Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Purifications (frags)', 'works' and 'Lecture on Applicability of Mathematics'

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2 ideas

1. Philosophy / H. Continental Philosophy / 4. Linguistic Structuralism

23123	Basic to human culture are binary oppositions, such as eating raw or cooked [Levi-Strauss, by Green,TH]
	Full Idea: Lévi-Strauss made canonic to French structuralism the idea that human culture could be understood through a series of binary oppositionsn - the difference between what could be eaten raw and what cooked being one of the most fundamental.
	From: report of Claude Lévi-Strauss (works [1950]) by T.H. Green - Prolegomena to Ethics 1
	A reaction: My guess is that such oppositions can often be illuminating, but will always be eventually judged as too simplistic.

6. Mathematics / C. Sources of Mathematics / 4. Mathematical Empiricism / b. Indispensability of mathematics

8732	It is spooky the way mathematics anticipates physics [Weinberg]
	Full Idea: It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.
	From: Steven Weinberg (Lecture on Applicability of Mathematics [1986], p.725), quoted by Stewart Shapiro - Thinking About Mathematics 2.3
	A reaction: This suggests that mathematics might be the study of possibilities or hypotheticals, like mental rehearsals for physics. See Hellman's modal structuralism. Maybe mathematicians are reading the mind of God, but I doubt that.