Discussions, incl. FW Lawvere, M Wright (contd.)

0:00 Partly, just by having more and more kind of intimate marriage ties and financial ties between the individual members of the plutocracies, but also on a more serious scale. In other words, even better, without a formal political system, which would involve all sorts of problems of constitution. So they got the substance. In the morning of 9-11, George Bush said, this is against our freedom. Your freedom to do what, George? Plunder the world? Anyway, yeah, right. Well, in a word, yes. Though one must have no illusions about the character of Islamic fundamentalists, the kind of crazies who did it. As I say, they were themselves very large to the creation of the American Intellectual Services. Yeah, you're mentioning Curzon, actually. Those of you who know a chap called Nick Miller. They can only evade us, and yet they are not all powerful, so they need our help. You need to be armies, Christian armies. In other words, if God is all-powerful, why should we bother to help him? Because these people, clearly these inhabitants of these worlds out there, while we have no choice of superseding them, we must actively help them. It's pure Star Trek, isn't it? You're absolutely right. Pure what? It's pure Star Trek. Pure Star Trek! Or rather, the other way round, Star Trek is just a pure reprise of this sort of... Oh yeah, no, Star Trek and many, many variants. ...Christian.

2:30 Many, many variants. And all of that kind of, you know, science fiction, agenda stuff, and once these are done, I think Freeman Dyson is a perfect illustration of the kind of thing that we're talking about. But it's okay. Yeah, you can get off at that end. I think you're not going to get off at that end. Yeah, we visited the town of Mirandola a year ago. Again, for the sake of your fascination with visiting the sites of these... Very good idea. Whereabouts is Mirandola in Italy? It's in the Po Delta. Oh, it's right up in the north. Well, we're not far from Herrera. All right, so that's not far. The astronomer of the Vatican himself published a rather intensive describing exactly that view. He says he accepts all of physics and everything, you see. It's just that these are the laws that God laid down, and so it's going to evolve according to that. I don't know whether within that Jesus is an anomaly or what, but... Basically, there's no... Well, this is why deists seem to be two views which are both, you know. Well, I haven't gone into it in detail, but I understand that this whole issue of the, you know, the nature of divine agency has always been a big problem, you know, for the theologians. And the deists have a short way with it, which is, you know, the very simple kind of, you know, version of an extrapolation from the first... God is just the first cause, and that's... Which, of course, is why traditionally the Orthodox Christians felt so uncomfortable with desks and were not even prepared to record them in their status as believers. Of course, the other view was very well earned by Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, that 1955 novel. Are you familiar with it? No, I'm not. No, the only thing that C. Clarke had read was the—oh, that was a very long time ago. This one's called Childhood's End.

5:00 Oh, is this the thing which inspired 2001, the movie? Yeah. Ah, right, okay. Well, I think 2001 was a further novel than 2010 also. Right, yeah. It's very much the same theme. In other words, humanity until now has been, quote, childhood, unquote, and now our parents are now coming to. Oh, so mom and dad are coming from beyond the stars to come and take us home. Yes, yes. So when Trump was dead, they come in the form of, you know, spaceships which suddenly appear over every major city, and then the beings which are in them have the traditional appearance of Satan. They're red with horns and a tail, and they're super intelligent, of course. They're qualitatively more intelligent. When they're talking, you can just barely follow them, because they're almost like lecturers on categories. I was going to say, it's been like this for a long time. Sorry, I just thought, oh, all right, all right. But anyway, now you know how we feel then. So that's why we have one we must follow without question, because they are beings. Yet qualitatively... So it's trying, as you say, to make the divine agency semi-material. ...permitted to seize on some distant planet, some distant galaxy, where some vast cloud of desert, above a desert, and there, yes, it's called the overmind, ah, it's a very black cloud, the overmind, the overmind is ordering these stuff to take over, and of course we can only, only follow. I mean, they literally take our children and turn them into, you know, put them all up together with tubes, and they, you know, some task that's been left for the last 40,000 years. This is a guy who gets to talk on television whenever he wants to. And who gets honorary knighthood from the Queen.

