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Everything on philosophy related to Maier files series. Posts and Thoughts examining existence, change, properties, space, time, causality, and possibility.

“Wise in Secret”: Diderot, Goethe, and the New Age of Manufactured Ignorance

“Must one be senseless among the senseless? No; but one must be wise in secret.” — Denis Diderot“Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Diderot’s admonition was not addressed to cowards. It was meant for those who see clearly yet find themselves surrounded by a world determined to walk blindfolded into disaster. Goethe, in turn, warned us what happens when ignorance rises from its armchair and takes...

A secret message to Goethe

Goethe had quite an important influence on Otto Maier. Goethe, a poet and at the same time a scholar, who seemed to offer the model of an approach to nature that was both scientific and aesthetic. Let’s take a look at a peculiar dedicatory page in a published book of Humboldt and Bonpland. From July 16, 1799, to March 7, 1804, the German scholar Alexander von Humboldt, together with the french botanist Bonpland, had embarked...
infinity

Arthur’s Grail

The Hidden Wisdom in Arthur’s Grail – In the Celtic sources that are the assumed origin of the Arthurian legends, we are told that the Grail is a cauldron, a symbol both of fertility and immortality. The cauldron was a powerful religious icon of its day. As mentioned earlier in another post, it brought forth marvellous and magical feasts, revitalizing and resurrecting great and powerful armies. According to Gardiner, as he wrote in his book...
brain conscious mind

Brains in Vats Paradox

Penfield’s classic brain experiments of the 1930s inspired a certain famous riddle, long since dubbed “brains in vats” by philosophy students. It goes like this: You think you’re sitting there reading this post. Actually, you could be a disembodied brain in a laboratory somewhere, soaking in a vat of nutrients. Electrodes are attached to the brain. And a mad scientist feeds it with a stream of electrical impulses that exactly simulates the experience of reading...
Space view

Coincidence of Matter and Mind

The idea of the importance of coincidences, as such, was introduced by Paul Kammerer in 1920, in his book Seriality, in which he logged a hundred amazing examples. His complex idea intrigued Einstein and was expanded by Carl Jung, who changed Kammerer’s term to the more widely used word synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidence.” Like Kammerer, Jung noticed that if two events were not causally related, but connected by meaning, it therefore established that a human...
Ishtar

Crescent Moon and Star

It was Rodin who stated that “Man never invented anything new, only discovered things.” Although it’s correct to say that certain symbols have been man-made for a particular purpose, it’s just as correct to argue that everything is somehow inspired by the natural world around us, by the forms of nature, plants, animals, the elements. Even a reaction against the fluid forms of nature is usually inspired by a desire to offer an alternative. Occasionally...

Deciphering Accelerationism

Accelerationism, an intriguing concept rooted in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and embraced by some Marxist theorists, is a radical idea proposing that the best way to bring about significant change is by pushing a system to its extreme limits, hoping to induce its collapse. In this article, we’ll delve into the essence of accelerationism, simplifying its complex theories with relatable examples. The Reductio ad Absurdum Principle Accelerationism draws inspiration from the reductio ad absurdum...
Descartes

Descartes radical shift in mathematics

If you have been the proverbial fly on the wall in Descartes’s bed-room in La Flèche, in southern France, in 1636, you may have watched Descartes laying in bed observing you. His most remarkable idea came to him while observing a fly crawl along a curved path, which he thought about illustrating in terms of its distance from the walls. A revolution in thought was in the making; mathematics would certainly never be similar. The...

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