The Examined Year: 2022

Sunday, January 1, 2023

What Is It

What happened over the last twelve months that challenged our assumptions and made us think about things in new ways?

  • The Year in Developed Nations at War with Tamsin Shaw from NYU, author of Nietzsche's Political Skepticism
  • The Year in Supreme Court Controversy with Bernadette Meyler from the Stanford Law School, author of Theaters of Pardoning
  • The Year in Deep Space Photography with Nick Riggle from the University of San Diego, author of This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive

Transcript

Transcript

Ray Briggs  
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything...

Josh Landy  
...except your intelligence. I'm Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs  
And I'm Ray Briggs. We're coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Comments (1)


Daniel's picture

Daniel

Saturday, December 31, 2022 -- 4:41 PM

The year in program-page

The year in program-page emails requires two follow-ups for incomplete discussion in two cases:

1) On the "Death of the Sentence"-program page from post of 8/25/22 an answer-key request to final question at beginning of last paragraph, (--which sentence is longest if earlier than sentence 4, but longer than sentence 6?), is:
a) They're all earlier than sentence 4, by (f); sentences 3, 6, and 7 must be shorter than sentence 5 by (c); sentences 2 and 4 are precluded from being the longest by (g) and (e); so that leaves sentences 5 and 1. We know by (h) that it can't be the earliest, and by (d) that, because sentence 1 is third earliest, it can not be later than sentence 6 by (a) and (b): It must therefore be sentence 5. The grounds for the correct answer can be summarized as: All being earlier that S4, and S7, S6, S3, S5, and S4 are all excluded from being the longest, the question comes down to which can be later than S6, S1, or S5? --S1 is excluded by (d) together with (a) and (b), leaving only S5. Note that the grounds-summary departs from the discovery-narrative while retaining the claim of its having been undergone. The correspondence between the correct answer and the posed question is therefore derivative from the primary correspondence between the truth claim and the discovery-voucher, i.e. the capability and readiness to defend it. This latter point is also part of a limited follow-up to the other case of incomplete discussion from the year in program-page posts, from a 10/8/22-post on the "Heidegger" page, which asks:

2) If truth as conditioned by falsifiability is constituted by an assertion about how something has to be and couldn't be otherwise, where's the correspondence if the thing is identical to what can be asserted of it? The answer is found in Section 44 of the seminal work, (as Professor Sheehan pointed out during the broadcast without going into it), which is that two separate claims of correspondence, a truth's discovery and its correctness, correspond to one another but not to anything in isolation not already contained in them. The correctness claim is one of a relation between ideal contents and physiological judgement activity, e.g. in the brain, et al., which raises the question of which is real without determining how it might be answered, and derives from the more fundamental discovery-claim, which takes the positive ontological position in anticipation of the epistemic concern of "how do you know?", grounded in a given process of discovery and its regenerable narrative history. Heidegger provides as an example the assertion that "the picture on the wall is hanging crooked", where a sense of ontological distinction is signaled that it's the real picture on the wall, not one brought to mind by respective linguistic usages. On the basis of the ontological assumption a semblance-resistance is inherited by the further use of truth claims in inference, producing the secondary correspondences between them which derive from the primary correspondence between truth-discovery and ontology-inheritance in usable truth-claims. This implies however that truths can't live forever, and ultimately must end by becoming mere facts which have lost the regenerability of their histories.

Regarding other year's end matters, instead of a voice-memo invited by the 11/29/22 email, I'd like to include the discovery of Cretaceous frogs which survived the K2 event, suggesting that the extinction of the larger Cretaceous species were not due to it but rather more likely to contagion. And with respect to the same email's call for future broadcast-content suggestions, one which comes to mind as contemporaneously relevant is Giordano Bruno, widely understood as the last person executed by the Catholic church that was not hanged or beheaded, but burned. Apparently he upset things by arguing against Aristotle's crystalline spheres, which are supposed to keep the sun, moon, and stars from falling out of the sky. The method of incineration is important on account of the doctrine that fire according to Aristotle flows by nature upward, whereas anything in the air not materially attached to something else will fall "by nature", seeking its place of rest, downward to the ground. Is there anything in Bruno's work which anticipates this dichotomy in relationship to the outcome of his trial in 1600? Not little distinct interest might be had in exploring possible answers to such a question in an upcoming year's broadcast.

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