Predictably (and cleverly, given how much I now want to read the book), this pushed a number of buttons, two of which I want to briefly discuss in detail.
The first:
‘But I don’t really give a damn about what “nothing” means to philosophers; I care about the “nothing” of reality. And if the “nothing” of reality is full of stuff, then I’ll go with that.’
Language is a thing. (See what I did there? Hold onto your britches, there’s bound to be more.) So wondering what exactly ‘thing’ meant – as opposed to what physics has supposedly decided it to mean – I went poking about the internet.
thing O.E. þing “meeting, assembly,” later “entity, being, matter” (subject of deliberation in an assembly), also “act, deed, event, material object, body, being,” from P.Gmc. *thengan “appointed time”
Breaking it down a little further:
-ing (1) suffix attached to verbs to mean their action, result, product, material, etc., from O.E. -ing, -ung, from P.Gmc. *unga (cf. O.N. -ing, Du. -ing, Ger. -ung). Originally used to form nouns from verbs and to denote completed or habitual action.
Now stick ‘th’ on the front of it (properly ‘Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ)’) and we start having fun.
Thorn
has the sound of either a voiceless dental fricative [?], like th as in the English word thick, or a voiced dental fricative [ð], like th as in the English word the.
both of which provide (yeah ok, maybe just me) a little amusement.
Theta (uppercase ?, lowercase ? or ?; [1] Ancient Greek ??? [t?ta]; Modern Greek ???? [?ita];
UK: /?i?t/, US: /?et/) is the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet, derived from the Phoenician letter
Teth . In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 9.
Putting aside that 9 is probably the coolest number on the planet (see,that was another one – we just haven’t got quite far enough yet for you to know how hilarious it really was), from Theta we get this little gem:
In its archaic form [the cross within a circle] theta is used as a symbol for Earth.
and also as shorthand for
Thanatos (Greek: ??????? (Thánatos), “Death,” from ????? – thn?sk?, “to die, be dying”)
Now, this is a stretch (edit: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet), but the etymological jump to entropy there was simply too fun to not point out, particularly given:
the Egyptians used a symbol for Kosmos in the form of theta
a term which theologically (and by extension through Pythagoras is, ahem, philosophically)
used to denote the created Universe, not including the creator. […] also used synonymously with aion to refer to “worldly life” or “this world” as opposed to the afterlife or World to Come.
Check and mate. If you plan on postulating the superiority of physics over philosophy, perhaps it would be a good idea to use (or create) language more appropriate to your argument.
The second issue I want to point out is this whole ‘mathematics is the fundamental fundiment of everything’… thing.
So sayeth Krauss:
In the case of descriptive philosophy you have literature or logic, which in my view is really mathematics. Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they’re really doing is mathematics
logic can certainly be claimed to be a part of philosophy, but to me the content of logic is mathematical.