Open Letter to JEB Bush

The Country does not want Washington to fix it.

Motion to Disqualify

A Motion to Disqualify has been filed.

And rejected.

Judicial Overreach

Federal:

In a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court legislated same sex couples can get married.

State:

In Kaaa vs Kaaa the Florida Supreme Court overruled a state statute.

Local:

In Florida's 18th Circuit, Judge Charles J. Roberts is demonstrating judicial run amok.  His court was described as having an illegal goal by the 5th District Court of Appeals.

Document no. 194 dated July 16, 2015, clearly demonstrates that he is a judicial problem.
His ruling violates several legal tenants and is inconsistent with his remanded instructions.

Fair and Equitable Distributions

Fair and equitable distributions in a no fault divorce should not "punish" anyone.

The law seems concerned about equity between spouses.

The law should not allow such actions as Judge Charles J. Roberts in Florida's 18th Circuit Court has been Ordering in one case, if not all his cases.

Preparing a "Fair and Equitable Distribution of Assets" should be done out of a court room with and by competent people.

Diane Baccus-Horsley and Charles J. Roberts have repeatedly demonstrated lack of the necessary competence.

Applying Kaaa vs Kaaa for Florida Lawyers

Just about everyone knows the “spreadsheet procedure” which resulted from the Kaaa vs Kaaa decision by Florida’s Supreme Court.

In brief, the passive appreciation is allocated according to the percentage of ownership established at the time of the marriage.  There is a big problem with any “reduction” necessitated by the mortgage being “serviced by marital funds”.  [The original opinion was very detailed in how to apply the decision but it was not implementable.  The revised opinion is much shorter but still confused about “reductions”.]

The “spreadsheet procedure” is a tool that can be used in Step 5 of the 5-Step Kaaa vs Kaaa procedure.

The Supreme Court’s decision is available at : http://www.floridasupremecourt.org/decisions/2011/sc09-967.pdf and an analysis can be found at http://caselaw.findlaw.com/fl-supreme-court/1539758.html#sthash.Ab2WL9CT.dpuf

To a layman, the Florida Supreme Court seemed eager to find a basis for the lower courts to award a portion of the passive appreciation to the non-owner spouse.  Hurley P. Whitaker, esquire, informed me in 2007 that my spouse could not touch my premarital residence.

Quoting the decision:

“61.075 Equitable distribution of marital assets and liabilities.— . . . .

"(5) As used in this section:

“(a) “Marital assets and liabilities” include: . . . .

“2. The enhancement in value and appreciation of nonmarital assets resulting either from the efforts of either party during the marriage or from the contribution to or expenditure thereon of marital funds or other forms of marital assets, or both . . . . (Emphasis added.) 

“This language clearly provides that under certain circumstances, the appreciation of a nonmarital asset is indeed a marital asset. We reject Joseph Kaaa’s argument that passive appreciation is not encompassed by the language in this section, and we conclude that the passive appreciation of a nonmarital asset, such as the Kaaa’s marital home, is properly considered a marital asset where marital funds or the efforts of either party contributed to the appreciation. Such findings are to be made by the trial court based on evidence presented by the parties.”

On the bottom of page 7, the opinion states, “Moreover, we emphasize that the trial court must make a finding of fact that the non-owner spouse made contributions to the nonmarital property during the course of the marriage.”

Continuing on to page 8 “While these contributions need not be strictly monetary and may include marital funds or the efforts of either party, they must enhance the value of the property.”

“Because paying the mortgage is a prerequisite to enjoying the appreciation in value of the marital home, we conclude that principles of equity do not allow an owner spouse to receive the full benefit of the passive appreciation when the nonowner spouse contributed to the property, and marital funds were used to pay the mortgage. Such inequities must be balanced by the trial court making specific factual findings regarding the contributions of the nonowner spouse and the relationship of those contributions to the passive appreciation of the property.”

