geopolicraticus

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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/

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Beating Back the Inevitability of Historicism

Discovery and Justification.—Reichenbach made a useful distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification in natural science, implying that the gap between discovery and justification is intrinsic to science to some degree. In some sciences, or for some problems within a given science, the gap may be more or it may be less, but it is characteristic of science that the discovery of knowledge has a human, all-too-human history. while ideal exposition of knowledge is ahistorical and is a rational reconstruction of that first known through discovery. Reichenbach’s distinction begs the question of which disciplines come closest to collapsing the distinction, so that the order of discovery and the order of justification are nearly the same, and those disciplines in which the gap is a chasm that is bridged only with difficulty. What disciplines require the most radical rational reconstructions, and which disciplines require less reconstruction, and where would history lie along this continuum? If history were a science, Reichenbach’s distinction immediately poses a problem. The context of the discovery for historical science would be an historical process, and its exposition would be a history, so that the rational reconstruction of the context of justification would be a reorganization of one history, the process of discovery, into another history, the rationally reconstructed justification. Can history even be given an ideal ahistorical formulation? It can be argued that the medieval conception of history was ahistorical, which, if it is to be taken as the model of ideal historical knowledge, implicates a particular period in the development of historiography as the non plus ultra of history. It is, moreover, a period not widely recognized for its historical authenticity or rigor, though arguably instantiated in Schopenhauer’s historical categoricity. However, this unlikely approach suggests a valuable perspective on history, and that is the possibility of a history that is the antithesis of historicism—in a word, ahistoricism. With the conception of ahistoricism, we have a means to beat back the apparent inevitability of historicism.

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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Copernicus and the Formal Symmetries of History

It is the 552nd anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus (19 February 1473 to 24 May 1543), who was born in Torun, then just as now part of Poland, on this date in 1473.

The Copernican revolution, like the industrial revolution, wasn’t a single event that happened and now is consigned to the past; both revolutions continue to unfold, and, as they unfold, they continue to transform the world. In this episode I discuss the ongoing iteration of the Copernican principle, that continues, in its development, to place ourselves and our world in a distinctively Copernican perspective. We have not yet seen the end of this.   

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

Discord:           https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD

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

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

Video:              https://youtu.be/kyOAIK7AiCw

Podcast:           https://open.spotify.com/episode/6OXARoplNf8AFURVy0T2Dz?si=EwlwNTdQR8SWb0rOaxVNKQ  

Episode:           S02EP12 

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The Dialectic of the Nomothetic and the Ideographic

Two Pathways to Scientific Rigor.—Schopenhauer’s historical categoricity presents the possibility of a way to nomoethetic rigor in history distinct from the nomothetic rigor of the natural sciences, attained through formal concepts rather than general concepts, but can we also define ideographic rigor for history? Although Windelband’s distinction between the nomothetic and the ideographic has been with us for well over a century, comparatively little effort has gone into clarifying ideographic methodology or into elaborating and extending ideographic methods so that they can stand as a viable alternative to nomothetic methods. There have been exceptions, like Heinrich Rickert, but nothing that we could call a scientific research program has appeared to advance the ideographic paradigm. Windelband himself tempered the distinction, arguing that sciences shift back and forth between nomothetic and ideographic methods as they pass through stages of development that tend toward the one or the other, implying that there are no pure species of the genus. Because the distinction has languished, there has been little or no effort contrariwise to more clearly define nomothetic methodology in contradistinction to ideographic methodology. If ideographic methodologies are to define an entire class of the sciences, demarcating them from the nomothetic sciences, the ideographic method itself would have to be developed in much greater detail. While there is little agreement within philosophy of science as regards what exactly constitutes rigorous nomothetic methodology, there is at least an attempt to capture and extend the methods of the natural sciences, which has been fruitful in its internal disagreement. This effort would be even more fruitful if it was consciously differentiating itself from ideographic methodology.

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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Sarmiento on the Conflict between Civilization and Barbarism

Saturday 15 February 2025 is the 214th anniversary of the birth of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (15 February 1811 – 11 September 1888), who was born in Carrascol, a suburb of San Juan, in north central Argentina, on this date in 1811.

Sarmiento was the seventh president of Argentina and the author of one of the great works of Latin American prose, Life in the Argentine Republic in the days of the Tyrants; or, Barbarism and Civilization. For Sarmiento, cities were the bastion of civilization and the countryside of barbarism, and the Argentine tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas had risen up from rural barbarism to threaten civilization in Argentina. I examine some of Sarmiento’s presuppositions about the relation of the countryside to 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/sarmiento-on-the-conflict-between  

Video:              https://youtu.be/GJy2t9kRpno  

Podcast:          https://open.spotify.com/episode/3L6V7L5eDYX7rhhj0XRRmG?si=TsmRqrSeSXaxEcNVq8QSjw  

Episode:          S02EP11

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The Reconstruction of the Synchronic Present as Diachronic Sequence

Historical Modes of Thought.—What is or what would constitute a distinctive mode of historical thought? Some would say it was Ranke who formalized historical method and professionalized the discipline, but much of Ranke’s method was already implicitly present in early modern histories, as with Étienne Pasquier, discussed by Paul Veyne in Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? Critical textual studies date all the way back to Lorenzo Valla, who proved the Donation of Constantine to be a forgery in the early fifteenth century. The formalization of text criticism is a means to an end, and the end is the reconstruction of past time from evidence available in the present. In other words, the historical mode of thought is the reconstruction of synchronic evidence as diachronic sequence. Collingwood’s a priori historical imagination is a method of reconstruction in the light of ellipses in the historical record. Danto’s analysis of narrative sentences is the weighting of an event in reconstructed time in relation to another event in reconstructed time, the better to produce a diachronic sequence. Varve chronology and dendrochronoloy are reconstructions of past time facilitated by advances in technology and scientific technique—advances that continue in the form of nuclear dating techniques and DNA sequencing. Again, this begins early with the laws of superposition in Nicolas Steno; the use of advanced technologies tend to overshadow the fact that these are new tools in the old quest to reconstruct the past. Perhaps the most distinctive of methods of historical reconstruction is seriation. Here the historians (or the archaeologists) can claim originality. It could be argued that all historical reconstruction is a form of seriation, because we do not find the events of history in serial order, but must render them in a series, and this is the work of reconstruction—transposing the simultaneous order of the present into the serial order of the past. It is here that we should seek after ideographic rigor.   

