Chris Campbell

C.S Peirce

If a machine works according to a fixed principle…it may be a useful aid in reasoning…unless…[so constructed]…any defect in it, it would improve itself…although it could correctly work out every possible conclusion…[it]…would afford no assurance that its conclusion would be correct.

And Hasok Chang got elected too! Hurrah

Brilliant news!!

And perhaps, by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce….

The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, from childhood and throughout his life, suffered from trigeminal neuralgia, allaying his pain with opiates.

This, one of his many sketches, perhaps captures his suffering….

Beautiful; thank you.

From the tree of Peirce….

Is that George Smiley in the distance…?

Thank you for your truly beautiful photographs.

“Tao endures without a name, yet nothing is left undone.”

— Laozi, Daodejing, Addiss & Lombardo tr. (Ch 37)

‘ Ireceived life because the time had come; I will lose it because the order of things passes on. Be content with this time and dwell in this order and then neither sorrow nor joy can touch you. In ancient times this was called the ‘freeing of the bound.’

Zhuangzi

Go well….

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We're finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming…..

CSN&Y

He sees clearly into what has no falsehood and does not shift with things. He takes it as fate that things should change, and he holds fast to the source.”

— Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, Watson tr. (Ch 5)

Enjoy ‘free and easy wandering’…….. Go well….

‘Knowledge is a plastic, applicable stuff….’

Some chemistry references here (barytes)….also anybody else surprised at Peirce’s use of the word ‘stuff’….?

Were there three men and a dog in your boat…?

Couldn’t be clearer…..!

Here, Peirce is seeking to fathom Mendeleev’s arrangement of the known chemical elements, ordered by atomic weight.

Peirce’s Kantian chemistry…

‘I shall now attempt to show that the fhcts of chemistry are explicable by the view of Kant, that matter is not absolutely
impenetrable and that chemical union consists in the interpenetration of the constituents’

CSP 1862

Pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce read chemistry at Harvard. Here, writing on an organometallic compound.

Passing ethyne (acetylene) gas through ammoniacal copper(I) chloride produces copper(I) carbide; when bubbled through ammoniacal silve

Peirce’s sketches accompanying his notes on acetylene.

Beautiful. Thank you.

‘We must not begin by talking of pure ideas, – vagabond thoughts that tramp the public roads without any human habitation, – but must begin with men and their conversation.’ CSP

Sadly,

Regretfully,

‘I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless.

The world is independent of my will.’

Wittgenstein

Policy makers: “Do Not Block the Way of Inquiry,"….

‘It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses; or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind; or lastly, ideas formed by help of memory and imagination….’

Berkeley

[A]ll those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind - that their being is to be perceived or known…

Of the Principles of Human Knowledge
Bishop George Berkeley, 1710

#CharlesPeirce and #MilesDavis - Blue and Green….

I find aspects of Zhuangzi are both amusing and uplifting.

….and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.’

Stoppard Arcadia