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----- 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."