from the glacier: Outline for a book that I should write but never will

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Outline for a book that I should write but never will

I was thinking. . .

Long story short I was stuck someplace with little to do but doodle on someone else's sticky notes, an idea occurred to me, and I sketched an outline. It would be called, grandly:

Unity in Truth

How All Human Knowledge is Related

It breaks down into sections like this:

I) The Hierarchy of knowledge:

A) Reductionist Science
1) Biology reduces to organic chemistry, reduces to chemistry, to physics. Hierarchical.
2) Comparison between the metrical observational inductive scientific method and the theoretical deductive 'top-down' methods in science. Their relationship.
B) Philosophy and Nature/Man
1) Politics reduces to ethics, to a philosophy of man
2) Physics (philosophically) reduces to metaphysics. Hierarchy.
3) The threefold investigation of man into nature, as man, nature, and man's knowledge of nature (psychology, ontology, epistemology). The relationship between the three.

II) Mathematics and the Cosmos:

A) Math as logic
1) The failure of axiomatic structures explaining mathematical reasoning.
2) A consideration of the possibility of math as human structure simply, its possibilities and drawbacks.
B) Mathematics as Pythagorean/Platonic
1) Can mathematical objects really be 'out there'?
2) Tie in the relationship of espistemology to ontology from (I.B.3) to understand
mathematic objects existing separately from man.

III) Conclusions?

Okay, I know some of you out there are thinking "what's the point? Thomas already proved that truth=beauty=good=being=one". I know. I haven't forgotten. Others might say "okay what is the point? I really don't see where you are going" Answer: I guess I just like to think that all human understanding is ordered toward the same goal. I don't think that it is productive in the since of interdisciplinary dialogue to simply state this, without at least trying to understand how this can be. Someone I know talks a lot about the tradition. Agreed. But the tradition is richer than philosophers philosophizing, mathematicians mathematizing, experimenters experimenting, politicians politicizing, depending on one's departmental (compartmentalized) slant. Richer by far, I say, because all of these are co-mingled, mixed together, but in a hierarchical systematic way that can (or at least could) be elucidated (not merely stated as if self-evident).

But I will never write it anyway.

12/28/2005 08:08:00 PM | Permalink

Disagreements

It is actually the sort of book worth writing because nobody is going to read Thomas' work. I am not saying it isn't good for them the just do it. Besides the more people we have screaming about this the better.

Incidentally, it is because of this sort of view of Truth that I have a hard time deciding what direction I want to take my education. (I know, I know, I could have worse problems.)

Argued by Andrew Simone | 4:06 PM

I largely agree. The problem you refer to is THE problem--and on the practical level is the problem of the university, as no one this side of the scholatics and especially this side of the 19th century has yet organized one like it should be organized, at least I'm pretty sure of it.

The principles and methods of the sciences are disputed and the whole thing is a disordered trainwreck...granted it will never be all neat and clean, but a University built upon the notion that this hierachy among teh sciences, or at least built with the self-awareness of the importance of finding the divisions and methods of the sciences and the proper relation of these sciences to each other, is exactly what we need.

It is amazing how truth is one, and how no matter what one studies, or experiences, you can make a potentially infinite amount of cool connections between things that help you understand all the things you connect as well as further things you discover through these connections.

To write that book you speak of properly, would, I think, take an entire school of people working in all those fields in some way together, with more than a few philosophers and theologians at the center of things, and, if it was to ever even have a...prayer...of success, these people would all have to live somewhat virtuous lives and realize that Christ is the living Truth at the center of all of it.

And thats the point at which I just kind of...try to go back to living a good life.

Cool post--but I've read it a bujnch of times now--where de hell are you?

Argued by Anonymous | 7:41 PM