Philosophy Archives - Page 2 of 10 - Maier Files Series Tidbits and Articles-

The Language They Had to Dilute

There is a grammatical fact that most people walk past without noticing. Germanic languages — German, Dutch, the Scandinavian tongues, and their ancestor Old English — have no true future tense. This is not a curiosity. It is not a limitation. It is a complete philosophy of time, encoded in the structure of the language itself, and it has been sitting in plain sight for as long as these languages have been spoken. The Missing...

Is truth an illusion?

TIDBITS The sophists were skeptics who doubted the possibility of attaining true knowledge of anything. They emphasized the practical application of rhetoric in civic and political life. Some claimed that they could teach both a thing and its opposite, simultaneously arguing both thesis and antithesis. One of the founders of sophism was Gorgias a Sicilian philosopher, orator, and rhetorician who settled in Athens where over his long life of 108 years he made large sums...

The Living Logos

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...

The Twelve Knights

In almost all myths all over the world the same theme reoccurs. The twelve knights, twelve tribes, twelve heroes etc. In his last and longest dialogue (Laws), Plato teaches: There are twelve feasts to the twelve Gods who give their names to the twelve tribes. Also in early christianity, the image of twelve disciples with the Godman figure at their center echoes the twelve constellations which revolve in the heavens around the pole star. Are...

Maier files & Rolf Dietrich

$Descartes$

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...

What Cosimo Heard

In the autumn of 1438 a delegation of nearly seven hundred Greeks crossed the Adriatic into Italy. At its head walked the Emperor of the Romans — by that title the Byzantines still meant themselves — and the Patriarch of Constantinople. Behind them came bishops, monks, scribes, philosophers, and the manuscripts they carried in iron-bound chests. The city they had left was dying. The Ottomans had taken almost everything the empire once held. Only Constantinople...

Prometheus and Atlas

The Two Women

The Nibelungenlied is not a simple story. A hero. A deception. Two women who loved the same man, for entirely different reasons, and both lost him. What follows is not a fairy tale. It is a precise account of what happens when two genuine principles are placed in direct collision — and neither is wrong. Before Kriemhild. Before the marriage. Before the river. There was a rock. And on the rock, a sleeping woman surrounded...

The Evolution of Civilizations

The Evolution of Civilizations expresses two dimensions of its author, Carroll Quigley, that most extraordinary historian, philosopher, and teacher. In the first place, its scope is wide-ranging, covering the whole of man’s activities throughout time. Second, it is analytic, not merely descriptive. It attempts a categorization of man’s activities in sequential fashion so as to provide a causal explanation of the stages of civilization. Quigley coupled enormous capacity for work with a peculiarly “scientific” approach....