Factasia Seminal 2006-05-03

Another return after lengthy neglect (and undocumented uploads), the last revival having been somewhat short-lived.

I think it is true to say that such work as I have done up to the beginning of 2006 since the last documented upload has consisted of various attempts to address kinds of philosophical problems which might possibly have defininte answers. This includes problems which can only have definite answers if further work is undertaken to make them more precise, and problems which are inherently to some degree vague, but which we can hope to make progressively less vague, typically using formal techniques.

I think its also true to say that these have all been (at least in my conception) metaphysical problems. The semantics of set theory is one which interests, though this might not be widely regarded as metaphysics. It isn't even in my mind wholly metaphysical, but since it is at least in part about what pure well-founded sets there are (or might be) it is at least in part abstract ontology, and hence metaphysics. I havn't really made a lot of progress on this stuff, and though I have not lost interest, I have overcome my reluctance to address philosophical problems whicn are more difficult to turn into definite questions (and all my other philosophical inhibitions).

The other thing I have continued to pick at over this period is meta-philosophy, which takes the form of enunciation of a philsophical "position" the name of which has lately always involved the word "positivism" (or latterly "scepticism"), my view on what additional word should be used to distinguish my own from other positivisms changing from time to time. I started with "analytic", because close to "logical", and progressed through "semantic" and "metaphysical" to my present position in which I use all three of "metaphysical", "existential" and "neo-", the latter being a whole which encompasses the other two (and another crop of qualifiers to go with "scepticism"). A lot of this stuff (though there isn't actually much of it, and its all fragmentary and incomplete) was not done in HTML or XML (in LaTeX actually) and is therefore available only as PDF files.

As of the beginning of 2006 I have reverted in important respects to my original ambition. Firstly in taking up hypermedia with enthusiasm once more, which I am at present inclined to use as much as possible, from XML sources for new material. Secondly in shedding the inhibitions which I had adopted in relation to philosophical problems well beyond the pale of formality.

So far this seems to be working. I am getting slowly back into a habit of writing. What's more, one objective which I never mentioned, which was that I was supposed to enjoy all this, seems now for the first time to be getting closer.


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