7:30 Whatever. Crazy. And his billet and his Sri Lankan. But I think that's a very clear example of the Star Trek. The Star Trek is there, but it's not quite so blatant. But the Giordano-Bruno conception must be that. So it's kind of a very crude attempt to kind of detranscendentalize and provide a kind of semi-materialist content for the notion of God. Detranscendentalize in order to make it acceptable, but at the same time more... And even more. Show that. In many ways it plays the same role vis-a-vis mainstream. Christian theology is the kind of medieval mystery plays and miracle plays played vis-a-vis trying to bring the whole thing down to a level where which will still make sure that the book of Muirhead, he has about three chapters, he has the Cambridge plate and then almost straight to the early English speaking interpreters of Kant and then there's three chapters.

10:00 And then they go to the, you know, to Emerson and the American Cliffs, and then to what, of course, when he was writing in the 1890s, the bang-up-to-date stuff, which is quite an interesting book. Muirhead, G. H. Muirhead, he founded, he was the first philosophy editor of Alan Nunwin, the publishers who published all of Russell's work. And he found a thing called the Muirhead Library of Philosophy, which published a lot of 1890s, and most of the other main British philosophers of that period. Who founded the journal called Mind? Ah, good question. Who did find Mind? It was founded again around that time. I thought it must have been very significant. Yeah, it was founded, it was actually kind of, gosh, I think Mind, I have a feeling that Mind was founded in 1891. It might have been slightly earlier than that. I think it was slightly earlier than that, I'm not sure. Maybe it was, yes. There used to be, in the days before, you know, university libraries in Britain just deaccessioned all their journals, and so just chucked them out for public. There was the University of London Library to have a complete run of mine, and it was my impression that the first volume was... But I could be wrong by a few years, it might have been 18 mid-late. People like Alexander Bain, for example, must have... I don't mean so much who followed him, but also who were the early authors. The guy who was briefly a materialist, who was briefly a collaborator of Engels, and then became an idealist. What the hell was his name? Good LSE. No, no, he never had an academic identity, an academic position. Because one of their early volumes was British philosophy at the turn of the century, by which they meant the turn of the 19th, 20th century, in the year 1900, 1901.

12:30 Come into my head later who this guy was. Bax? No, Bax, B-A-X. He was a relative of the composer, and he had been a member of the International Workmen's Association, Marx and Engels, when he was a very young man. But then, under the influence of that pernicious man, Aveling, Marx's son-in-law, the one who did so much damage, he, the scoundrel, he broke away from... Any sort of serious Marxist position and he became, around that time, around the 1890s, he became a dabbler in... But I'm just trying to think of your question. The answer to your question is who was the founder of MIND? It used to be on their title page. I think it may have been T.H. Green, who was certainly one of those mainstream British idealist philosophers from that sort of 1870s, 80s generation. So it's a good question, I want to know. But you're right, but the monist, I think, is, I'm sure actually mine also was founded with a quite explicit agenda, but the monist seems, because of that, the nexus between Kairos and the metaphysical climate. You know, I published, finally, this review of Grassmark, the historian of Grassmark. No, I didn't, though. Why did I not see that?

15:00 It's on the web. It's on your website. No, it's on the... which might be not perfectly accessible to access. It's quite the long thing. You'll probably have to pay a fortune to download it, don't you? I don't know. I don't, but then my university may have paid them. I don't know. But it's rather long. Send me the first few pages of the translation of the Ars Danians theorem that you and your students did way back. No, you haven't sent me the article yet. Oh, yes, yes, the paper from the conference in... Your machine's recording of my... Yes, which I have, which I was listening to, which is up there, you know. Yes, right, I was trying to think of the name of the... So that's... Which I still have and which is still in... That was published a year ago. Yes, I started that. I was asking you the actual, well, the English translation, you see, of both versions of The first of which was done by OpenCore Publishing. They had actually, they asked me... I remember you telling me this. Mainly because I didn't want to be associated, but on the grounds that the translation was bad, which is also true. The thing is that Aldi was actually a copy boy for them at the time, and he claims to have improved the translation somewhat. He knows German. He studied at Marburg, so he wanted to ask me about it also. But anyway... John Bell seemingly has taken a lot from Hermann Cohen, whom Lenin himself again specifically described as reactionary, using abstract mathematics as a way to promote and so on. But anyway, so Albie, thanks. So among other things, in this review of Grassmann, I mentioned how Grassmann was immediately distorted.

