The curious reader might be interested to know that Diophantus and the Greek thinkers rejected the concept of negative numbers (and irrational numbers, of course) as “patently ridiculous” and “idiotic.” And we are a Greek-based society. So to borrow David Hume’s plaintive question – Then whence Negative Numbers? The answer to this question lies in [...]
Posts Tagged ‘wittgenstein’
The Three Thousand Year Reich of Negative Numbers (part one)
Posted in countable numbers, negative numbers, tagged china, cognitive dissonance, countable numbers, david hume, derrida, diophantus, hitler, horses, india, islam, negative numbers, number line, positive numbers, semantics, three thousand year reich, wittgenstein, yellow menace on November 11, 2008 | 51 Comments »
The subatomic world (part one)
Posted in subatomic particles, tagged atoms, descartes, fairies, latin, myth, neutrino, particles, protons, sam harris, subatomic, wittgenstein on October 27, 2008 | 9 Comments »
Scientists believe in fairies; they call them electrons. That’s just a language game, and we all know what Wittgenstein uncontroversially proved about language games. Supposedly there are these magical little floating things and here are their essential properties: 1) We can’t see them 2) They hold everything together That sounds to me a lot like [...]
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