And no, the academy in question mostly prized its mathematics whizkid prodigy eggheads, someone like Ed Chu (a member of the "AP Calculus" class that had me depressed as ****) who had great discipline and very strict parents
Unfortunately, Ed Chu did not show much interest in what "my Philosophy instructor" was offering.
.-Herr HauserI have been thinking about it and this is what I thought.
Mr.Chu did a lot of maths but looked down upon philosophy and probably , so did his parents, who were sticklers for discipline.I think he would have been great at mechanical maths methods and might have picked up algorithms rather easily.
He would have done pretty well it came to applying the rules ,without giving much thought to the meaning of it all.
He and his parents looked down upon “useless philosophy” ,because they,implicitly perhaps, believed that anything like that or “intuition” ends up causing indigestion.
Mr.Chu would have declined to consider sets and space, per se. Give him symbols ,bereft of meaning, and clearly defined rules, to play with, and you would have a happy boy.
He would have admired computational processes which are ( apparently ) without any “given” intuitions.
And he would have been completely disinterested in anything to do with the genuine nature of mathematical entities.
His objective,of course, would be to exile all intuition from his mathematical studies.Then ,he would come to believe that once that is done, the mathematical objects would disappear and what would be left ,would be glorified “Checkers”.”Checkers” does not point to a higher reality and is governed completely by its rules.
Keep the rules of inference in mind and try to deduce one meaningless string of symbols from another.His discipline would help him to do it.
If you would have asked him-why is maths mysterious? He would say there is no mystery there.It’s all explicable once you understand the rules.He would say that when he does maths he is not trying to describe anything external.He is just playing with the mechanical rules of mathematics,which could,admittedly get rather complicated,from time to time.But that is all there is to it.
That there is no mystery there.Or anywhere.You start with a set of maths expressions,you should know the rules of inferences and voila! you could deduce the solution.
Only, there is a chink in this armor. Big enough for a thousand whales to swim through it together.I know that you know that too. That is why you are no Ed Chu.That is why you are so great.
Get well soon.