In The Shadows of the Mind, Roger Penrose spends many pages discussing whether calculating machines (computers) can match human intelligence. Penrose proposes to elucidate the nature of human consciousness through modern mathematical discoveries and quantum physics. He is working out the implications of Godel’s Theorem but in reverse, so to speak. Since we cannot completely prove any axiomatic system in mathematics, when we do discover truth in mathematics […]
C.I. Lewis, the well-known 20th century American philosopher from Harvard notes in his book The Ground and Nature of the Right that the concept of obligation pervades all of human thinking. Obligation does not refer only to Moral behavior – it applies to every aspect of thinking and behavior that can called right as opposed to wrong. There is a right and wrong way to calculate numbers. There […]
Daniel Pipes on the Middle East, July 16, 2015
“You know, and I can tell you and I have told it so many times, and I will tell it again. Our methodology our analysis, our manner of conceptualizing, inferring, classifying and defining concepts of halakhic matter do not lag behind the most modern philosophical analysis. I happen to know something about modern philosophical analysis. We are far ahead of it, because the tools we employ to analyze […]
Hilbert requires Completeness for an Axiomatic System; that the system itself be the basis for making all inferences and conclusions –But the Torah cannot be reduced to a mathematical, deductive system. It is a system of law. The System can never be incomplete. One must make a Halachic Ruling when practical questions arise. Furthermore, one of the axioms of the Torah is the possuk that one cannot deviate […]
As found in N.R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery. (Cambridge University Press, London, 1961.) [Induction] sets out with a theory and it measures the degree of concordance of that theory with fact. It never can originate any idea whatever. No more can Deduction. All the ideas of science come to it by way of Abduction. Abduction consists in studying facts and devising a theory to explain them. Its […]
P.F. Strawson in his work Individuals an essay in Descriptive Metaphysics describes the conceptual system which we implicitly use in all human thought processes. This system has very general features which we all take for granted but do not bother to take notice of. Delineating concepts such as Space, Time, Physical Objects and the possibility of individuation, singling out individual objects, are part of this description. It […]
Isidore Twersky: Introduction to the Code of Maimonides, Yale University Press, 1980) p. 517. …the influence of this rich and resonant work was, in fact, unusually widespread and multifaceted, both specific and general; its impact – direct and indirect – on later odes was massive, even if not decisive in the strict Maimonidean sense, which it also crucially and creatively impinged upon other genres of halachic writing (commentary, […]
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