Determining an Award of Passive Appreciation

We now turn to the method that a trial court should employ as it determines whether a nonowner spouse is entitled to a share of the passive appreciation and calculates the proper allocation. We note that the trial court’s task in this regard is an extremely fact-intensive one, and there are certain steps that each court must take. First, the court must determine the overall current fair market value of the home. Second, the court must determine whether there has been a passive appreciation in the home’s value. Third, the court must determine whether the passive appreciation is a marital asset under section 61.075(5)(a)(2). This step must include findings of fact by the trial court that marital funds were used to pay the mortgage and that the nonowner spouse made contributions to the property. Moreover, the trial court must determine to what extent the contributions of the nonowner spouse affected the appreciation of the property.  Let's call this TWETCOTNSATAOTP. 

If the trial court does not "find" that the nonowner spouse's contributions affected the appreciation of the property in a positive manner, there is no passive appreciation to be distributed as a marital asset under section 61.075(5)(a)(2).

If the trial court does not determine to what extent the contributions of the nonowner spouse affected the appreciation of the property, the trial court has not completed its task.  

Fourth, the trial court must determine the value of the passive appreciation that accrued during the marriage and is subject to equitable distribution.  In simple cases, this will be directly related to TWETCOTNSATAOTP.   Fifth, after the court determines the value of the passive appreciation to be equitably distributed, the court’s next step is to determine how the value is allocated.

We approve the methodology in Stevens, which addresses the disposition of nonmarital real property assets and provides the following method for determining how the appreciated value is to be allocated:

 

If a separate asset is unencumbered and no marital funds are used to finance its acquisition, improvement, or maintenance, no portion of its value should ordinarily be included in the marital estate, absent improvements effected by marital labor. If an asset is financed entirely by borrowed money which marital funds repay, the entire asset should be included in the marital estate. In general, in the absence of improvements, the portion of the appreciated value of a separate asset which should be treated as a marital asset will be the same as the fraction calculated by dividing the indebtedness with which the asset was encumbered at the time of the marriage by the value of the asset at the time of the marriage. If, for example, one party brings to the marriage an asset in which he or she has an equity of fifty percent, the other half of which is financed by marital funds, half the appreciated value at the time of the petition for dissolution was filed, § 61.075(5)(a) 2, Fla. Stat. (1993), should be included as a marital asset. The value of this marital asset should be reduced, however, by the unpaid indebtedness marital funds were used to service.

Stevens, 651 So. 2d at 1307-08. Applying this language from Stevens to Kaaa, we note that the home was financed almost entirely by borrowed money that was repaid almost entirely by marital funds. Moreover, there appears to be ample evidence in the record of contributions made by Katherine Kaaa that affected the passive appreciation of the home’s value.

Since the Kaaa home was financed mostly by borrowed money which was repaid almost entirely by marital funds, it seems reasonable form Ms. Kaaa to share in the passive appreciation.

What about a home which was 80% owned, only the marital home for 18 months,  TWETCOTNSATAOTP is zero or negative, and paid its way as a rental property?

A Fair and Equitable distribution of assets is a right of all Floridians even for newly Single, Protestant Anglo-Saxon Males.

The Enormous Theorem

In the early 1960s, Group Theory was a way of describing several phenomena in a concise manner.

Morton Hamermesh's book is great.  Chapter 1 is "Elements of Group Theory".

The applications of Group Theory have moved to "Representation Theory".  The theory side seems to have evolved to Category Theory.

Category theory can be used to formalize concepts of other high-level abstractions such as set theory, ring theory, and group theory. Several terms used in category theory, including the term "morphism", differ from their uses within mathematics itself. In category theory, a "morphism" obeys a set of conditions specific to category theory itself. Thus, care must be taken to understand the context in which statements are made.

Morphism In mathematical category theory, a generalization or abstraction of the concept of a structure-preserving function.

In many fields of mathematics, morphism refers to a structure-preserving map from one mathematical structure to another. The notion of morphism recurs in much of contemporary mathematics. In set theory, morphisms are functions; in linear algebra, linear transformations; in group theory, group homomorphisms; in topology, continuous functions, and so on.

