Mid-afternoon. You remembered sometime in
the last day that the earlier dinner with the Paik’s was at the House of Japan
where you just ate Sunday never happened. Kim said it was just with you and
Carol, her, and Paul and the boys. You were obviously thinking of another time
at another restaurant. This put you in a spiral thought reinforcing your
fictional nature, that it is a slippery slope with almost every memory as far
as you are concerned, that you cannot and have not remembered many particulars
and general notions of a time and/or event can only go so far. Yesterday when
you were telling old and new stories about you and Dave to Marsha and Carol and
David was smiling with tears you now wonder what was true and what was not.
Dave could have raised his hand to protest because he can do that or give a
look that says, “No, that is not exactly as it was,” but he did not. You think,
he may not remember much more than I do about those days. – Amorella
1535
hours. Those are my thoughts most certainly. In fact, my notes over the years
are a help to see how I was thinking, but even the notes are not facts as such.
I cannot imagine how a Grandma Story would be with the main character sure of
himself about how life had been for him only to, when dead, realize that no one
else saw his life that way, that is, other witnesses to the shared events. My
attitude is as usual, I will not be shocked when these ‘false memories’ occur.
Par for the course, that’s the way I look at it. – rho
At Panera today, during lunch, you hit on a new attitude about the 2005 Honda Accord, your second car. – Amorella
1542
hours. I have been looking at the car wrong. I have been looking at the Accord
as a second car because as long as we both worked we needed two
cars. Today, however, retired, we only need one and for all intents and most
purposes that is the Avalon. The Accord is not a second car; it is a spare car.
As a spare car we don’t need a new one. We can make sure it stays in good
mechanical and otherwise good physical shape inside and out. I can have it
cleaned up inside, the outside is in good shape and I can have the windows
tinted for our protection ultraviolet rays like on the Avalon. We just keep it
for as long as we need it. When the Avalon puts on the miles and wear we get a
new car and still keep the Accord as a spare. Why not?
You
are rather excited about the prospect and have been admiring on how good it
looks, outside medium green metallic paint, wheels, tires, and the interior, an ivory leather – it will be as it is, an early twenty-first century six
cylinder Honda Accord. Post with the thought. – Amorella
1947
hours. I read an article in a relatively new Scientific American while
in the doctor’s office waiting for Carol. It was about the basics of the
universe and four words kept popping up in my mind: combinations of the
conditionals – hot, cold, wet and dry and all at once Anaximenes cast a shadow
on the entire article, at least for me.
** **
Ancient History Encyclopedia
Definition
published on 02 September
2009
Anaximenes of Miletus (c 546 BCE) was a younger contemporary of Anaximander and generally
regarded as his student. Known as the Third Philosopher of the Milesian School
(after Thales and Anaximander) Anaximenes proposed air as the First Cause from
which all else comes (differing from Thales, who claimed water was the source
of all things, or Anaximander, who cited 'the boundless infinite’). To the
Greeks of the time, `air' was comparable to `soul' and, just as one's breath
gave an individual life, so air, Anaximenes claimed, gave life to all
observable phenomena. He explained the process by which the First Cause creates
the observable world in this way:
Air
differs in essence in accordance with its rarity or density. When it is thinned
it becomes fire, while when it is condensed it becomes wind, then cloud, when
still more condensed it becomes water, then earth, then stones. Everything else
comes from these. (DK13A5)
To
Anaximenes, everything was in a constant state of change owing to the property
of air and how it is always in flux. The world itself, he claimed, was created
by air through a process he compared to the process of felting, by which wool
is compressed to create felt. In this same way was the earth created through
compression of air, which, through a process of evaporation, gave birth to the
stars and the planets. All of life came from this same sort of process, of air
being compacted to change itself, or another, into a different thing.
In
this way, Anaximenes provided a basis for rational discourse and debate on his
claim and laid the groundwork for future scientific inquiry into the nature of
existence. His influence is far reaching.
