Re: You asked for it!

Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@pobox.com)
Mon, 11 Aug 1997 16:42:14 -0700

Leeson makes a juxtaposition of my comment with a bit of text from
a book that N himself did not choose to publish. I don't have my
library handy, but I hope that when I refer to N's praise (in the
works that he did choose to publish, and prepared for the press
himself) of physiology and his call for philosophers to pay more
attention to such things as the exquisite analytical power of the
human sense of smell, people won't have much trouble finding these
citations.

I said:
> exquisitely bound up with physics

but "exquisitely bound up with physiology" would have worked
just as well.

Leeson's quote said:
> a firm systematization of atoms in necessary motion

but my text with which he juxtaposed this made no mention of atoms,
since no such mention was needed.

I might also juxtapose N's refutation of metaphysical idealism, in
which he painted that quaint notion as the idea that the sense
organs create themselves through their own action. That's in BEYOND
GOOD AND EVIL. If Leeson can find any text of N's to juxtapose in
which N (who was always suffering from splitting headaches) questions
the existence of sense organs and nerves, I'd be interested to see
it.

I've disclaimed the relevance of discussions of atomism to the text
I wrote. Nonetheless, I might point out that N wrote the text
Leeson has chosen into one of his private notebooks several decades
before the Perrin experiment, which tested and failed to break
Einstein's atomistic explanation of the Brownian motion. I suspect
that N might have phrased things rather differently after being
informed of this experiment. Particularly if he were planning to
publish.

--
Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pobox.com ++ expectation foils perception -pcd

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