Lec 1 | MIT 21H.931 Seminar in Historical Methods

[dinasepulueda]

Nice vid. Learned something new. Keep up the good work...

[JerryKitich]

Just as you can lie with the spoken or written language, lie with English you can also lie with mathematics. Mathematics being true such as 1+1=2 but someone being able to convince you that it =3 does not mean that math itself is not true; it simply means someone is using mathematics to tell an untruth. Just as with language your mental process has to be able to determine when and why a lie is being told.

[JerryKitich]

Are we talking about math as math or math as a tool used to explain or summarize physical systems. Math itself, by itself, for itself can be considered to have a separate discoverable truth that is already there. I don't think that should be mixed with the question of whether a particular formula or set of formulas devised by physicists to explain observations are ultimately correct or not. Whether E=mc2 is ultimately true or not does not reflect on whether pure math is true or not.

[JerryKitich]

Reading Jeremy Paxman's book 'The English: A Portrait of a People' it seems the English have an antipathy to intellectualism especially public intellectualism. I'm wondering if this is perhaps not the reason behind the jealousy of the Oxford Dons to Tolkein's success; not simply on the basis of being successful monetarily but also in teh currency of being an identified public intellectual. I read Tolkein in secondary school because everyone was reading it then and Narnia as a teen.

[thalesdotnet]

agree

[vkgoku2012]

These students are dumber then I imagined but maybe I am just jealous that I will never be allowed to study in MIT.

[chopin7tristesse]

@vkgoku2012 Can you elaborate the dumb part of them in your opinion?

[bfb8688]

The book by Lewis they are discussing is The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature