1. Hadden and Edna. There is a similarity between Hadden, a character from the movie Contact, and Edna, from The Incredibles. Both act more or less as guides or advisors. Both are trying to help, but at the same time, they are very humorous. Hadden is supposed to start funding a project to contact another civilization, based on the information that has been received through a radio signal, and Edna is going to provide the Incredibles with technologically advanced suits that are going to protect them. Both are related to science. And they are shown in similar ways, for example, when Hadden asks Ellie if she would like to be part of the mission, he says, “Wanna take a ride?” (minute 101) and smiles, and the scene ends. And when Helen wants to find out where her husband is, Edna shows her a tracking device and asks her, “Would you like to find out?” (minute 61), and the scene ends.

2. Prequels. The idea of a prequel in movies is very similar to the logic of how postulates work in Kant. A prequel explains what should have happened first, so that something takes place later, like in the Star Wars franchise. In Kant´s framework, the Categorical Imperative presupposes the existence of the idea of freedom, and the concept of the highest good presupposes the ideas of God and Immortality. I say similar and not identical because in Kant´s theory, there is no room for many possible explanations as postulates (and those concepts are not given in time). But from the perspective of a movie director, you can imagine (for movies that are supposed to be prequels) different plots as alternatives, but you will pick one alternative as the best possible one, so that it makes sense. I am talking here about the way of thinking and not really about movies in themselves. In the case of literature, for example, the book “Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction” by Salinger was written after Nine Stories, but it explains things that happened before.

3. The Structure in Buddhism. In the legend of Buddha, when the Buddha is born, at the same time his wife, his horse, his carriage driver, and the tree, under which he will reach enlightenment, are born or appear in reality. This means that while the child is growing in the palace, the tree is growing too (in advance, so to speak). This means that in the legend of the Buddha, all those elements are sort of rooted in the same thing, or belong to the same structure. But, in this framework (one can treat any system of beliefs as a framework), that structure has to have its roots somewhere else, but not in the world of the senses. Or... the world of the senses has to have another layer or a variety of layers. There is something about this entire idea that could be confusing at the beginning. All this has, to some extent, the form of teleology because the tree is going to be there to serve as the place where he will reach Nirvana. At first sight, a naive reader would think that all that purposiveness must have been produced by a God. But Buddhism does not really support the idea of a God. It is the Buddha himself who produces that part of the reality before being born (he has chosen the place and people he is going to be born with). So somehow nature responds to his desire, and there is some sort of teleology, but without the need for any God. For Buddhists, God or the idea of God is something superfluous.

4. A Terminator ex ungue leonem. In the summary of Terminator 2 that I found on Wikipedia, the author uses the term "reverse engineering" to say that humans were able to rebuild the original design of the computer chip of the robots of the future (using an incomplete chip that they found from the 1st Terminator that time-traveled to the past and was destroyed). One could say that they built it ex ungue leonem. This expression means "from the claw the lion", which means that you can imagine the whole from one of its parts, so you can deduce the form or the dimensions of the lion only by seeing the claw. It seems that this expression has been used to describe the sculptor "Phidias´ [supposed] skill in sculpting an entire lion on the basis of his claw alone" (Leach, A. What is Architectural History?). (This was thought as possible because, at that time, nature was thought of as divine, as perfect). There is clearly a similarity between the idea behind the expression ex ungue leonem and the idea behind "reverse engineering". Reverse engineering "may be used as part of an analysis to deduce design features from products with little or no additional knowledge about the procedures involved in their original production" (This Quote is from Chikofsky, E.J. & Cross, J.H. II (1990), "Reverse Egineering and Design Recovery: A Taxonomy", IEEE Software 7(1): 13-17, this is the quote used in the Wikipedia article, I have verified that this article exists). While the example with Phidias, the Ancient Greek Sculptor, and the claw may sound like an exaggeration to praise his abilities, the procedure in itself of going from a part to the whole is not an exaggeration. In the case of engineering, for example, it is not an exaggeration because people can sometimes reconstruct stuff given that there are enough clues.

There is another example of the use of this expression with Newton. Newton wrote a solution for a mathematical problem and sent it anonymously to Bernoulli, who was organizing a contest. Bernoulli says that, in spite of the anonymity of the solution, he knew it was Newton´s solution because he could recognize the lion by the claw. Bernoulli could somehow recognize it was Newton´s type of work as if it were a personality trait, as if that work were an effect of his personality.

sigo invicto