Spare a moment if you will to tell us in this thread something about a book you might be reading, how you rate it, and why.
-oOo-
I have been getting into the three hundred and forty-four pages of "
An Outline of the Idealistic Construction of Experience" (1906), the work of
Professor Sir James Baillie of Aberdeen (1872 to 1940), a Scotchman of the most elevated sort. It merits eight out of ten for concernment, ten for seriousness, and eight for originality. Well worth reading -
here is a link - and highly recommended. My own copy is a physical one I found in a second-hand "shop" a decade ago.
A taste of Professor Baillie:
"Even a confessed and acknowledged ignorance about the unity of experience as a whole, soon leads to doubt of our knowledge in any form whatever; and doubt is a preparatory stage for silent or open distrust. We can see this in the present attitude in regard to science assumed by many of its exponents. 'Reality' as a whole, they say, they know nothing about, and cannot even name. What then is the view taken of science? It consists of mere 'descriptive formulæ,' a 'conceptual shorthand,' which we contrive and use to get along in dealing with this reality. But it seems evident that a description of what is admitted to be incognisable, or at least unknown, is absolutely cut off from having any import except for the mind describing. If the reality exercises a check on the character of the description, it seems illogical to say it is not known, for the coherence of knowledge just consists in being so controlled; and that control must come from the object described, because the object is so constituted and not otherwise. If it does not come from the reality, one description is as good as another, and the very progress of knowledge becomes purposeless. When this objection is put aside by pointing to the fact that we can prophesy and anticipate by means of our descriptions what reality will do, the extremity of the dualism seems given up altogether. For to speak of calculating an unknown is to use terms without a meaning. A 'shorthand' is surely indecipherable if we are not in touch with the meaning of the language we have taken down in symbol. If it be said that the descriptions are truer, because
for us they are simply 'better' descriptions, better fulfil our needs, then this leaves altogether unanswered, positively or negatively, the question whether these needs may not just be a fuller appreciation of reality. In short, this restriction imposed on science is due to a prior restriction placed upon knowledge as a whole, a sceptical attitude regarding philosophical knowledge. It is typical of every such attempt. It either compels us to accept two heterogeneous kinds of knowledge, a descriptive and a non-descriptive, which have no continuity of purpose with each other, and yet profess to deal with the same reality; or else to make knowledge purely of presentational 'phenomena' hold, and to leave 'reality' out of account altogether."
That puts the hordes of Northern American "mathematical physicists" in their squalid place does it not?
