Want to take part in these discussions? Sign in if you have an account, or apply for one below
Vanilla 1.1.10 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
I wrote a stub about a quite an exceptional mathematical philosopher Albert Lautman.
I’m glad that there’s a Lautman stub, but I don’t know that you want to note that he influenced Laruelle. I haven’t read his book Anti-Badiou, but I hear there are atrociously bullshitty things about quantum physics in it. http://abuseofnotation.tumblr.com/post/44185560373/aunty-badiou
but I don’t know that you want to note that he influenced Laruelle
This has been repeated many times in the articles by other people in the volume with his collected works. There were few observations by Laruelle about the science which I appreciate though. I do not support that you use harsh language at nForum.
Sorry for the harsh language, my reaction to Laruelle is harsh because I have literally heard people who think Derrida was a good philosopher complain about Laruelle’s obfuscatory language.
Which collected work volume are you talking about?
I added David, Alain Badiou, and Gilles Deleuze to the list of people that Lautman has influenced, b/c they were/are influenced by him more than Laruelle is. For proof of his influence on Deleuze, see essay 19 in this volume: http://www.elimeyerhoff.com/books/Deleuze/Graham%20Jones,%20Deleuze’s%20Philosophical%20Lineage.pdf . (I can remove this link if anyone would like … just wanted to have it up for a short while to give people a chance to see the essay). See this essay for proof of Lautman’s influence on Badiou: Badiou and Lautman .
(Evidently Ferdinand Gonseth, Jean Largeault, and Jean Petitot are also philosophers who have recognized the importance of Lautman).
Trent, Lab is not a value site, we note facts and not opinions on how somebody is “good philosopher” and I am personally very much any change in this policy. So it is irrelevant if Laruelle is good or not. He is in an influential/well known French 20th century philosopher and what I wrote is a fact. I did not write that he is a “good philosopher” nor we have the notion of “good philosopher” defined in Lab.
That’s why I asked which collected work volume you are talking about. I have never seen anyone say that Laruelle was influenced by Lautman and I don’t think Lautman and Laruelle’s positions are compatible. Actually, I just talked to my friend Robin Mackay - the translator and publisher of some of Laruelle’s books - and he said that he has never heard of Laruelle mentioning Lautman nor noted any influence. Furthermore, he said that Laruelle’s position is very far from Lautman’s because Lautman is concerned with identifying fundamental philosophical problemata behind mathematical and physical theories, and Laruelle would see these problemata as traps which ensare one back in philosophy. I don’t see what facts there are which suggest that Laruelle was influenced by Lautman, so unless you can provide those, I think you should remove his name.
Regarding facts and not values: - I think the notion of “good philosopher” is to some extent implicitly defined in nLab b/c there are quite a lot of philosophers out there, the vast majority of whom do not have nlab entries. If a philosopher has an nLab entry, I imagine it is often b/c someone found his work interesting enough to include. Also, Laruelle is significantly more obscure than people like Deleuze and Badiou (to my knowledge, Laruelle is not influential or well known), so even if Lautman influenced Laruelle, it would present a skewed picture of Lautman to just have Laruelle and Zalamea’s names up. Sociologically, I would also be worried that having Laruelle’s name there (and only one other) could scare Analytic minded philosophers and mathematicians away from Lautman, which is the main reason why I wanted his name removed in the first place. - I don’t know that nLab has an official policy for philosophical rather than mathematical entries, but this is enough to make me wonder what the official philosophical entry policy would be:
Wikipedia enforces its entries to adopt an NPOV – a neutral point of view . This is appropriate for an encyclopedia. However, the nLab is not Wikipedia, nor is it an encyclopedia, although it does aspire to provide a useful reference in many areas (among its other purposes). In particular, the nLab has a particular point of view, which we may call the nPOV or the n- categorical point of view .
…
at the nLab, we don’t care so much about being neutral.
(By the way, I don’t necessarily think Laruelle is a bad philosopher - I’m actually interested in the project of designing an interdisciplinary post-philosophical mode of knowledge. I just think that other philosophers/intellectuals - such as Reza Negarestani, Gabriel Catren, and Fernando Zalamea - are more useful in that endeavor than Laruelle is…. and don’t come with the baggage of questionable things said about technical subjects like quantum mechanics.
Which observations of Laruelle’s about science did you find interesting?)
I imagine it is often b/c someone found his work interesting enough to include
Maybe so, but it doesn’t necessarily mean an endorsement of the whole body of work. Just some aspect of the work that might be relevant to an entry. I’m pretty sure we could come up with such examples of philosophers mentioned on the Lab, where a full endorsement is not implicit.
^ I agree, and zizek is an example of someone who is mentioned but presumably not endorsed (outside of the quote where he says that reading hegel in relation to quantum mechanics and vice versa could be productive).
If a philosopher has an nLab entry, I imagine it is often b/c someone found his work interesting enough to include.
Did I wrote an entry about him ?? I have just written a remark of one line. Edit: below I comment that I removed it anyway.
interdisciplinary post-philosophical mode of knowledge
Are you despising philosophy ?
so even if Lautman influenced Laruelle, it would present a skewed picture of Lautman to just have Laruelle and Zalamea’s names up
Surely, every stub is a skewed picture and asks for more information!
Indeed you are perfectly right that the influence to Deleuze is very explicit and far more important (especially because there is a personal connection there as well), so I have removed the other phrase. Now the passage at Albert Lautman reads:
He influenced the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou, the mathematician and historian of culture and mathematical philosophy Fernando Zalamea, and the philosopher David Corfield.