In category theory, morphism is a broadly similar idea, but somewhat more abstract:  the mathematical objects involved need not be sets, and the relationship between them may be something more general than a map.

The July 2015 issue of Scientific American on page 72 summarizes "Four Enormous Families" that contain all the finite simple groups.  An exemplar for completeness. 

1. 
   

The Road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions

1.  Recent standards for teaching science say that students should be taught "The Law of Unintended Consequences" before they graduate from high school.  The title combined with "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread" suggest my views on the subject.

Systems Dynamics is an approach that applies to dynamic problems arising in complex social, managerial, economic, or ecological systems — literally any dynamic systems characterized by interdependence, mutual interaction, information feedback, and circular causality.

The field developed initially from the work of Jay W. Forrester at MIT.  His seminal book Industrial Dynamics (Forrester 1961) is still a significant statement of philosophy and methodology in the field.  Within ten years of its publication, the span of applications grew from corporate and industrial problems to include the management of research and development, urban stagnation and decay, commodity cycles, and the dynamics of growth in a finite world.   It is now applied in economics, public policy, environmental studies, defense, theory-building in social science, and other areas, as well as its home field, management.  The name industrial dynamics no longer does justice to the breadth of the field, so it has become generalized to system dynamics.    The modern name suggests links to other systems methodologies, but the links are weak and misleading.  System dynamics emerges out of servomechanisms engineering, not general systems theory or cybernetics.

System Dynamics has a chance of usefully handling the complexities of the Modern world.  However, Auerbach reports stated about that time that only 15% of Analysts could use PSL/PSA (which Tom Demarco described as the best Automated Data Dictionary System available at the time).  Systems Dynamics is inherently non-linear.

Newton developed methods to linearize things.  Human thinking does rather well in a linear world.  R. A. Fisher did some outstanding work concerning the Design of Experiments and tools for the analysis of experimental data. See http://dr2htay.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-design-of-experiments.html

Social scientists did a very poor job of understanding the system before the tried "to improve it".  Several problems were presented in Jay W. Forrester, "Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems", 

Technology Review, Vol. 73, No. 3, Jan. 1971, pp. 52-68.  See http://www.constitution.org/ps/cbss.htm

2.  "Gall's Law"

Although dubbed Gall's Law by some, the actual quote is not labeled as such in the original work. The work cites Murphy's Law and the Peter Principle and is filled with similar sayings.

John Gall (born 1925) is an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics : an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law.

Gall's Law is a rule of thumb for systems design from Gall's book Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail. It states:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. – John Gall (1975, p.71)

This law is essentially an argument in favour of underspecification: it can be used to explain the success of systems like the World Wide Web and Blogosphere, which grew from simple to complex systems incrementally, and the failure of systems like CORBA, which began with complex specifications. Gall's Law is said to have strong affinities to the practice of agile software development.

Although the quote may seem to validate the merits of simple systems, it is preceded by the qualifier "A simple system may or may not work." (p. 70). 

One of the first systems designers to quote Gall's law was Ken Orr in 1981. Notable were the quotations of Gall's Law by Grady Booch since 1991.

Systemantics (a change in typography and underlining indicate that the title is better rendered as "SystemANTICS") is a commentary on systems theory and general semantics publications by such thinkers as Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Alfred Korzybski.

3.  Alfred Korzyski was the only one above unknown to me previously. Following the link, I find William Burroughs went to a Korzybski workshop in the Autumn of 1939. He was 25 years old, and paid $40. His fellow students—there were 38 in all—included young Samuel I. Hayakawa (later to become a Republican member of the U.S. Senate), Ralph Moriarty deBit (later to become the spiritual teacher Vitvan) and Wendell Johnson (founder of the Monster Study). I used S. I. Hayakawa's book Language in Thought and Action as an undergraduate.

