The History of Metaphysics as a Footnote to Parmenides

Parmenides (ca. 515-450 B.C.E.)
(From: Wikipedia)

"Back we go to Parmenides and his argument to the effect that we can never know the world. What, then, can we know? And what can we do with philosophy if it brings us to that abrupt and final conclusion? One possibility: spend the next two thousand years attacking the premises, criticizing and refining the logic, clarifying and extrapolating the terms 'existence' and 'is,' reinterpreting the conclusion, reaffirming the conclusion, reconstructing the argument, translating the argument into theology, converting the theology into ontology, redefining ontology and reducing it to semantics, redefining and returning it to the language of common sense once again, then challenging or ridiculing common sense and turning it back into paradox, further refining the logic, generating new and even more puzzling paradoxes..." (39) --Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, A Short History of Philosophy

Madness, no?

Philosophy on the Can

An ideal place to philosophize? Some might say so.
(From: Wikipedia)

"Long before the sixth century B.C.E., there were already flourishing civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The Greeks (or Hellenes) were a group of nomadic Indo-Europeans who came down from the north and replaced a people already settled by the Aegean Sea. (This displaced people moved and founded a great civilization on the island of Crete. We've completely lost their language, but it is hard to believe that they didn't have a profound and complex philosophy. After all, they even had indoor plumbing.) (7) --Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, A Short History of Philosophy

The question here is whether the fact of indoor plumbing serves as: 1) an indication of this civilization's engineering and intellectual prowess, or 2) as a facilitator for reaching higher levels of philosophical abstraction. In other words, does the availability of an indoor toilet as an ideal location to philosophize lead one to the conclusion that this civilization's philosophical complexity was probably high?

Bum Fodder

Continental paper money. (From: Wikipedia)

"While Connecticut struggled to cope with constant enemy harassment on the home front, she also took part in a national drama, the collapse of the [Continental] currency. We have seen how continued depreciation during 1779 helped to confirm the imbalance between the demand for grain and the demand for currency that had begun in 1778. Natural disasters and enemy action contributed to the problem, but the root of it lay in a currency which one disgruntled resident of the state described as 'no Better than oak leaves & fit for nothing But Bum Fodder.'" (199) --Richard Buel, Jr., Dear Liberty: Connecticut's Mobilization for the Revolutionary War

A Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima... and a Sunny Bank Holiday

On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan by the United States. Here is the news reader's script from the first BBC report of the bomb:

"Monday,
August 6th, 1945
Six p.m.

HOME SERVICE:

Here is the News:

President Truman has announced a tremendous achievement by Allied scientists. They have produced the atomic bomb. One has already been dropped on a Japanese army base. It alone contained as much explosive power as two-thousand of our great ten-tonners. The President has also foreshadowed the enormous peace-time value of this harnessing of atomic energy.

At home, it's been a Bank holiday of thunderstorms as well as sunshine; a record crowd at Lord's has seen Australia make 265 for 5 wickets."
--reproduced in David Irving, The German Atomic Bomb: The History of Nuclear Research in Nazi Germany