Experigraph

 Bertolt Brecht, born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht on February 10, 1898, in Augsburg, Germany, emerged from a middle-class family-his father was a paper company director and his mother the daughter of a civil servant. He began writing poetry as a youth, publishing his first poems in 1914. Brecht attended the Königliches Realgymnasium and gained a reputation as an enfant terrible. In 1917, he enrolled at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich to study medicine, but his studies were interrupted by service as a medical orderly during World War I. Early Career and Artistic Development After the war, Brecht attended Arthur Kutscher’s theater seminar in Munich, where his interest in drama deepened. He wrote his first play, Baal, in 1918, which was produced in 1923. His early works, including Drums in the Night (1922) and A Manual of Piety (1927), reflected a rebellious, antibourgeois attitude shaped by the disillusionment of postwar Germany. During this period, Brecht was influenc...

Knowledge maps itself to the environments we build, the context we live in creates the potential field for its symbols.  As technology evolves this range of what can be shifts, the apparatuses we construct to help decipher the world make up the laboratory of what we scientifically and conjecturally explore.  But how do different technologies vary in their influence?  Is a mariner's astrolabe as paradigm-altering as their star chart?  What of buildings, weapons, codices, slide rules? Let's focus on a couple of components.  First let's think of the interpretive range of a given thing.  While every object has some cultural meaning, we can see how say a weapon has a particular use and reading in mind, where a codex would have a whole range.  However glorious we make the inscriptions on Achilles' shield, its purpose is clearly to physically defend Achilles.  But the purpose of some writing on this event in Achilles' life, which may describe the buildin...

  Pascal's Wager is the opportunity for a mathematician turned theologian to justify their view of cosmic order in the mathematical ways they've come to know.  What's the pay off if you're right and what's the pay off if you're wrong.  If the pay off for being right far outweighs that for being wrong, should we out of principle take the wager? Ask Laplace and we have a different framing.  Now probability has replaced the divine role so the aspect of choice has been eliminated.  Probability no longer informs a bet on divine order, divine order is a subsidiary part of probability.  Laplace's famous demon is not an impossible gambit on an all-controlling deity as popularly assumed, but a thesis that cosmic order can be predicated by sheer mathematical analysis.  Pascal's world still contains Christian state law, but Laplace's does not.  How do we culturally bind people without such moral institutions? It turns out fairly easily.  We don't need t...

  From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, Europeans are all about the geometric approach.  The approach from Euclid.  When Galileo says that the universe speaks in mathematics, he's thinking about geometry.  When Newton writes the Principia, he does so following a geometric method.  His fluxions, or calculus, would allow otherwise, but somehow it still seems proper to construct the concepts geometrically. Of course this is not really Euclid, but the European reimagining of Euclid.  And as algebras advance, so do new geometries.  Fast forward to the end of the 18th century.  Kant talks what we can know and what we can't.  A priori knowledge is innate, what we know before experience, what he also calls analytic.  Synthetic knowledge on the other hand comes from experience, what he calls a posteriori.  But mathematics and geometry are something different.  He calls them the synthetic a priori. Like a priori knowledge, math is c...

Early modern formalizations of what is retrospectively called scientific practice (then a natural philosophical one) centre around geometrical methods and their experimental power.  From Galileo to Descartes, Pascal, Newton and Leibniz, commitment to visual mathematical techniques are paramount in bringing to bear an effective accumulation of knowledge.  It is a literate rationalism, bodies in space that offer a protocol for mechanical reproduction.  Galileo's  language of the universe becomes a necessary part of knowledge gathering, of the experimental trials that he put its formal predictions to. Fast-forwarding from the anticipations of Leibniz to the work of Peirce, Carroll and Wittgenstein, geometric diagrams are infused with symbolic and algebraic universality that progresses with time.  The visual proof and model takes a formal role in the development of mathematical foundations; and reasoning, now in a more pragmatic vein, comprises what we ascribe to th...