If you can provide further information on
(Evidently Ferdinand Gonseth, Jean Largeault, and Jean Petitot are also philosophers who have recognized the importance of Lautman).
that could be valueable…
I do not know why you mention Žižek, we can just attract spam that way :)
my reaction to Laruelle is harsh because I have literally heard people who think Derrida was a good philosopher complain about Laruelle’s obfuscatory language
I think that the gossip is not a relevant issue to be mentioned in Forum, though.
I don’t know that nLab has an official policy for philosophical rather than mathematical entries, but this is enough to make me wonder what the official philosophical entry policy would be:
Wikipedia enforces its entries to adopt an NPOV – a neutral point of view . This is appropriate for an encyclopedia. However, the nLab is not Wikipedia, nor is it an encyclopedia, although it does aspire to provide a useful reference in many areas (among its other purposes). In particular, the nLab has a particular point of view, which we may call the nPOV or the n- categorical point of view.
Look,
Lab is a place for our notes on information which is of our personal importance so we can include something even if it is not so important for the rest of universe.
The fact that we are biased toward, say NPOV, means that we THINK and have ARGUMENTS that this is RIGHT, even if it is not widely accepted. We do NOT really think that this is a question of taste so much as a feature of nature. We have no final proof, it is a belief of this group of people based on partial evidence. In some cases, our point of view will not be the best but will be subject to argumentation. The level of bias in judging persons is naturally much higher than in judging mathematical concepts, so we have to be more cautious there and it is likely to be less agreed upon. Hence we can not take our common opinion on such issues so we are to be more conservative in language and exposition. When we argue about adjoint functors, there are many formalisms and there is some preference toward more modern ones which work beyond simple 1-categories, so we prefer say internal 2-categorical point of view. But it is harder to decide that a natural tendency (that is, to be fully resolved after next scientific revolution) is that some philosopher X i better than Y.
I added more content at Albert Lautman.
If a philosopher has an nLab entry, I imagine it is often b/c someone found his work interesting enough to include.
Did I wrote an entry about him ?? I have just written a remark of one line.
I suppose that Trent was worried since, when I added markup to Albert Lautmann, I included brackets around ‘François Laruelle’, inviting people to create an entry about him. Now that he's no longer mentioned, I put brackets around ‘Gilles Deleuze’ and ‘Alain Badiou’. But I intend no endorsement by any of this; indeed, don't think that I'd ever heard of any of them before this discussion (although the English Wikipedia's description of Deleuze's idea that identity derives from difference, rather than vice versa, seems interesting).
Deleuze’s idea that identity derives from difference, rather than vice versa, seems interesting
Precisely, difference or change…very interesting.
Are you despising philosophy ?
No, the fact that I think engaging with materials in such a manner that a philosopher ceases to be just a philosopher but becomes also a mathematician, a musician, a physicist, a cognitive scientist or what have you is a productive mode of intellectual exploration does not mean that I despise philosophy.
if you could provide further information on [Ferdinand Gonseth, Jean Largeault, and Jean Petitot] that could be valuable …
I don’t know anything about the first two, but Petitot is a philosopher/polymath whose research is on “dynamic models in cognitive sciences” (semiotics, morphodynamics, differential geometry and computational vision, naturalized phenomenology etc..) and “epistemology of mathematical models” (the problem of platonism in philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy and phenomenology of form, epistemology of mathematical physics, analysis of different doctrines in philosophy of mathematics). Petitot was also the first one outside of France to seriously engage with Lautman.
What is the easiest way to put diagrams on an nLab page? (Namely, the diagrams from Petitot’s Refaire le « Timée » : Introduction à la philosophie mathématique d’Albert Lautman and Lautman’s nlab page. I would translate the diagrams into english of course.).
(I added Petitot to the list of people that Lautman has influenced and added some info from his Refaire le « Timée » article.)
Just added an excerpt form Book IV of Lautman’s Mathematics, Ideas, and the Physical Real on how Lautman sees mathematics and the sensible physical world as both participating in the same dialectical structure:
[…] It is also possible that the distinction between left and right, as observed in the sensible world, is only the transposition on the plane of experience of a dissymmetrical symmetry which is equally constitutive of the abstract reality of mathematics. A common participation in the same dialectical structure would thus bring to the fore an analogy between the structure of the sensible world and that of mathematics, and would allow a better understanding of how these two realities accord with one another
I added more content at Albert Lautman.
Just throwing this out there in light of the content Zoran added:
Zalamea expands upon those 5 characteristics that Lautman identified, and sees contemporary (~1950-now) mathematics as conserving those 5 modern Lautmanian characteristics and incorporating 5 new ones (that are not present in modern math):
Then, he classifies the work of 13 contemporary mathematical greats (the 13 who he case studies in detail in the 2nd part of his book) along those lines:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grothendieck | x | x | x | x | x |
| Serre | x | x | x | ||
| Langlands | x | x | x | ||
| Lawvere | x | x | x | ||
| Shelah | x | x | x | x | |
| Atiyah | x | x | x | ||
| Lax | x | x | |||
| Connes | x | x | x | x | |
| Kontsevich | x | x | x | ||
| Freyd | x | x | x | ||
| Simpson | x | x | |||
| Gromov | x | x | x | ||
| Zilber | x | x | x |
Are there any characteristics that he should’ve added to the list? Are there any mathematicians other than Grothendieck who have incorporated all 5 into their work? Is there a different (arguably more or equally accurate) set of characteristics describing contemporary math according to which a mathematician other than Grothendieck appears supreme?
(I added these characteristics to the Fernando Zalamea page + some references (mostly related to mathematics) to the Charles Sanders Peirce page btw.)
Thank you for your work! I did not notice that we had a stub on Peirce.
I added a reference to the edition of Philosophiques dedicated to Lautman, and to an English version of my article within it.
1 to 20 of 20