Intro and first
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Meanwhile this first page dumps some currently open links - mainly from unsystematic browsing through Wikipedia while reading Hilary Putnam's "Representation and Reality" (1988) and "Words and Life" (1994) plus "Hilary Putnam" edited by Yemima Ben-Menaham (2005) to see if I want to get fully to grips with Putnam.
I'm interested because he's a leading light in Analytical Philosophy with a background in both Mathematical Logic and Marxism including active involvement with a US "Marxist-Leninist" ("Maoist") group that was central to the development of the student movement there and influenced ours in Australia or at least Melbourne and indirectly Adelaide in the late 1960s.
I figure it is necessary to understand the Analytic trend in order to re-state materialist dialectics for a modern audience and likewise necessary to have at least a full appreciation of developments in Mathematical Logic foundations of mathematics, philosophy of physics etc so Putnam is likely to be a good starting point.
While recanting from functionalism and showing some signs of relapse into idealism and religion in his old age I would guess that Putnam's approach still fundamentally assumes supervenience and emergentism. See also the discussion page at wikipedia for Putnam entry.
I'm particularly interested in digital philosophy and cellular automata - always intended to follow up on Chaitin and more recently Wolfram (also enjoyed Rudy Rucker sci-fi).
Some important Chaitin links:
Here is a simple one page proof of Chaitin's main theorem and of undecidability of Halting problem. More intuitive than Godel's approach.
Includes link to suggestive implications regarding determinism related to Marx's doctoral thesis on Epicurus and Sakata's discussion of that and perhaps to Hegel's treatment of causality and conclusion that the idea which thinks itself is Nature. I'm still fascinated by the Epicurean On the Nature of Things and see a connection between digital atomic "bits", spontaneous symmetry breaking, self-organized criticality, self-assembly and atoms that swerve... cf later confused conceptions of materialism.
Lucretius discussion of "monsters" also hinted at the theory of evolution by natural selection...
Dialectical materialism and the scientific socialist philosophy of nature can be viewed as a form of dialectical monism and hence closer to both physical and neutral monism than to mechanical materialism. Heraclitus was a monist.
Also need a full appreciation of the various modern schools on philosophy of mind although I can't see that they have much epistemological theory to say in answer to Mao's classic summary in "On Practice":
Discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth. Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational knowledge; then start from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change both the subjective and the objective world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level. Such is the whole of the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, and such is the dialectical theory of the unity of knowing and doing.
cf the secondary school Baccalaureat syllabus for Theory of knowledge for an indication of what any minimally educated person should be aware of.
Dennett's philosophical lexicon could be useful in understanding the folk ways of academic philosophers. Interesting definition of an arthurdantist (misspelled?)
Rorty may provide some background on the relation between Analytic and Continental schools.
Hofstadter's focus on recursion as central to mind has been developed by Dennett. Points towards Chaitin on the mathematical side. Wiki books consciousness studies looks like a good place for background on the psychology/neuroscience cognitive studies side, including some necessary for studying Dennett.
For the relation to ontology (see "On Contradiction"), Objectivity is central. Also necessary to grasp substance as emphasized by Sakata.
On the maths side, Tarski is a pretty fundamental starting point - especially for his semantic theory of truth which relates to philosophy of language where one immediately runs into many of the views Putnam is debating. Putnam crops up with the causal theory of reference.
Game semantics looks potentially more "dialectical".
In computer science ontology the semantic spectrum also leads directly into such areas as hypergraphs, formal ontologies and uml modelling that I won't go into here but under mathematics and computer science.
Likewise Systems Theory connection with Bogdanov may come up here or elsewhere. Same for complex systems. However one cannot avoid the issue of teleology and Aristotelian final cause in philosophy and some of Putnam's stuff looks related to that too. This is generally confused with religion and idealism by mechanical materialists (and Democritean atomists) but much better understood by Hegel and Marx (and Epicurus?). There may be something of the political differences between Bogdanov and Lenin (petit-bourgeois and proletariat) in the static harmonizing concepts of Bogdanov's tectology and homeostasis and Darwin's "dangerous idea" of evolution.
Background to all this is that I'm going through Hegel properly as part of a cycle including Lenin's philosophical notebooks (CW Vol 38) and Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Marx's Capital (including Contribution, Grundrisse, and Theories of Surplus Value) and other philosophical works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao.
After re-reading the shorter (Encyclopedia) Logic and some Ilyenkov I decided I needed to review Kant's Logic and thence the Analytic school before continuing past chapter 2 of the greater ("Science of") Logic or other works. End up needing to review the meanings attached by philosophers to words like reality. Also reminded of ongoing interest in mathematical logic, Godel etc and related interests in abstract computer science and practical computing.
Also need more background on Enlightenment and earlier (including ancient Greece, Vedic, Taoism etc).
Also need to understand what others understand by Marx, marxism and works such as Capital etc
Flocking is a fascinating illustration of emergent pheneomena and of a particular phenomenon central to problems in philosophical and political struggle. See swarm robotics. and swarm intelligence
Self-organization spontaneous order and autopoeisis is central to the application of dialectical materialism to historical materialism, political economy and practical politics (and also relates to the emergence of concepts in epistemology). The maths of random graphs may be relevant. See also the small world phenomenon and stigmergy. The edge of chaos is where we want to be and this links philosophically to the relation between chance and necessity and between freedom and necessity.
Consider also the nature of ideology and in particular the fascinating implications of "proletarian ideology" in "socialist societies" where bourgeois relations of wage labor are still dominant but under revolutionary transformation.
Will update some missing links and possibly extend this page later but mainly just doing a window dump for now.
