitatively exceeding lived value; in a naturalistic context, eschatological value can quantitatively exceed lived value by any arbitrary degree. Unless civilization comes to a sudden end in the near future, anyone’s three-score-and-ten of lived value could potentially be outstripped by several orders of magnitude—seven hundred years, seven thousand years, seventy thousand years or more, limited only by the extent of humanity’s impress upon the cosmos. Again, in a theological context, the calculus of the value of a life is underlined by the certainty of faith, “…in sure and certain hope of the resurrection,” as the The Book of Common Prayer would have it. No such assurance is granted the naturalistic communicant. Lived value surrendered in favor of eschatological value is radically uncertain, and, even if the individual has convinced himself of its likelihood, the compensation of the surrender is never personal. The most we can say is that we may be remembered for longer than we lived. What is the value of the impersonal fulfillment of eschatological value?  

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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

G. H. Mead’s Philosophy of the Present

Thursday 27 February 2025 is the 162nd anniversary of the birth of George Herbert Mead (27 February 1863 – 26 April 1931), who was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts, on this date in 1863.

Mead’s contributions to philosophy and psychology come together in his treatment of time, which he forcefully expresses in an uncompromising presentism that is admirable in the consistency with which he works out the consequences of his theory of time and the self.  

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:               https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Text post:        https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/g-h-meads-philosophy-of-the-present  

Video:              https://youtu.be/6ZjD0B4uFa0

Podcast:          https://open.spotify.com/episode/1HsMBtGKr0zQwpi9btPLTo?si=AxKLIjMiQ2OMgcb5ejhLNQ  

Episode:          S02EP15

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Joining the Rogue’s Gallery of Human History

A Thought Experiment in Legacy.—Beginning in the thirteenth century, there were rumors of a book with the title Treatise of the Three Impostors. The book was believed to be an attempt to undermine all three of the Abrahamic religions, with the three impostors being Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The mere idea that there could be a book like this in existence was a source of both horror and fascination. The idea was so fascinating that eventually versions of the book appeared centuries later claiming to be the notorious treatise. A more clear and present danger was Machiavelli’s The Prince, since it was real. Already notorious in manuscript, The Prince was published five years after Machiavelli’s death and secured his reputation as a name to conjure with. Time has tamed Machiavelli’s reputation, and The Prince is now studied alongside other classics. Another moral panic involved the mere rumor that Spinoza would write a book against religion. Spinoza did in fact leave his Ethics to be published after his death, which it was, and it was regularly denounced until it was widely recognized as a philosophical classic. The Testament of Jean Meslier is another such example, but we have become harder to scandalize, and few today have heard of Meslier. The legacy of these works has loomed large, and their authors have been invoked to frighten the upright. Suppose you conceive a book that you could write, left to be published posthumously, and suppose you knew, you were absolutely certain, that you could do justice to your project in a way that would make your name more notorious than Machiavelli. This is a book that would place your name firmly in the rogue’s gallery of humanity, never to be mentioned without either a denunciation or a disclaimer. Further suppose that you have already published a body of work—interesting, to be sure, but not notorious—and you know that if you write your imagined book, your existing ouvre will be reassessed in the light of your posthumous work and roundly repudiated. But your posthumous book would live on, not least due to its notoriety, and your name with it. Would it be worth it to be remembered as a symbol of evil?  

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Friday 21 February 2025

Grand Strategy Newsletter

The View from Oregon – 329

An Alternative Formulation of the Fermi Paradox

…in which I discuss spacefaring skepticism and suspicion, astrofuturism, inevitability, viable populations, habitability, Pandora’s Box, the Fermi paradox, the ideographic exclusion, nuclear technology, Last Men, realizing ends, buildability and practicality, and constructing cheap nuclear devices…

Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/an-alternative-formulation-of-the

Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/an-alternative-formulation-of-the-fermi-paradox-1977a097782d

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1iyi4zp/an_alternative_formulation_of_the_fermi_paradox/

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The Epistemic Golden Mean of Concept Formation

Boundary Conditions of Abstraction.—The lessons to be learned from a methodological inquiry are not to be found in deriving a solution to a known problem, but in the struggle to find an adequate formalization of an elusive problem that will allow any solution whatever to be derived once the requisite epistemic resources are available. Surveying the problem reveals a range of constraints that bear upon it and a range of possibilities for it. These constraints and possibilities define an epistemic space within which our thought moves as we attempt to capture essential features of the world so as to serve as the foundation for a body of knowledge about the world, i.e., a science. For any essential feature of the world we want to capture in theory, there is a potential concept that is too abstract, and there is a potential concept that is too concrete. If we employ a concept that is too abstract, we become incapable of definitely delineating its properties or distinguishing it from closely related concepts. Our thought remains trapped within theory only, and has no bridge to the world. If we employ the concept that is too concrete, we get lost in the weeds. Or, to shift metaphors, we can’t see the forest for the trees. Our knowledge is too ideographic to generalize. Getting at the “just right” concept is the problem of the boundary conditions for abstraction, i.e., we are trying to find the “Goldilocks conditions” for knowledge. The entire enterprise of science is predicated upon our forming the right concept to capture the given problem. Concept formation occurs within the boundary conditions of abstraction, and the optimal concepts for the framing of knowledge will be the epistemic golden mean between the extremes of the abstract and the concrete.