4.  Wiki's 1st para on Korzybski:

"Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]; July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory""

5.Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine's Ph.D. thesis and early publications were on formal logic and set theory. Only after World War II did he, by virtue of seminal papers on ontology, epistemology and language, emerge as a major philosopher. By the 1960s, he had worked out his "naturalized epistemology" whose aim was to answer all substantive questions of knowledge and meaning using the methods and tools of the natural sciences. Quine roundly rejected the notion that there should be a "first philosophy", a theoretical standpoint somehow prior to natural science and capable of justifying it. These views are intrinsic to his naturalism.

6.  Karl Popper versus Thomas Kuhn

I rejected Thomas Kuhn's stuff that was contrary to German Idealism.  I was in graduate school in the 1960s.  The Encyclopedia Britannica definition of "Physics" was basically the Hegelian dialectic applied to theory and experiment.  Seemed great to me.  I thought my rejection of Kuhn meant that I agreed with Karl Popper.  I'm revisiting this now.  What I thought  agreed with Karl Popper on was that assertions should be backed by (independently) verifiable evidence.  I have always been more interested in Metaphysics than "physics."  I  never shared the Logical Positivist's desire to do away with Metaphysics.  I am learning that Popper's focus was on distinguishing science from pseudo science.  That has not been a problem for me.  Physics, systems, and/or economics is the real world science and mathematics is the logical science.

7.  Charles S. Peirce

September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician,mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism".  He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism. 

Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically.  A language-game (German: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waismann, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven.

Jean-François Lyotard explicitly drew upon Wittgenstein's concept of language-games in developing his own notion of metanarratives in The Postmodern Condition. However, Wittgenstein's concept is, from its inception, of a plurality of language games; their plurality is not taken to be a feature solely of contemporary discourse. Lyotard's discussion is primarily applied in the contexts of authority, power and legitimation, where Wittgenstein's is concerned to mark distinctions between a wide range of activities in which language users engage.

Michel Foucault  frequently lectured outside France, particularly in the United States, and in 1983 agreed to teach annually at the University of California at Berkeley. An early victim of AIDS, Foucault died in Paris on June 25, 1984. 

Since its beginnings with Socrates, philosophy has typically involved the project of questioning the accepted knowledge of the day. Later, Locke, Hume, and especially, Kant developed a distinctively modern idea of philosophy as the critique of knowledge. Kant's great epistemological innovation was to maintain that the same critique that revealed the limits of our knowing powers could also reveal necessary conditions for their exercise. What might have seemed just contingent features of human cognition (for example, the spatial and temporal character of its objects) turn out to be necessary truths. Foucault, however, suggests the need to invert this Kantian move. Rather than asking what, in the apparently contingent, is actually necessary, he suggests asking what, in the apparently necessary, might be contingent. The focus of his questioning is the modern human sciences (biological, psychological, social). These purport to offer universal scientific truths about human nature that are, in fact, often mere expressions of ethical and political commitments of a particular society. Foucault's “critical philosophy” undermines such claims by exhibiting how they are just the outcome of contingent historical forces, and are not scientifically grounded truths.

Foucault left clear instructions that there should be no posthumous publication of his writings that he had not published in his lifetime. His estate has obeyed, with one major qualification. Foucault is deemed to have published lectures that he allowed to be taped. This has, in particular, allowed print editions of the annual courses of lectures that he delivered at the Collège de France from 1970–71 through 1983–84 (except for a sabbatical year in 1980–81). This has made an enormous body of important material available. Some of it covers (although in a different way) material later published, but some presents ideas (for example, on ancient philosophy) that appear nowhere else.

