----- Original Message -----
From: "MC Ward" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 4:47 PM
Subject: Re: 1 poem
> Apologies to Kasper: as a fellow listee kindly bc'd me
> to point out, the correct spelling is _hallelujah_.
> Mea culpa.
>
> Fred: I love your 2-circles exercise; it reminded me
> of a fascinating book called _Laws of Form_ (1969?) by
> G. Spencer Brown, a mathematician and student of
> Bertrand Russell's who went on to become an engineer
> in Virginia. Do you know it? It's pretty hard to come
> by outside large university libraries, but is well
> worth chasing down. The point is how he uses the
> circle as the basis of distinction in all sorts of
> senses.
>
> Thanks again, guys!
>
> Candice
>
I actually read Brown's book in the early 70s. Intimidating to hear it
mentioned again. I'd decided at that time, some five years out of school,
that I would get serious - as serious as a dilletante can be - about
philosophy, stop reading once-trendy existentialists and then-trendy
structuralists (I never liked the later-trendy poststructuralists) and
discipline myself: read Brits! Positivists and Linguistic Analysis types!
Wittgenstein! And teach myself symbolic logic, so that I too could
intimidate people with "iff"s and ": :"s and "p(~q)"s. Laws of Form looked
like just the thing. I got halfway through and there was one diagram and
argument I simply didn't understand. Couldn't get past it. Same thing
happened around the same time with Quine's short Introduction to Symbolic
Logic. As I recall, I was defeated by Chapter 17. Now I just read
philosophy the way it is read in Borges's Tlon (umlaut): as "a branch of
fantastic literature."
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