Philosophical Enquiries
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Browsing Philosophical Enquiries by Subject "Autobiography"
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Item Open Access From Plato to Socrates: Wittgenstein's Journey on Collingwood's Map(2003) Cameron, Evan Wm.How can I learn and help others to learn to mean more precisely by saying, doing and making things? By attending to how Ludwig Wittgenstein and Robin Collingwood answered that question during the first half of the twentieth century. I show how the last of three answers given by Wittgenstein, and the journey that he undertook to arrive at it, exemplify the kind of answer that Collingwood had been advocating and exemplifying. I conclude by suggesting, however, that a fourth answer upon which they converged unwittingly points even further along the road to philosophical understanding than either of them was able to go, namely that if we are to answer such questions exactly, we must approach them not only historically but biographically.Item Open Access How to Pair the Real Numbers with the Integers - a Précis of the Proof(2023-02-06) Cameron, Evan Wm.Item Open Access How to Pair the Real Numbers with the Integers: a Game of Kitchen Mathematics.pdf(2023) Cameron, Evan Wm.;Can one pair the real numbers with the integers? I believe so, believing as well that the proof follows so simply from the work of Abraham Robinson a half-century ago that neither he nor readers thereafter, minds on other matters, noticed. Had they done so, they would have realised that the pairing obliterates the conclusion and methods of Georg Cantor's 'proofs' to the contrary and therewith his insistence that sets are required for comprehending mathematics, for were there 'no more real numbers than integers', we should have no reason to suppose that there are uncountably many things of any kind within our world, numbers included, and hence no need for them. Within this essay, I prove the pairing, unpack the flaws in Cantor's 3rd 'proof' and sketch the 'religious' passion that drive him to ignore them.Item Open Access Psychopathology, Personal Identity and David Hume(1978) Cameron, Evan Wm.Consider our idea of 'personal identity'. Of what simple ideas is it compounded, and from what impressions are they derived? David Hume was unable to answer the questions to his own satisfaction, and yet he could have answered them, I think, and many more, had he considered the implications of an off-hand remark that he made early on within his Treatise of Human Nature: " . . . in madness . . . our ideas may approach to our impressions" (page 2), for what is 'madness', succinctly, but a loss of personal identity? Hume's Treatise of Human Nature is mistitled, for it remains unconcerned with the possible abnormalities of the mind. I suggest within this essay, however, that had Hume considered the possibilities of abnormality implicit in his theory of the normal mind, he could not only have solved the problem of personal identity but established with remarkable accuracy the foundations of psychopathology as well.