9.  Jurgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theories on communicative rationality and the public sphere.

http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/courses_readings/phil123-net/publicness/habermas_structural_trans_pub_sphere.pdf

The Theory of Communicative Action (German: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns) is a 1981 book by Jürgen Habermas, in which he continues his project set out in On the Logic of the Social Sciences^[1][2] of finding a way to ground "the social sciences in a theory of language."^[1] The two volumes are Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung)^[3] in which Habermas establishes a concept of communicative rationality,^[4] and Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft),^[5] in which Habermas creates the two level concept of society and lays out the critical theory for modernity.^[4] After writing The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas expanded upon the theory of communicative action by using it as the basis of his theory of morality, democracy, and law.^[6] The work was the subject of a collection of critical essays published in 1986,^[7] has inspired many responses by social theorists and philosophers, and in 1998 was listed by the International Sociological Association as the eighth most important sociological book of the 20th century.^[8]

Why We Should Not Like Each Other

I am one of a large number of people who went into the sciences to search for The Truth.  I was raised to be self-sufficient and self-reliant.  I went into the branch of physics that announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson on July 4, 2012.  The field generated one of the Clay Mathematics Institutes Millennial problems http://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems .  My professional work and interests have touched on all the other problems.  I was very interested in being the first to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.  At this time, only the Poincare’ Conjecture has been solved.  I was honored by my undergraduate school for “community service” in 1980 for saving the free world from the Warsaw Pact.

When I did my studies in Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry, physics was defined in Encyclopaedia Brittannica as:

“Physics, which may be defined broadly as the study of nature, was long called natural philosophy (from the Greek physikos); its exact scope is not fixed nor easily delimited.  From decade to decade in modern times, the principal effort in physics has changed as, on the one hand, fields of scientific knowledge were reduced to practice, whereupon they were regarded as branches of engineering or applied physics; and, on the other hand, new fields were opened by fresh experimental or theoretical discoveries.  Physics may be called a point of view about the natural world and a method of attack on its problems, a method based upon certain general principles and disciplined by the close interplay between experiment and theory.  With a kind of confidence that the understanding of nature may be reduced to a few comprehensive principles, physicists seek for those central ideas by which great areas of common experience may be brought into order and coherence.  To achieve their purpose, they proceed by use of mathematical and logical tools, and by experimentation.”

My education was in the 1950s and 1960s.  This was coincident with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s struggle for civil rights in the United States,.  King synthesized the teachings of Christ and Mahatma Gandhi to create a method of nonviolent resistance that carried Americans toward justice during the turbulent years of the 1950s and 1960s. King’s life and legacy are an excellent topic with which to review how far the philosophy of freedom has come. Once the province of academics, it now inspires activists and political leaders in nonviolent struggle.

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, King has to describe how to explain violating human laws.  The letter shows how he reconciled his actions in breaking the law and going to jail with his teachings of law and order.  He had to carefully distinguish the laws that he broke from what he called the highest law of the land.   He argued that an unjust law is no law at all, as St. Aquinas said. A just law was one that squared with moral law, and an unjust law degraded human personality.  Segregation laws give the segregator a false sense of superiority, and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Therefore they were morally wrong.

Narratives written by arithmetically-challenged people cannot be transformed into a lawful order.

You chose your career with the PSAC Report, the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr,  and the 1969-71 RETRENCHMENT being recent history.  In 1962 the President's Science Advisory Committee published a report entitled Meeting Manpower Needs in Science and Technology.  The "PSAC Report" declared that the acceleration of graduate training in engineering, mathematics, and physical sciences, especially at the doctoral level, was a matter of urgent national priority requiring immediate action, without which severe shortages of engineers and scientists would occur. Engineering was identified as an especially crucial area. The federal government was to provide the funds needed, through increased research expenditures, provision of training grants,  and fostering of new centers of scientific excellence. The country was, of course, reacting to shocks to its prestige caused by the success of Sputnik , and was also riding the crest of the greatest economic boom in its history, and these events simultaneously provided both the motive and the means for a major expansion in engineering graduate programs. Engineering education responded immediately, and the numbers of graduate students rose to unprecedented heights. (Just eight years later, the magnificent declarations of the PSAC Report were negated by a new conventional wisdom—that Ph.D.s were a drug on the market.)

Even before the Retrenchment, I was skeptical of Government Intervention/Programs beyond its core Defense mission.

