Re: OT Re: DISAGREEMENTS and THIS LIST was goo now Sercret Chord

[Tony Douglas <tonyisyourpal@yahoo.co.uk>]

Ahh... but wasn't set theory as we now know it described by the French 
Bourbakists, whose method of discourse and debate was so brutal it puts 
anything ever seen on this list to shame ? (I seem to recall one debate 
being resolved with a letter saying almost literally, "you're f*cked"...)


--- On Mon, 22/12/08, Krispen Hartung <info@krispenhartung.com> wrote:

> From: Krispen Hartung <info@krispenhartung.com>
> Subject: Re: OT Re: DISAGREEMENTS and THIS LIST was goo now Sercret Chord
> To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
> Date: Monday, 22 December, 2008, 3:46 PM
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "andy butler"
> > In UK while I was a pre-teen schoolkid for some reason
> the powers that
> > be decided that symbolic logic (in it's guise as
> Set Theory) needed to be taught
> > as a pre-cursor to maths.
> > I don't know what the other kids made of this (or
> indeed the teachers) but I found it incredibly easy to draw
> the diagrams and get the answers, ...it felt like cheating.
> 
> Leave it to the Brits to think of something as brilliant as
> that.  Logic, especially set theory should by all means
> precede mathematics. Maybe you can thank your famous
> Bertrand Russell for that (one of my favorite philosophers,
> btw, though I never had the patience to read the the three
> volume mammoth work Principia Mathematica, which he wrote
> with Whitehead).
> 
> You have to love Russell's set theory paradox though:
> "It might be assumed that, for any formal criterion, a
> set exists whose members are those objects (and only those
> objects) that satisfy the criterion; but this assumption is
> disproved by a set containing exactly the sets that are not
> members of themselves. If such a set qualifies as a member
> of itself, it would contradict its own definition as a set
> containing sets that are not members of themselves. On the
> other hand, if such a set is not a member of itself, it
> would qualify as a member of itself by the same definition.
> This contradiction is Russell's paradox"
> 
> 
> Kris