3 ms·

Well, if concepts turn out to be simplicial (or cellular) complexes maybe philosophy can be made into applied algebraic topology.

• mjhay 2y ago
  You may be interested in some of the work of the great Bill Lawvere, especially around formalization of Hegelian dialectics: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/William+Lawvere#RelationToPhilosophy https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/William+Lawvere#RelationToPhil...
  • zyklu5 2y ago
    Thank you. It's a bit surprising to see Hegel here, I was thinking more on the lines of the analytic philosophy. Of course many early 20th c. mathematicians who were interested in philosophy such as Weyl or Gian-Carlo Rota would not have thought much of such a distinction.
    • mjhay 2y ago
      Yeah, it didn't used to be that big of a divide. Nowadays it seems like analytic philosophers are doing endless retreads, and continental ones are also doing endless retreads, but with more confusing sentence structure. From a 10,000 foot view, I think nailing down a more "objective" understanding of dialectics (idealist, material, whatever) is a promising direction to ameliorate this meta-problem. People arguing in journals is pretty much a dialectic problem, so understanding that can go a long way to understanding issues beyond that.