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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

The Portland Vase is Vandalized 

At 3:45 p.m. on Friday 07 February 1845—180 years ago today—the Portland Vase was destroyed in an act of vandalism. Since that time it has been reassembled and restored several times. The saga of the Portland vase offers us an opportunity to think about the fate of historical artifacts over the longue durée. What will become of them? What will become of us?

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/the-portland-vase-is-vandalized

Video:              https://youtu.be/tqXI6SXmIQs   

Podcast:          https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jKwENe3ijhqHJaJ4nX6kV?si=Cniwy2CPRHiB9UWr39impQ  

Episode:          S02EP10  

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The Pursuit of Ideographic Rigor

Rigor without Revolution.—Because historians, and the histories that they wrote, were passed over by the scientific revolution, there was no inflection point in history that distinguished pre-modern history from modern history, and while the methods of historians gradually and incrementally became more rigorous, there was never a time when the tradition was discontinuous from one generation to the next. The argument could be made that there was a greater transformation in the writing of history in the passage from the ancient to the medieval world than in the passage from the medieval to the modern world. If we are interested in a counterfactual for the intellectual life of Western civilization had its linear development never been preempted by the scientific revolution and then the industrial revolution, we can look to the development of historical thought, which has experienced no revolutions. Instead, history has ever so slowly built on its past, but never enough to introduce a discontinuity into the tradition, and still today we prize histories for the literary qualities, keeping alive the problem of whether history is a science or an art. The possibility of nomothetic rigor denied history for its failure to enter into the spirit of the scientific revolution has left it with the elusive possibility of ideographic rigor. If we view the history of history through this lens, we can trace a wavering line of increasing ideographic rigor from the inception of history in Herodotus to the present day, with two steps forward always followed by one step back. Historians were on their own, without the help of either logicians (whose rigor gave us the formal sciences) or mathematicians (whose rigor informed the natural sciences) in their pursuit of independent canons of ideographic rigor.   

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Friday 07 February 2025

Grand Strategy Newsletter

The View from Oregon – 327

Permutations of Pseudomorphosis

…in which I discuss Oswald Spengler, historical pseudomorphosis, pristine civilizations, Cuneiform, imperialism, Susanne Langer, imposing a template, The Golden Age, and Geoffrey West’s Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies…  

Substack: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/permutations-of-pseudomorphosis

Medium: https://jnnielsen.medium.com/permutations-of-pseudomorphosis-8afafb6771f4

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1iltboe/permutations_of_pseudomorphosis/

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The Next Big Thing in Philosophy Coming Down the Anti-Metaphysical Conveyor Belt

Cartesian Clarity.—Against the linguistic transcendentalism (pace Ankersmit) that has beclouded much philosophical thought, the generation prior to those who pioneered the linguistic turn gave us the early Wittgenstein saying, “What can be said at all can be said clearly,” and Husserl saying, “…we can make our speech conform in a pure measure to what is ‘seen’ in its full clarity.” This Cartesian commitment to clarity and distinctness is now unfashionable, but it remains a philosophical possibility and, at least for some, a philosophical ideal. The reaction against this ideal also sought clarity; most of all, it wanted to achieve clarity through overcoming metaphysical obfuscation once and for all, even though this reaction was the reaction against an earlier reaction again metaphysical obfuscation. Wittgenstein and Husserl were both the founders of anti-metaphysical philosophies. These philosophies had fared no better in laying the ghost of metaphysics than earlier efforts by Hume and Kant. The conveyor belt of philosophy continually offers up new anti-metaphysical philosophies, which are shown to be inadequate to their ambition each in their turn by the next anti-metaphysical philosophy to come down the conveyor belt. But the condemnation of metaphysics common to philosophers until a new generation shows them their inevitable metaphysical presuppositions is only a via negativa to the overcoming of obfuscation, whereas the ideal of Cartesian clarity is a telos toward which we can strive, and a metric against which we can measure our progress toward that ideal.   

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TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Goldstein’s Tentative Metaphysics of the Past

It is the 98th anniversary of the birth of Leon J. Goldstein (06 February 1927 to 24 May 2002), who was born in Brooklyn, New York, on this day in 1927.

Goldstein adopts a position that he calls critical philosophy of history, but it is a conception indebted to Henri-Irénée Marrou, and not to more recent analytical philosophy of history as we might naturally expect. He makes a distinction between the finished product of the historian and the historian’s methodology by which the finished product comes into being—historical knowing—that is the basis of his tentative ontology of historical facts. 

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/leon-goldsteins-tentative-metaphysics  

Video:              https://youtu.be/iSCdZDYimIo  

Podcast:          https://open.spotify.com/episode/7ciC7XU3nXsSq45dYG0M5E?si=zSa_g6VIRrWaZZHwpk-OCA  

Episode:           S02EP09