17:30 I have a footnote where I comment a little further on the actual agenda of the court. I remember seeing the footnote, but I haven't seen the whole article. That's right. I remember you telling me all about this. I remember this very clearly. That was published in the book that just came out. No, I didn't quite say that. I was very concerned. I was insulted that I had been describing this as religious. Anyway, Sir Aldi told me now, last week, he said, actually, the young Karras agrees with me, and whatever that means, agrees. There was an accurate description of the agenda. So at the very least, he claims not to be insolvent. I was a little bit afraid, you know, that there was going to be a pointless war of words here if, actually, Aldi had been right, but he turned out to be wrong about that, too. Turned out to be wrong about his reaction, that's why. I do remember studying your paper about Grassman's use of dialectics, and indeed one of the sections of this meeting in October that I had hoped to bring about was going to be a four-day meeting, possibly five days, but only four days. I wanted to devote one day, because this is meant to be a history, a history in philosophy, a history of historical and philosophical aspects of category theory, to devote at least one day to the imprint of categorical ideas in earlier 19th-century human-man geometry, and obviously Graf also, Neuter also, Dedekind, Cayley, and... No, I'd very much like to... It came out in Historia Mathematica. It's appeared now, has it?

20:00 One of the problems is that I can't afford at the moment to subscribe to journals, and of course, you know, I'm nowhere near a university library. That's a hell of a question. But with some publishers... Oh, I know, I know. It is. And the problem is, you know, if you have a university access code, then you can sometimes, you know, you can download stuff. Of course, here I am isolated as, you know, private researcher, if you want to call it. Dignify it even as that and of course I can't I can't afford these things it's a great it's very depressing but I'm hoping that there may be some benefits from some of these new publishers that are coming on stream now like this you know these people in Milan it's Polytechnica oh yes they seem to be they'd be ready to publish a very Very reasonable prices. Serious works. So the question is, in the period of retreat or revolution, should we take Pauley as an ally? Pauley is the chap. Is he? I don't know anything about him. I've only been told that he... I've studied his site, I've looked at some of their publications, and I don't know anything more about him. The organizers, John Bell, Cazale, various people on part-whole relations. There seemed to me to be some very good contributions to that meeting. There was a result, I got you. You may talk to me. Oh, yes. Oh, so that's the same guy, Poli, of course. I remember him now. I hadn't realized it was the same guy. I'm sorry, I just hadn't made the connection. Somebody had told me that this Roberto Poli, who supported the Polytechnica, was a very young guy. That's obviously wrong. I just heard that. Very to me, maybe. No, I had the idea. He was some, you know, kid in his mid-twenties.

22:30 No, obviously, I've got... There might be... Ah, no, that's just... You're not the only one. Cross wires, cross wires. I forgot to hold the... Besides, I heard that from a row dancer. It probably wasn't very reliable. But I saw that they were publishing a book by Gonzalo. Yes, that's the one. Yeah, and another guy, or a sort of intermediate introductory text. I didn't realise it was this one. I should have noticed it, because I knew La Palma was this one. I thought it was, I didn't realize it was his, but I looked at the reviews of that and it looked, I was wondering if you'd actually had a chance to look at it and what you thought of it as a... Yeah, well, I mean, it would serve just that intermediate... As a gentle intermediary level introduction to functor categories, yeah. Well, I thought it might do me a bit of good to study, yeah, I thought it might do me a bit of good to study it. Oh, it's out now. That's good. In that case, I must order it because it's pretty, it's a very reasonable price. That was your point. Yes, I mean, that's what I thought made me think that they... Inexpressive. Yes, and they seem to be publishing some very useful stuff. And when you compare their prices with these monstrous price gouges like Kluwer and North Holland and Alcivia, 200, any of their books. Looking at the content of their list, I thought they should be encouraged. The only reason I'm a little bit wary is because I know that Aluni has approved the support for this meeting in October. But of course it doesn't follow from that, just because he's... Well, even if they did, it doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong with their motives or their agenda. Is it their website or Paul Lejeune's? I forgot. There's a detailed statement in there. I don't know if they have a more serious connection with the formal ontology.

