Good News

You might expect that spending three weeks failing to come up with an abstract for a talk I was keen to give would leave me deflated and dispirited.
To this we can add that I have just now passed my last target for publishing the first edition of "the book" (last known as "Evolution, Rationality and Deduction"), and its reasonable to say that I have not even started properly on writing it.

However, I have now had just enough time, since giving up on the abstract, for my ideas on the way forward to come "clear", and the picture is good.

The single most important feature of this is that in all but detail there is NO CHANGE, but that I now have a rather clearer picture of what the whole consists in and hope that I will be able to present that picture, and make my web site begin to make sense.
The thing that really pissed me off over the last 12 years or so since I gave up the day job, is that I kept abandoning projects as ill-conceived or unachievable.
Now its probably fair to say that they just kept re-emerging in a different forms.
It is so good to feel that the structure of my enterprise is beginning to stabilise.

I may as well enumerate some of the things which remain essentially unscathed and which are therefore likely to get sewn into the structure of my enterprise.

First, at the head of the list is the thing which may or may not turn out to be my opus magnum, or the two perhaps:

(1) Evolution, Rationality and Deduction

My conception of this project is unchanged in its essentials, but I now have some new ideas about how to progress it. The gross structure remains stable.

(2) Analyses of Analysis

That is the last known name for the volume of formal materials which is intended to underpin "Evolution, Rationality and Deduction".
It began after my first forays into formal historical exegesis applied to Plato and Aristotle and provoked by Grice/Code as conveyed to me by Speranza.
It is still there on the books and is the home for all formal modelling related to (1) which will include lots of foundational stuff in relation to "X-Logic" (which term is heading for meaninglessness).

(3) A Conversation between Carnap and Grice

Important to mention on my top level menu, because it's being neglected right now and I don't want JL (Speranza) to think I am loosing interest.
It is waiting for me to make enough progress with X-Logic to see how the comparative analysis of Grice and Carnap which is needed here can be structured, possibly as an exemplar of that method.

(4) Practical Philosophy

(1) and (2) both belong to my conception of analytic philosophy, and I might as well admit that analytic philosophy seems to be occupying a larger proportion of my intellectual space than it used to.
Possibly I will never get round to saying anything much in the practical arena (which I tentatively classify as political/economic, ethical, existential), but I hope not.

Here are some substructures, which I am pleased (this morning) to find myself thinking I will write something about.

2.1 Abstract Semantics (formal side)

My technical work on the foundational side belongs here, this includes ruminations about the semantics of well-founded set theory, and about how to compare the alternatives, it includes my material on non-well-founded set theory, and I hope it will come up a layer above that as well (those three layers were mentioned in my talk at Cambridge, and nowhere else probably, somewhere on the web site. From QED to X-Logic, following the lead of Leibniz, page 22.
And other stuff on set theory.

I'm going to stop there and try come up with something more detailed on the web site.
Maybe some more here on each area.

RBJ