Milesians

Women who changed ideas in Antiquity and in Middel Ages.

Praised for its reliance on observation rather than myth, the Milesian school signals the dawn of science in the West. Whereas Hesiod appeals to the long ago and far away to explain the here and now, Thales and his cohorts do the reverse. In this reversal, we are their thankful, even faithful heirs. But with Hesiod not everything is myth and hearsay. Indeed, Hesiod singles himself out by name as the bearer of a powerfully poetic and distinctly human wisdom that (...) he consistently contrasts with Zeus’ divine wisdom. In this article, the author argues that the Milesians attempt to gain access to divine wisdom, and thus disregard the ambiguities characteristic of human wisdom. One sees this especially in a tension between Thales’ political wisdom and natural philosophy, and later between Anaximander’s cosmology and cosmogony. The author concludes that Heraclitus appears to have been the first thinker to confront the Hesiodic worldview on its own terms, inasmuch as his attempt to bridge the divide between divine and human wisdom always keeps one eye on the ambiguities that pervade human experience. (shrink)

The Essential Herman Kahn offers the public for the first time an anthology consisting of the best of Herman Kahn's work. It brings together, out of the several thousands of pages published in his life, the "essential Kahn"—the most relevant, consequential, and interesting themes, ideas, and arguments of his work in areas such as international relations, public policy, environmentalism, strategic thinking, and futurology.

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This dissertation analyzes the language of clarity and obscurity in Plato and Aristotle. For each of them Heraclitus serves as a paradigm of obscurity. Against this foil, a strictly philosophical notion of clarity comes to be defined. ;Chapter One frames the topic by examining Lucretius' critique of Heraclitus in the first book of De Rerum Natura. In it I take Lucretius' condemnation of Heraclitus' obscura lingua as exemplifying the dominant conception of what philosophical language must be after Plato and Aristotle. (...) ;Chapter Two contains a reading of the metaphors of light which dominate the central books of the Republic. Here Plato sets out for the first time in anything like a systematic way his conception of what philosophy is. I examine how, early in the discussion of philosophical education, Plato introduces Heraclitus' metaphorical use of sunlight as antithetical to his own, and uses the contrast to formulate his own sun-metaphors in the analogy, the divided line and the cave mythos. ;In Chapter Three I turn to the Cratylus. The problem presented to Platonic philosophy by Heraclitus is here defined not only around a specific set of doctrines which need to be countered, but also around the issues of clarity and obscurity in language. ;In Chapter Four, I analyze two distinct conceptions of metaphorical obscurity in the writings of Aristotle. In theoretical philosophical discourse, Aristotle analyzes metaphor as necessarily generating obscurity. Such obscurity is almost universally condemned as establishing an impassible barrier to the truth. In the Rhetoric and the Poetics, on the other hand, while the connection between metaphora and asapheia remains strong, Aristotle gives a certain guarded approval to the alienating effect of metaphorical obscurity in that it can be shown to generate a unique form of insight. Heraclitus plays a prominent role in the framing of each conception. ;An appendix examines the notion of narrative obscurity as formulated by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Longinus. (shrink)

The subject of the dissertation is the futurological problem of the containment and structure of uncertainty by means of systems analysis and related techniques in a book written by the nuclear strategist Herman Kahn entitled On Thermonuclear War published in 1960. The dissertation closely examines how Kahn articulated specific contents for fighting and and surviving a hypothetical and uncertain future war. Kahn considered his mode of systems analyses, scenarios, war-games, and analogies to comprise a scientific method which was both more (...) comprehensive and more precise than the work produced by his national security counterparts. To a large degree, he attributed the greater definition and refinement of his method to the central importance it gives to the otherwise undervalued status of hypothetical possibility. ;His unbounded field of historical possibility suggests the primary epistemological question of the dissertation. In a situation of general uncertainty, how did Kahn draw forth the specific features of any individual condition? I will examine his employment of an abstract quantitative idiom in calculating risks, and his characteristic methods for circumscribing and plotting the scenario-sets which I designate as the dialectic of faith and insight. By tracing the articulation of the originating field, I shall identify the points at which Kahn set limits to hypotheticals. ;How did Kahn make the future an object of study? How did he block or limit the disruptions of variable uncertainty in his scenarios and calculations? How did he manifest his claim for the scientific integrity of his method? In consequence of my attention to Kahn's rhetorical and scientific performances, my review of his ideas focuses on the formal means of the futurological domain: its idiom, elements, themes, and combinatorial patterns. Only this close and serious scrutiny of Kahn's practices of composing the speculative object will yield an understanding of the specific form of planning which shaped, and one might even say, determined, the American nuclear arsenal. (shrink)