You received your B.S. degree in microbiology from the University of Florida in 1978 and your J.D. from the Stetson University College of Law in 1982.  Perhaps because your school is ranked #1 in trial advocacy, you wouldn’t recognize the truth unless it was conveniently packaged as a rhetorical narrative. You came along at a time when the narrative paradigm was being formed.  See para 3.2 http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narratives-rhetorical-discourse . Ms. Baccus-Horsley fed you those galore.

Your “formative years” coincided with Michel Foucalt’s popularity in the US.

I read Gerald Holton’s Science and Anti-Science shortly after it was published in 1998.

“Employing the case-study method and the concept of scientific themata that he has pioneered, Holton displays the broad scope of his insight into the workings of science: from the influence of Ernst Mach on twentieth century physicists, biologists, psychologists, and other thinkers to the rhetorical strategies used in the work of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and others; from the bickering between Thomas Jefferson and the U.S. Congress over the proper form of federal sponsorship of scientific research to philosophical debates since Oswald Spengier over whether our scientific knowledge will ever be ‘complete.’  In a masterful final chapter, Holton scrutinizes the ‘anti-science phenomenon,’ the increasingly common opposition to science as practiced today. He approaches this contentious issue by examining the world views and political ambitions of the proponents of science as well as those of its opponents-the critics of ‘establishment science’ (including even those who fear that science threatens to overwhelm the individual in the postmodern world) and the adherents of ‘alternative science’ (Creationists, New Age ‘healers,’ astrologers). Through it all runs the thread of the author’s deep historical knowledge and his humanistic understanding of science in modern culture.”

About this time, I was reviewing manuscripts prepared by my father-in-law, Paul Edward Brown, Sr., PhD.  Doctor Brown had a PhD from Drew University in New Testament and Systematic Theology.  He was/is a Theist.  Dr. Brown knew that Secular Humanism (France) was the Devil Incarnate.  He also knew that The Big Bang implied a beginning – consistent with the Judeo-Christian Creation Myth.  Dr. Brown’s two sons:  Paul Edward Brown, Jr and Samuel Isaac Brown, the First, are real doctors and have significantly more income than their PhD father (and (former) brother-in-law).

A “culture war” is a clash of ideas about what one believes to be true, and others with different viewpoints.  A person’s experiences, family, friends, education, and the media help to form your belief system, or World View.

I was shielded from the full force of the anti-science forces by being a part of the Military-Industrial Complex.  My coworkers and friends were predominately active or retired military or naval officers, many of them had graduated from the Service Academies with degrees in engineering.  From my perspective, “the enemy” looked like Postmodernism.

Dr. Paul E. Brown, Sr., described intellectual/philosophical history through David Hume.  I had watched The Ideas of Great Philosophers, 1^st Edition by Daniel N. Robinson and had taken an interest in philosophy about 1969.  I purchased two paperback books by the Sahakians one being comparable to http://www.amazon.com/Ideas-Great-Philosophers-William-Sahakian/dp/1566192714 .  From the two, I identified 17 Conceptions of/theories of Truth.  The reviewer cautions that although the first chapter gives a very cleanly written summary of the mechanics of epistemology: listing many of the criteria of truth, the problems of truth, and the main fallacies of reasoning, it is still selective rather than exhaustive (category errors for instance are not mentioned). But most egregiously, the essential philosophical definitions needed to understand the explanations are not given here: but are "assumed to be understood" by the reader.  The second Sahakian book is described as having been “one of the most important books of my life. Not only does it provide an introductory survey of the field of philosophy, but it covers truth and fallacies. In fact, for decades it was the only source to reference Negative Pragmatism, a superior criterion of truth that was developed in the early 20th century and explained in detail by Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman in 1964.” My second Sahakian book did not Include Negative Pragmatism.

The Teaching Company’s new set and format meshed well with Professor Lawrence Cahoone’s Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida.  I felt that watching this course sort of completed my studies in philosophy.  I recently completed watching Cahoone’s The Modern Political Tradition:  From Hobbes to Habermas.

