In common usage, the word “paradox” often refers to statements that may be both true and false i.e. ironic or unexpected. Some paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One well-known example is Zeno’s arrow paradox, where it appears to show that motion is impossible. Zeno of Elea (c. 490 – c. 430 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of Magna...
Philosophy
Everything on philosophy related to Maier files series. Posts and Thoughts examining existence, change, properties, space, time, causality, and possibility.
Mystery stories leave a flat aftertaste, because before the solution, anyone might have done it; after, it turns out to have been only a certain someone. But the infinite and the unknown endlessly call each other up, letting imagination loose. We love to live on frontiers that enclose a well mannered, finite world but look out toward the at any time unexpected. Is this mere romantic excitement or the dabbling curiosity of our species carried...
Here is a subconscious double standard: Infinities of time seem a little different from infinities of space. It is natural to think that space extends out in all directions forever (or is this a culturally instilled belief?). Time is supposed to be infinite only in the future direction. We ask when time began but rarely where space began. The infinity of past time The infinity of past time is an unpopular belief. Yet it would...
The writer Aventinus stated that the Minne and the Minnesingers did not have anything to do with love and constant courting. That’s not entirely true. There are many enigmas and paradoxes concerning the Troubadour movement and their theme “LOVE” in the middle ages. They propagated the quest for selfhood, the birth of the individual. And the individual’s love is discriminative, personal and specific. You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created...
Heidegger’s Being and Time (1924), a quickly written introductory volume to a proposed multi-volume project, inspired philosophers for generations to come. What did the enigmatic title refer to? “As regards the title ‘Being and Time,’ ‘time’ means neither the calculated time of the ‘clock,’ nor ‘lived time’ in the sense of Bergson and others,” he explained, years after the book appeared. When he wrote that book, Heidegger was dissatisfied with the two dominant conceptions of...
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...
The Delphic idiom: gnothi seauton (“Know thyself”), assigned to Pythagoras, carries an extended history in the Western world. It grew to become popular all through of the teachings of Socrates as well as Plato, along with the query to obtain self-knowledge was, from that point on, much more a challenge of philosophy than of religion. In the religions, Western man made larger attempts to attaining understanding of the characteristics and meaning of the world altogether...
Understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox. Are paradoxes “all in our heads” or are they built into the universal structure of logic? At first sight the idea of knowing what the universe is like, is absurd. American-Canadian neurosurgeon Penfield expanded brain surgery’s methods and techniques, including mapping the functions of various regions of the brain. Penfield’s experiments demonstrated that memories occupy engrams, specific physical sites in the brain. To know about...