My notes or comments

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 theoretical framework (one can treat any system of beliefs as a theoretical 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 present 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, that means you could 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, as if it had been designed).

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, I have verified that Chikofsky´s article exists. This is the quote used in the Wikipedia article about Reverse Engineering). While the example with the Ancient Greek Sculptor, Phidias, and the claw may sound like an exaggeration intended 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 but 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.]

5. Knowledge that can be written down and knowledge that cannot be written down. This note is about knowledge that belongs to an elite and knowledge that does not belong to an elite. It is also about knowledge thatn can be communicated and knowledge that cannot be communicated. Both exist. (All this may sound a bit obvious for some)

Knowledge from academia is often elitist (which is not a problem) because a person cannot master many disciplines at the same time, usually you have to chose one: you cannot have a PhD in Physics and in a PhD in Old Languages at the same time, that would be very unlikely, and the percentage of people that do a PhD is very low. And there is nothing wrong with that type of knowledge being elitist. A big part of that knowledge is communicated through textbooks and classes. On the other hand, there is knowledge that does not come from academic activity. A good example of this is music. In Latin America, for example, a big number of people from the middle class learn how to dance, they learn that at parties or at home. Their minds learn how to recognize a pattern so that the body will follow the pattern too. And there are also people that can sing or compose. But they have not learned that at public institutions, it is something that happens at home. It just happens. And that type of knowledge cannot be written down or communicated. This happens through looking or witnessing. Those people will not be able to tell you how they recognize a pattern or how to describe it, they just know that. It is more than an ability, it is already knowledge. The same thing happens with cooking and the combinations of ingredients. It is something very difficult to communicate or to describe.

The point is that there is knowledge that is elitist and can be communicated through words, and there is also knowledge that is not elitist and is difficult to communicate. There is also knowledge that is elitist and cannot be communicated, and has to be witnessed, for example, in medicine. There is also knowledge that is not elitist and can be easily communicated. 

[Plato held in the Seventh Letter that there is knowledge, about the ideas or essences that lie behind things in reality, that cannot be written down. Like the knowledge about the idea behind a circle that has been drawn. That knowledge is, from Plato´s perspective, elitist because only few people can acquire it. And, for him, that type of knowledge cannot be communicated.]

6. Coleridge, knowledge and the way people think. This is a quote where Coleridge talks about the possibility of dividing people in two kinds or groups according to how they think and how they perceive the human cognitive capacity. He really thinks this is possible (I can imagine both kinds could be rather just tendencies and not fixed groups). This idea is really not boring for people that have read a bit about Plato and Aristotle. Coleridge says the following :

Coleridge, Table Talk, 2nd July 1830:  “Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. I do not think it is possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are the two classes of men beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality or attribute; the other considers it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to understand what Plato meant by an idea. There is a passage, indeed, in the Eudemian Ethics which is like an exception; but I doubt not of its being spurious, as the whole work is supposed by some to be. With Plato ideas are constitutive in themselves. Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding; the faculty judging by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself into the higher state, which was natural to Plato and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths. Yet what a mind was Aristotle's -only not the greatest that ever animated the human form! - the parent of science, properly so called, the master of criticism, and the founder or editor of logic! But he confounded science with philosophy, which is an error. Philosophy is the middle state between science, or knowledge, and sophia, or wisdom."

7.Coleridge and Shakespeare. For Coleridge, Shakespeare, has direct access to another type of information, to another type of knowledge that allows him to create his characters. This type of knowledge is knowledge about the structure or the essence behind human beings. This type of knowledge has nothing to do with science (I say this because there are other texts, like the Critique of Pure Reason, that have a lot to do with science). Coleridge says the following:

"Shakespeare shaped his characters out of the nature within; but we can not so safely say, out of his own nature as an individual. No! this latter is itself but a natura naturata - an effect, a product, not a power. It was Shakespeare's prerogative to have the universal, which is potentially in each particular, opened out to him, the homo generalis, not as an abstraction from observation of a variety of men, but as the substance capable of endless modifications, of which his on personal existence was but one" (Coleridge, S., The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Notes and lectures upon Shakespeare and some of the old poets and dramatists, Ed. Willia Greenough Thayer Shedd, Page 257, 1884)

This quote appears in Borges's essay, From being somebody to being nobody, (De Alguien a nadie), Borges translates it as follows:

"La persona Shakespeare -escribe- fue una natura naturata, un efecto, pero lo universal, que está potencialmente en lo particular, le fue revelado, no como abstraído de la observación de una pluralidad de casos sino como la sustancia capaz de infinitas modificaciones, de las que su existencia personal era solo una" (Borges, J.L., Obras Completas, P.738, EMECE, Buenos Aires, 1974)

Borges, quotes also  William Hazlitt, who says something similar about Shakespeare. For Hazlitt, Shakespeare "was all that others were or what they could become" (Hazlitt, W., On Shakespeare and Milton in “Lectures on the English Poets”, Derby and Jackson, New York, 1859, P.55)

[It seems that Coleridge is borrowing the concept of natura naturata from Spinoza.

For Spinoza, natura naturans "is the active, productive aspect of the universe -God and his attributes, from which all else follows" (Nadler, 2023), it "is identical with God (Nadler, S. 2023). On the other hand, natura naturata is the effect or "that which is produced and sustained by the active aspect [...]." (Nadler, S.2023).

One could say, that it is as if the universe had two layers, one is Natura naturans and the other natura naturata. Another way of imagining that is the following: natura naturans or God is a core -like a suprasensible core- with an outer layer - the natura naturata-, being the outer layer all the effects of the core.

For Coleridge, the personality of human beings is an effect or consequence of a structure that is behind. It even seems as if Coleridge were talking about that structure as if it belonged to another plane, to a suprasensible plane.

The quotes about Spinoza are from the following source: Nadler, Steven, Baruch Spinoza, in “The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”, Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), 2023]

8. Adam Smith. This note is about the work of Adam Smith. Kant was interested in Smith's work about business and the economy. Usually, you do not hear in class that Kant read Adam Smith. So, I will copy a couple of quotes about that.

"A letter to Kant dated 1771 from a friend named Markus Herz declares he has heard from David Friedländer that Smith is Kant's [...] favourite" (Simpson Ross, Ian, The Life of Adam Smith, Oxford, University Press, 2010, Page 207)

Adam Smith states in The wealth of nations that an individual "generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it [...], he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention [...] By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually", (Smith, A., The wealth of nations, 1776, Book 4, Chapter II)

The invisible hand that appears in Smith's writings is a metaphor for the purposiveness that appears at a public level when individuals are looking for personal gain in a market. That purposiveness has the form of teleology (with or without a God). All this does not mean that Smith is telling people to be selfish, he is just making an observation about what he really thinks that usually happens in a market. The idea of purposiveness as an effect of commerce is what Kant must have liked about Smith´s works.

Also: Kant quotes Smith (Book I Chapter IV) in his own chapter about money in the Metaphysics of Morals:

"Money is (after Adam Smith) the thing [...] with which humans and nations do commerce with each other" (Kant, I., Metaphysical Principles of the Doctrine of Right, Paragraph 31, "What is money?"), and also adds that money is the means by which you can measure diligence. Kant is more interested in business than some would have thought, and says the following: Money "is an instrument, which, among all things, has the highest utility" (Kant, I., "What is money?").

[The Cambridge Dictionary defines diligence as "the quality of working carefully and with a lot of effort".

Teleology is "(in philosophy) the belief that everything has a special purpose or use" (Cambridge Dictionary). Telos means purpose or end in Old Greek.]