An Anthropological Curiosity

The reports predicted snow that night. So Friday in my classroom, the possibility was on my students' minds. Having finished her work, one girl asked to draw on the board and so I allowed her to do so.

She proceeded to draw a snow scene, complete with snowman. I thought I had seen something like this before, some event related somehow - and I realized what it was. Cave paintings.

One theory about the purpose of those paintings has it that they were magical in nature, as they often showed hunting scenes. If some of them were done as a way to attract success in hunting, what happened in my classroom was another example of the same thing - sympathetic magic.

In some ways, how little do we change, as a species, in thirty thousand years. The girl would most likely not be happy to think of her actions as magical, and it is possible she would doubt that humanity was so old. Nevertheless, without knowing it, she affirmed the connection we all still have to our ancestors in the ancient past.

The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

The article can be found here. The main idea can be summed up as

...it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what the universe is.

I can think of four systems of elements that supposedly categorize all things. Two are from history, the Western classical elements and the Chinese version. One is from a game, and one is something else entirely. There are surely more, as many as imagination allows, and that is the key.

At the end of Maybe Logic, there are exercises. One of them is to gather a bunch of arbitrary objects and divide them into two categories in as many different ways as possible. This is a concrete demonstration of the principle that categories are a mental phenomenon and not a property of the universe-as-such. Thus philosophical attempts to discover the "true nature" of the "real categories" of the objects in the universe are misguided.

Reputation

Rooster image from here.
All kinds of quotations about mathematics and by mathematicians can be found here.


According to St. Augustine:

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.

This makes much more sense when you realize that in this context, a "mathematician" is what we would call an "astrologer".