Guy Said:

What do you think of these books as examples western science prelogicality ie Levi-Bruhl?

We Answered:

Primitive peoples, says Lévy-Bruhl, are little concerned about the coordination of myths with the requirements of logic. So it is in Australia, and we see the same thing among the Eskimos. Lévy-Bruhl quotes the words of the wife of a shaman: "You always wish that supernatural things should be intelligible. But we are little concerned with this matter. We do not understand, and we are no less satisfied." Having reminded himself, apropos of this, of the famous credo quia absurdum, Lévy-Bruhl writes:
"the primitives show themselves insensitive to contradictions that we judge flagrant... this indifference is one of the traits by which their mental habits contrast most visibly with our own. Undoubtedly the fundamental structure of the human mind is everywhere the same. When the primitives have the clear and vivid feeling of a contradiction, it shocks them no less than us. They reject it with the same energy. But... frequently what, according to us, is contradictory does not appear so to them, and leaves them indifferent. They seem then to adapt themselves to contradiction and, in this sense, to be 'pre-logical' beings. This attitude is closely connected, on the one hand, with the mystical orientation of their mind, which does not attach great importance either to the physical or logical conditions of the possibility of things, and, on the other hand, with its scanty conceptual tendencies" (XI. The italics here, as in all the rest of the quotations in this article, are mine - L.S.) [1]
These words contain Lévy-Bruhl's fundamental idea. He more than once admonishes that the only means of penetrating into the mental world of primitive man consists for us, persons of European education, in not foisting upon him our own ideas about the signs that distinguish truth from falsehood. "The logical generalization (among the primitives) can in some fashion be replaced by a common emotional element" (ibid., p. xv). Lévy-Bruhl energetically objects to Wirz, who, following Tylor and his school, which explains the inconsistency and the contradictions in the ideas of primitive people by the weakness of their mental capacities, is of the opinion that only for this reason does the "imaginary," supernatural world find room in their mind alongside the real and natural world, and that their conviction about the existence of a supernatural world is the result of badly thought through and ungrounded considerations, which, in their turn, are generated by the wish to find an explanation for any peculiarity or any event of ordinary experience. In Lévy-Bruhl's view, Tylor's hypothesis is arbitrary and rests only on the conviction that we are entitled to attribute the orientation of our thinking to the Papuas or the aborigines of Australia. If one renounces this conviction, then all the confusion and all the contradictions of the primitives appear before us in a completely different light.
"Their belief in an imaginary' world no longer appears to us as the conclusion of a process of reasoning. This world is only an 'imaginary' one for us. In their eyes it is real, and even more profoundly real than the world of everyday and common experience. It is also an object of experience. But this experience is supernatural and therefore of a higher value. In a word: according to Wirz as according to Tylor, the existence of this suprasensible world is 'concluded.' It seems to me, on the contrary, that it is immediately given. There where he believes he sees an operation of the understanding, I establish... a feeling, in other words, an experience very distinctly characterized by the action of the affective category of the supernatural." (ibid., pp. xliv - xlv)
What Lévy-Bruhl calls the "affective category of the supernatural" [2] is also intimately connected with the mystical orientation of the primitives and chiefly distinguishes their thinking from our own, which is conditioned by intellectual categories: it is given not to the mind but to the will to decide what is and what is not, what is truth and what is falsehood.
"The primitives do not seek (as we do) the 'cause' of that which surprises or strikes them, in contrast with ordinary experience... Because this cause is given to them beforehand, they do not have to ask themselves what it can be, either to speculate or 'philosophize' about it. They are doubtless metaphysicians, but not out of an appetite for knowledge. They are metaphysicians by reason of a spontaneous movement, by reason of a frequent, one could say, a continuous experience that they have of a reality that transcends and dominates the ordinary course of nature and intervenes in it at every moment" (ibid. p. xix).
http://www.angelfire.com/nb/shestov/sar/…

Tammy Said:

What do you think of these books that says mathematics and science end in x meaninglessness?

We Answered:

This is what happens when philosophers try to be mathematicians. The fact that logical paradoxes and contradictions exist in math is no secret. Godel proved that every mathematical system is either inconsistent or incomplete (two terms which have very precise definitions in formal logic, so don't go off your assumptions about what they mean). In proving this, he showed that it's always possible to find a true, yet unprovable statement within a theory, or to create a contradiction.

The problem with the authors of your books is that they make a huge and unnecessary leap when they suggest that this means mathematics is meaningless. If something is meaningless, it should have no value, but who in their right mind would suggest that math is worthless? Try living in a world without math. You can say goodbye to your computers, cars, houses, stores, money, cell phones, and just about every other convenience in existence. Even though paradoxes exist in math, they don't automatically negate the usefulness of the subject as a whole. That's just ridiculous.

Edit:

That's a pretty long paper, and I don't have enough time to study the whole thing and give a proper criticism of it, but after reading the introduction, I'm pretty skeptical about what he claims to show. For one thing, he claims that using the axiom of choice was one of the flaws in Godel's proof. I don't know if he means he used it incorrectly or if he is saying that the AoC is invalid itself, but if it's the latter, then I don't buy it. The axiom of choice was a source of controversy in the early 20th century, but it has since become accepted as an axiom of set theory. It's validity is pretty much unquestionable today.

Also, given the importance of Godel's theorem, I would suspect that a proof of it's incorrectness would have enormous repercussions in the mathematical community, and yet I've heard nothing about this until now. If what the author claims is true, I find it hard to believe that nobody would be making a big fuss over it.

It's an interesting concept to say the least, but at this point I remain unconvinced.

Gwendolyn Said:

What do you think of these books as examples of western science pre-logicality i.e Levi-Bruhl?

We Answered:

The real humour lies in the author not appreciating the irony of his objectives. To quote:

"This case study is to demonstrate... that all our concepts, all our categories, all our ideas, all theses, all antitheses, all epistemologies, all ethics, all ontologies, and all metaphysics, and other words all our views are meaningless."

Let's just stop right there. The view that everything is meaningless is a VIEW. The only way this can be valid is if it has a meaning. The author has immediately constructed an impossible situation. How can someone deprived of any ability to derive meaning nonetheless do so?

The author then goes on to wacky portions of science where scientists are honestly at a loss to explain what's going on and uses that to argue that science doesn't work. I note that he doesn't bother disputing the validity of, say, gravitational theory. Since this, according to the author, is just as meaningless as quantum mechanics, I would personally kindly request the author to demonstrate this by jumping off a large object.

Or, as Locke once said about people who choose to disbelieve the reality of reality: "...if our dreamer pleases to try whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man's fancy, by putting his hand into it, he may perhaps be wakened into a certainty greater than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination."

You may still choose to believe it is all an accident or a miracle. I say test that theory out and see how well it works. I think you will find it doesn't work well at all.

Cindy Said:

anyone know any examples of how the subjective nature of perception have effected science and art?

We Answered:

If there were concrete examples they wouldn't be subjective they'd be empirically demonstrable and thus objective, the nature of "subjectivity" is that it is, by definition, "subjective", that is relating to determined by the mind as the subject of experience. The terms of your question make it unanswerable.