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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Frankfort and the Form of a Civilization

Monday 24 February 2025 is the 128th anniversary of the birth of Henri Frankfort (24 February 1897 – 16 July 1954), who was born in Amsterdam on this date in 1897.

Frankfort was an archaeologist and an author who strained at the limits of his professional specialization and so occasionally found himself engaged in philosophy of history. His practical experience on excavations in Egypt and Iraq, and his subsequent books about the ancient civilizations of these regions, shine a distinctive light on history and civilization.  

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:               https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Text post:        https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/henri-frankfort-on-the-form-of-a

Video:              https://youtu.be/qbMFzGjRLwA

Podcast:           https://open.spotify.com/episode/44pcyqYvBvAmAxnDsTB2dv?si=SXkBFgt8THyPiYmmkNcq1w

Episode:          S02EP14

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The Future of Logic through Its Past

The Structure of Logical Revolutions.—The lesson that ought to be taken from the historically recent revolution in logic is that formal thought today is little more than being in statu nascendi, and everything in it is up for grabs, including the dominant extensionalist paradigm. The coming into being of a new logic began with the birth pangs of symbolization, formalization, axiomatization, and quantification. It continued with foundationalism, limitative theorems, recursive function theory, and the delineation of metalogical properties, and continues today with natural deduction, model theory, proof theory, and computer science. All the while, the conceptual framework of logic has been enriched and extended, with new fundamental concepts introduced as the result of principled distinctions introduced to remedy earlier conflations—distinctions such as those between intension and extension, syntax and semantics, language and meta-language, and first- and second-order logic. We can scarcely be said to have digested, in our time, all these recent extensions to formal thought. When some future polymath is able to survey these developments, see them whole, and transcend that whole in a new synthesis, that will be the next initial stage of maturity for the new logic that began to take shape in the late nineteenth century. Ancient logic, created by Aristotle, had its initial stage of maturity in late antiquity; medieval logic had its own origins (Porphyry, Boethius), came to an initial stage of maturity in the logica antiqorum (which could also be called a late, decedent development of ancient logic, much as John the Scot has been called the last ancient philosopher), revolutionized itself yet again and attained another stage of maturity in the logica modernorum. Such is the structure of logical revolutions, and such is as we should expect in our future.   

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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Schopenhauer on Herodotus and Historical Categoricity

It is the 237th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860), who was born in Danzig, then just as now part of Poland, although Danzig is the German name for the city, and Gdansk is the Polish name for the city that’s used today.

Schopenhauer wrote little about history, but he held distinctive views about history that can’t be assimilated to familiar views on the philosophy of history. I characterize Schopenhauer’s view as a form of historical categoricity, employing the idea from model theory of a formal system that has one and only one model. For Schopenhauer, the one model of history is Herodotus, and I suggest that, given Schopenhauer’s view, all other histories could be show to be equivalent to Herodotus.

Quora:              https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/ 

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

Links:               https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/

Newsletter:     http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/

Text post:        https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/schopenhauer-on-herodotus-and-historical  

Video:              https://youtu.be/xHN2ruqn5cs

Podcast:           https://open.spotify.com/episode/2fg3QrXS2ycWieO5ioAsN3?si=T9GkMOJsRLS3pju4f7iGVA

Episode:          S02EP13

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Is Formal Science Settled Science?  

The Closing of the Gates of Logical Interpretation.—One of the fundamental errors of our time is the presumption that the terms of formalization are essentially settled and are no longer open to revision. This is the taqlīd of formal thought, and the assumption that underlies this logical taqlīd is that the formal disciplines have been brought to a state of maturity such that no further revolutions are to be expected, and the future holds only “normal science” for all of formal thought in time to come. Of course, every normal science believes itself to be the final form of science, waving away anomalies that will later come to define the future revolution. But after more than two thousand years of slow, incremental development of the Aristotelian paradigm—two millennia of normal science—logic had its revolution in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Mathematical logic departs toto caelo from traditional logic even while remaining backward-compatible with it, in sense of both encompassing and transcending pre-modern logic. This implies that any revolutionary ardor in logic has been spent for the time being. Must we wait two thousand years for another revolution in formal thought, or will the revolution in logic be like the industrial revolution, which continues to revolutionize itself in iterated pulses of rapid development so that industry, technology, and engineering have not yet established a plateau from which “normal” development can settle into a routine?

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Friday 14 February 2025

The View from Oregon – 328

Problems of Interdisciplinarity

…in which I discuss philosophy of psychology, neuroscience, hard truths about scientific research programs, failures of universality, naturalistic encroachments, interdisciplinarity, epistemic progress, thematizing objects of knowledge, and Einstein’s Fridge…

Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/problems-of-interdisciplinarity

Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/problems-of-interdisciplinarity-f1abc7180420

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1iul2tp/problems_of_interdisciplinarity/