The term “postmodernism” first entered the philosophical lexicon in 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard.  Another Frenchman Michel Foucault had a lot to do with it.  Though often cited as a post-structuralist  and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history of modernity.   His thought has been highly influential for both academic and activist groups.

In 1976 Gallimard published Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité: la volonté de savoir (The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge), a short book exploring what Foucault called the "repressive hypothesis". It revolved largely around the concept of power, rejecting Marxist theories of power and rejecting psychoanalysis. Foucault intended it as the first in a seven-volume exploration of the subject.   Histoire de la sexualité was a best seller and gained a positive press reception, but lukewarm intellectual interest, something that upset Foucault, who felt that many misunderstood his hypothesis.   He soon became dissatisfied with his publisher.  Along with Paul Veyne and François Wahl, Foucault launched a new series of academic books, known as Dex Travaux (Some Works), through the company Seuil, which he hoped would improve the state of academic research in France.   He also produced introductions for the memoirs of Herculine Barbin and My Secret Life.

“There exists an international citizenry that has its rights, and has its duties, and that is committed to rise up against every abuse of power, no matter who the author, no matter who the victims. After all, we are all ruled, and as such, we are in solidarity."  - Michel Foucault, 1981

Foucault remained a political activist until his death in 1984.  He focused on protesting government abuses of human rights across the world. He was a key player in the 1975 protests against the Spanish government to execute 11 militants sentenced to death without fair trial. It was his idea to travel to Madrid with 6 others to give their press conference there; they were subsequently arrested and deported back to Paris. In 1977, he protested the extradition of Klaus Croissant to West Germany, and his rib was fractured during clashes with riot police. In July that year, he organised an assembly of Eastern Bloc dissidents to mark the visit of Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnevto Paris. In 1979, he campaigned for Vietnamese political dissidents to be granted asylum in France.

In 1977, Italian newspaper Corriere della sera asked Foucault to write a column for them. In doing so, in 1978 he travelled to Tehranin Iran, days after the Black Friday massacre. Documenting the developing Iranian Revolution, he met with opposition leaders such as Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari and Mehdi Bazargan, and discovered the popular support for Islamism. Returning to France, he was one of the journalists who visited the Ayatollah Khomeini, before he visited Tehran again. His articles expressed awe of Khomeini's Islamist movement, for which he was widely criticised in the French press, including by Iranian liberal dissidents. Foucault's response was that Islamism was to become a major political force in the region, and that the West must treat it with respect rather than hostility. In April 1978, Foucault traveled to Japan, where he studied Zen Buddhism under Omori Sogen at the Seionji temple in Uenohara.

Although remaining critical of power relations, Foucault expressed cautious support for the Socialist Party government of François Mitterrand following its electoral victory in 1981. But his support soon deteriorated when that party refused to condemn the Polish government's crackdown on the 1982 demonstrations in Poland orchestrated by theSolidarity trade union. He and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu authored a document condemning Mitterrand's inaction that was published in Libération, and they also took part in large public protests on the issue. Foucault continued to support Solidarity, and with his friend Simone Signoret traveled Poland as part of a Médecins du Monde expedition, taking time out to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp. He continued his academic research, and in June 1984 Gallimard published the second and third volumes of Histoire de la sexualité. Volume two, L'Usage des plaisirs, dealt with the "techniques of self" prescribed by ancient Greek pagan morality in relation to sexual ethics, while volume three, Le Souci de soi explored the same theme in the Greek and Latin texts of the first two centuries CE. A fourth volume, Les Aveux de la chair, examined it in early Christianity, but it remained unfinished at Foucault's death.

