Re: The Problem with Atheism
Reply #419 –
But no one pays attention to the pre socratics these days.
Not quite true: Among other things, some pre-Socratic Greek Stoics did creditable work on what we now call the sentential calculus; that the logic of the syllogism eclipsed it is a fact of history that I think retarded both science and logic/mathematics… This, in much the same way as Roman numerals made mere calculation an arcane art! A bad notation makes thought harder than it needs to be… (Yes, I do think that the "modern" first-order predicate calculus should have been recognized and formalized in the Middle Ages. Instead, we had to wait until 1879… ) (Popper himself said this.*)
The only place for joining numbers with mystical approaches would be […]
Do numbers "exist" before they are constructed? Was the square root of two (or negative one) an entity before someone considered them?
Consider π: We do really know that it is an irrational and transcendental number. (Don't we?) And that it is merely the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter… (Not an unusual nor certainly bizarre notion!) Why is it thus?
You may scoff at such questions. But not everyone does; indeed, some great mathematicians have not. And -you'll forgive me for saying so- a lot of people would likely reject most of mathematics; specially, if they understood it!
——————————————
Have you recanted your belief in Platonic ideas, and accepted the Nominalism of common sense?
_______________________
* @Sparta: You'll like this, if you have enough English to read it… Section XI is the most important! (If for no other reason, than that an American of my generation has immediate and conflicting emotions about "Chapter Eleven" filings… I mention this lame joke because I only decided to take your posts seriously after you quoted Popper! )