AT THE STOA

I have a few friends who are Math majors, so I apologize for this in advance. Said people, please don't bother to correct me, I know I'm wrong. I'd make for a very poor Philosophy major if I didn't. The purity of mathematics is incomparable to any other: it alone can boast of an objectivity that is almost not scientific, if by "science" we think of empiricality. Concepts and axioms in (pure) mathematics have no need of empirical epistemology, they are abstract, or, more correctly, math is the realm of the abstract, in the most abstract sense of the word, even. This is because math does not belong to time and space. It can measure and model time and space, yes, but it has to stand outside of them for it to have the capacity to do that. That is why, in Sir Terry Pratchett's Nation , we see two strangers who do not speak the same language have difficulty in learning terms for numbers, since things always have inherent quantity (what Locke would call &q

To this day, I have heard almost 200 audio hours of interviews. To this day, I have seen hundreds of thousands of people, in images, over the internet (considering that we see, and I say this supposedly as a conservative estimate , 200 ads a day). In two of my earliest adult memories of being so floored by what I am looking at, I remember looking at a woman who was texting on her cellphone, standing by a hospital, with moles on her face that served only to accentuate her features. I remember looking at a child with three moles on her cheek, in a straight line going from below her eye to her jawline, and how she sat so still in the jeepney, clutching her oversized, violet bag. I remember seeing, for ten seconds, a man walk by the window of the cafe I was then sitting at, whose appearance so struck me that I have written several paragraphs about him, the entirety of which  doesn't  exist. More recently, since I just hear voices through my work, I have heard a nurse being intervie

The movie's theme is simple, (in the shallow sense of simple ): time.  But time is not simple, again, in the shallow sense of the word. You know, of course, that the time we're talking about is not in any substantial way related to the  timepiece . (Although that is one impressive hell of a timepiece.) Each of the main characters in the movie (and I will stick to the movie, since I have read approximately no percent of the comics) can be understood vis-à-vis a, or their, philosophy of time. As such, perhaps the simplest  (oh, man, I'm throwing that word around a lot without using its colloquial meaning) way to start is with the character of Baron Mordo. In the movie, he serves as one of Dr. Strange's masters in his training both his physical and psychic prowess. We see a man who, fortuitously (or is it?) very much resembles the character of The Operative in Serenity , in terms of the consequentialist view with which both (or is it?) see duty. Mordo, understanding ti