In October 1980, Foucault became a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, giving the Howison Lectures on "Truth and Subjectivity", while in November he lectured at the Humanities Institute at the New York University. His growing popularity in American intellectual circles was noted by Time magazine, while Foucault went on to lecture at UCLA in 1981, the University of Vermont in 1982, and Berkeley again in 1983, where his lectures drew huge crowds. When in California, Foucault spent many evenings in the gay scene of the San Francisco Bay Area. He would praise sado-masochistic activity in interviews with the gay press, describing it as "the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously." Through sexual activity, Foucault contracted HIV which developed into AIDS. Little was known of the virus at the time; the first cases had only been identified in 1980. In summer 1983, Foucault developed a persistent dry cough, which concerned friends in Paris, but Foucault insisted it was just a pulmonary infection. Only when hospitalized was Foucault correctly diagnosed and treated with antibiotics.  He delivered a final set of lectures at the Collège de France. Foucault entered Paris' Hôpital de la Salpêtrière on 9 June 1984.  He died in the hospital on 25 June 1984.

Foucault's discussions on power and discourse have inspired many critical theorists, who believe that Foucault's analysis of power structures could aid the struggle against inequality. They claim that through discourse analysis, hierarchies may be uncovered and questioned by way of analyzing the corresponding fields of knowledge through which they are legitimated. This is one of the ways that Foucault's work is linked to critical theory.

In 2007, Foucault was listed as the most cited scholar in the humanities by the ISI Web of Science among a large quantity of French philosophers, the compilation's author commenting that "What this says of modern scholarship is for the reader to decide – and it is imagined that judgments will vary from admiration to despair, depending on one’s view".

A prominent critique of Foucault's thought concerns his refusal to propose positive solutions to the social and political issues that he critiques. Since no human relation is devoid of power, freedom becomes elusive - even as an ideal. This stance which critiques normativity as socially constructed and contingent, but which relies on an implicit norm in order to mount the critique led philosopher Jürgen Habermas to describe Foucault's thinking as "crypto-normativist", covertly reliant on the very Enlightenment principles he attempts to deconstruct.^[163] A similar critique has been advanced by Diana Taylor, and by Nancy Fraser who argues that "Foucault's critique encompasses traditional moral systems, he denies himself recourse to concepts such as "freedom" and "justice", and therefore lacks the ability to generate positive alternatives " 

The experts say, “That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.”  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

Michel Foucalt was not one of the bad guys.  Had he not died in 1984, he might have led the rediscovery of Hegel.

The Nietzschean method of genealogy, in its application to modern subjectivity, is another facet of philosophical postmodernism. Michel Foucault's application of genealogy to formative moments in modernity's history and his exhortations to experiment with subjectivity place him within the scope of postmodern discourse. In the 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault spells out his adaptation of the genealogical method in his historical studies. First and foremost, he says, genealogy “opposes itself to the search for ‘origins’” (Foucault 1977, 141). That is, genealogy studies the accidents and contingencies that converge at crucial moments, giving rise to new epochs, concepts, and institutions. As Foucault remarks: “What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity” (Foucault 1977, 142). In Nietzschean fashion, Foucault exposes history conceived as the origin and development of an identical subject, e.g., “modernity,” as a fiction modern discourses invent after the fact. Underlying the fiction of modernity is a sense of temporality that excludes the elements of chance and contingency in play at every moment. 

In short, linear, progressive history covers up the discontinuities and interruptions that mark points of succession in historical time.

Is this a return to Hegel?  http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/philosophy/philosophy-texts/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel-science-logic

This new translation of The Science of Logic (also known as ‘Greater Logic’) includes the revise Book I (1832), Book II (1813), and Book III (1816). Recent research has given us a detailed picture of the process that led Hegel to his final conception of the System and of the place of the Logic within it. We now understand how and why Hegel distanced himself from Schelling, how radical this break with his early mentor was, and to what extent it entailed a return (but with a difference) to Fichte and Kant. In the introduction to the volume, George di Giovanni presents in synoptic form the results of recent scholarship on the subject, and, while recognizing the fault lines in Hegel's System that allow opposite interpretations, argues that the Logic marks the end of classical metaphysics. The translation is accompanied by a full apparatus of historical and explanatory notes.