Anaximenes’
theory of successive change of matter by rarefaction and condensation was
influential in later theories. It is developed by Heraclitus (DK22B31), and
criticized by Parmenides
(DK28B8.23-24, 47-48). Anaximenes’ general theory of how the materials of
the world arise is adopted by Anaxagoras (DK59B16), even though the latter has
a very different theory of matter. Both Melissus (DK30B8.3) and Plato (Timaeus
49b-c) see Anaximenes’ theory as providing a common-sense explanation of
change. Diogenes of Apollonia
makes air the basis of his explicitly monistic theory. The Hippocratic
treatise On Breaths uses air as the central concept in a theory of
diseases. By providing cosmological accounts with a theory of change,
Anaximenes separated them from the realm of mere speculation and made
them, at least in conception, scientific theories capable of testing. (Encyclopedia
of Philosophy)
Like
Thales and Anaximander before him, Anaximenes sought an underlying reason for
existence and natural phenomena without appealing to the tradition of
supernatural deities as the First Cause. Even though, like the other Milesians,
he is never quoted as teaching atheism, there is nothing theistic in any of the
extant fragments of his writings nor in any of the references to him by ancient
writers. According to Diogenes Laertius, Anaximenes "wrote in the
pure unmixed Ionian dialect. And he lived, according to the statements of
Apollodorus, in the sixty-third Olympiad, and died about the time of the taking
of Sardis" His influence
is especially noticeable in the philosophy of the later writer Heraclitus, as
noted above, who developed the concept of Flux as a First Cause in and of
itself.
(Citations DK in reference to the
Diels/Krantz work The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics, 1967).
Selected and edited from -
http://wwwDOTancient.eu/Anaximenes/
** **
And,
** **
Unity of opposites
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The unity
of opposites was first suggested by Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC), a
pre-Socratic Greek philosopher.
Philosophers
had for some time been contemplating the notion of opposites. Anaximander
posited that every element was an opposite, or connected to an opposite (water
is cold, fire is hot). Thus, the material world was composed by some
indefinite, boundless apeiron boundless from which arose the elements (earth,
air, fire, water) and pairs of opposites (hot/cold, wet/dry). There was,
according to Anaximander, a continual war of opposites. Anaximenes of Miletus,
a student and successor of Anaximander, replaced this indefinite, boundless
arche with air, a known element with neutral properties. According to
Anaximenes, there was not so much a war of opposites, as a continuum of change.
Heraclitus, however, did not accept the Miesian monism and replaced their
underlying material arche with a single, divine law of the universe, which he
called Logos. The universe of Heraclitus is in constant change, but also
remaining the same. That is to say, an object moves from point A to point B,
thus creating a change, but the underlying law remains the same. Thus, a unity
of opposites is present in the universe as difference and sameness. This is a
rather broad example though.
For a
more detailed example we may turn to an aphorism of Heraclitus:
The road
up and the road down are the same thing. (Hippolytus, Refutations
9.10.3)
This is
an example of a compresent unity of opposites. For, at the same time, this
slanted road has the opposite qualities of ascent and descent. According to
Heraclitus, everything is in constant flux, and every changing object
co-instantiates at least one pair of opposites (though not necessarily in
simultaneously) and every pair of opposites is co-instantiated in at least one
object. Heraclitus also uses the succession of opposites as a base for change:
Cold
things grow hot, a hot thing cold, a moist thing withers, a parched thing is
wetted. (DK B126)
As a single object persists through opposite
properties, this object undergoes change. . . .
Modern philosophy
Unity of opposites is the central category of dialectics, and it is viewed
sometimes as a metaphysical concept, a philosophical concept or a scientific concept.
It defines a situation in which the existence or identity of a thing (or
situation) depends on the co-existence of at least two conditions, which are
opposite to each other, yet dependent on each other and presupposing each
other, within a field of tension.
Selected and edited from Wikipedia
** **
No comments:
Post a Comment