25:00 No, no, well that's a, I guess I just, my first reaction was that that makes such a nice change that I was immediately fairly well disposed to learn from painful experience. That can be a very naive reaction. And their first publication is not bad at all. What they, did they publish conceptual mathematics then? No, well you say their first publication. The first and only publication is Gonzalo. Oh, is that the only thing they've actually published? Well, as I say, that looked extremely interesting, and I was going to send off more of it. That came out more in the pipeline, so maybe more have come out since the last time we looked. Speaking about formal ontology, did you see, I've actually got a cutting which I must show you from the British press from about two months back, that this man, the brother of the... The grand duke of Liechtenstein, who sponsors this, his family have been exposed. The present grand duke demanded that he should be allowed to rule, so that Monarchy and Liechtenstein

27:30 dissolved their stamp, nominal assembly, just kind of rule over an 18th century, yes, pre-1850s. Yes, exactly. Even in Liechtenstein they're wondering whether to send for the many white coats for him. But at the same time, and it's interesting that it came out as a result of this initiative, a huge amount of dirt has surfaced about their role under the Nazis. Under the Nazis, yes. And it doesn't surprise me to discover that it's now been massively documented. The Swiss government during the war and the Grand Duke, the SS over the sea. Yes, yes. Well, actually, in Liechtenstein. Which was nominally, yes exactly, as a kind of gown of the Reich, and the Nazis were actually sending them, these poor Russian slave laborers from the concentration camps, to work on their estates, and several members of the Duke's family were members of the SS, and all of this, of course, was 1945, and hardly anything had surfaced about it since. Until now, when the guy has gone crazy. ...demanding to evade an absolute despot again, and at that point, whichever Swiss bank it is that yanks his chain or whatever else, has decided they better sort of mark his card by releasing all this stuff that they've had for years, proving that he and all his family are absolutely up to their necks in collaboration with the Nazis.

30:00 A couple of months ago in the British press there's a very detailed report in the Daily Telegraph, which is a pretty right-wing newspaper, but... ...his brother's foundation of the... He was also a house worker. No, they didn't mention that specifically, but of course I knew about that from talking to you and knowing about Mary Smith and his activities. That was quite an experience, Mary Smith. Yes, oh my god. I didn't get invited again, I didn't get a reply, I didn't get a return invitation. But you know, he was famous for having gotten a larger grant than any other philosopher. Leipzig went from the German government in order to start some kind of institute for teaching formal ontology to vast numbers of lawyers and so forth, the sort of people that they envisage and quote-unquote apply these theories, but so he received a grant of over a million dollars. No other philosopher ever received that much. He's the pinnacle of philosophical success from the American program. Meanwhile people who have taken serious philosophical ideas, and indeed ideas from categories, and tried to apply them in law, like your friend, you know, the late Kanani, were totally neglected, and probably hardly anybody in the United States has ever heard here. Kanani, a very serious philosopher of law. I was reading his Collective papers in Pompadour that Poisson had in his library. Oh, yes, he was a friend of Poisson also, that's right. In fact, he co-authored several papers with Poisson. Gosh, what an impressive man he clearly was. And yet, as I say, his work has never had an English publisher, whereas people like Barry Smith get up. He's very not far from there, you know. Oh, he died in France, didn't he? No, but his wife is from Angers. And he somehow...

32:30 Well, it's very near. Friends who came to stay with me just before I came up to see you in Fort Padua, we drove down to Angers. That little essay on categories is a cult. Some very sensible things. Very perceptive things in that. So when you compare his work with people like Smith and his, all ontology. I visited Liechtenstein for laws.