Evolution and Rationality

Another nocturnal replan and "Hot Philosophy", at least as a
book title, is gone. The new title, probably to contain the
two words "evolution" and "rationality", I need to check out
what is already out there before the final decision.
.
I was struggling yesterday to make the last plan work, and
this morning I have a new title and a new plan.
The book is now in four parts, and is one long historical
narrative with the emphasis on analysis now muted.
.
Part I Evolution as far as deduction
.
(which I take, and argue, to be
coeval with descriptive language)
.
Part II Aspects of cultural evolution to 1900
.
(not sure what to call this)
This is mostly western philosophy, logic and mathematics
with a bit of Tao.
All hanging around the concept of rationality.
.
Part III 20th century
.
Analytic Philosophy, Mathematical Logic, Computer Science.
We see the evolution of techniques and technology
for formal modelling and inference alongside some of
the most conspicuously irrational episodes in the history
of philosophy,
.
Part IV 21st century
.
This includes X-Logic but I now have a more open conception
of what I might say here.
A forward projection on the evolution of Rationality
.
Though these are all historical or futuristic, the history
is intended to be extremely selective and relates to the
development of rationality.
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All this in a slim volume, in a short timescale, if I can
once get going.
.
RBJ

HOT philosophy warms up

I did a lot of tossing and turning last night before
eventually getting to sleep, and this morning (in a deep
frost which reminds my of Gellner's story about twigs in
salt mines), I have a new plan for my HOT Philosophy
project.
.
The changes are two.
.
The first change concerns Part I of the book, which I had
intended to be a story based around my own philosophical
odyssey covering the last 15-20 years (this possibly not a
good description, perhaps there is a better one in my last
message here?).
It is now to be a brief account of the history of analytic
philosophy in the 20th century, giving my most brutally
honest (but often highly tendentious) opinions about what
was going on, and in particular, exposing and providing the
best possible explanations for my belief that the entire
progression was highly irrational. The purpose of this part
is unchanged, only the way I intend to realise that purpose
is altered.
.
The second change is in publication timescales, on which I
had nothing definite in mind, but had thought of "HOT
philosophy" loosely as about a 1 year project.
The new plan is to make a slim first edition of the book (as
slim as it takes) which will be published on (or by) 31st
June, 2010. The expectation would then be that quite
substantial amounts of new material would be expected in
subsequent editions.
.
These two changes will both help me to raise the temperature
somewhere closer to where I want it to be, and also increase
the synergy between this an my Carnap/Grice collusion with
Speranza, which in theory is supposed to appear even faster
than that.
.
The changes will also allow me to expose (through Blogs and
mailing lists and RBJones.com) some of the most inflammatory
parts, pretty soon.
.
RBJ