Headline from a local newspaper this morning:

Bond

USA Today on last night's White House dinner:

"In his toast, Bush said the royal visit was 'a reminder of the unique and enduring bond' between the two countries."

The New York Lottery evening number
for All Souls' Day, Nov. 2, 2005, was

007.

Related material:

Entries for Nov. 1, 2005 and
the song Planned Obsolescence
by the 10,000 Maniacs

(Hope Chest:
The Fredonia Recordings)

All Souls' Day

Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano:

In memory of Malcolm Lowry, a quotation from Donne, 1611:

And, Oh, it can no more be questioned,

That beauties best, proportion, is dead,

Since euen griefe it selfe, which now alone

Is left vs, is without proportion.

Shee by whose lines proportion should bee

Examin'd measure of all Symmetree,

Whom had the Ancient seene, who thought soules made

Of Harmony, he would at next haue said

That Harmony was shee, and thence infer.

That soules were but Resultances from her,

Here is a link to a later Cambridge praelector, Robert Alexander Rankin.  Rankin, a purveyor of pure mathematics, may help to counteract the pernicious influence on souls of Sir Michael Atiyah (see previous two entries and Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star).

"Mathematics is an evolution from the human brain, which
is responding to outside influences, creating the machinery with which
it then attacks the outside world. It is our way of trying to reduce
complexity into simplicity, beauty and elegance....

I tend to think that science and mathematics are ways the human mind
looks and experiences-- you cannot divorce the human mind from it.
Mathematics is part of the human mind. The question whether there is a
reality independent of the human mind, has no meaning-- at least, we
cannot answer it."

-- Sir Michael Atiyah, interview in Oslo, May 2004

"For Plato, the Forms represent truth, or reality.... these Forms are independent of the mind: they are eternal, unchanging and perfect."

--  Roy Jackson (pdf)

Atiyah's denial of a reality independent of the human mind may have something to do with religion:

"Socrates and Plato were considered 'Christians before Christ'; they
paved the way for the coming of Christianity by providing it with
philosophical and theoretical foundations that would be acceptable to
the western mind.
    In the analogy of the cave, the sun represents the
Form of the Good. In the same way that the sun is the source of all
things and gives light to them, the Form of the Good is over and above
the other Forms, giving them light and allowing us to perceive them.
Therefore, when you have awareness of the Form of the Good you have
achieved true enlightenment. In Christianity, the Form of the Good
becomes God: the source of all things."

-- Roy Jackson, The God of Philosophy (pdf)

Antidote to Atiyah

In a recent talk, "The Nature of Space," Sir Michael Atiyah
gave a misleading description of Plato's doctrine of "ideas," or
"idealism."  Atiyah said that according to Plato, ideas reside
in  "an imaginary world--  the world of the mind," and that
what we see in the external world is "some pale reflection" of ideas in
the mind.

An antidote to Atiyah's nonsense may be found in the Catholic Encyclopedia:

"So it came to pass that the word idea in various languages
took on more and more the meaning of 'representation,' 'mental image,'
and the like. Hence too, there was gradually introduced the terminology
which we find in the writings of Berkeley, and according to which
idealism is the doctrine that ascribes reality to our ideas, i.e. our
representations, but denies the reality of the physical world. This
sort of idealism is just the reverse of that which was held by the
philosophers of antiquity and their Christian
successors; it does away with the reality of ideal principles by
confining them exclusively to the thinking subject; it is a spurious
idealism...."

Atiyah contrasts his mistaken view of Plato with what he calls the
"realism" of Hume.  He does not mention that Plato's doctrine of
ideas is also known as "realism."  For details, see, again, the Catholic Encyclopedia:

"The conciliation of the one and the many, the changing and the
permanent, was a favourite problem with the Greeks; it leads to the
problem of universals. The typical affirmation of Exaggerated Realism, the most outspoken ever made, appears in Plato's philosophy;
the real must possess the attributes of necessity, universality, unity,
and immutability which are found in our intellectual representations.
And as the sensible world contains only the contingent, the particular,
the unstable, it follows that the real exists outside and above the
sensible world. Plato calls it eîdos, idea. The idea is absolutely stable and exists by itself (ontos on; auta kath' auta),
isolated from the phenomenal world, distinct from the Divine and human
intellect.... The
exaggerated Realism of Plato... is the principal doctrine of his
metaphysics."
 
Atiyah's misleading remarks may appeal to believers in the contemptible
religion of Scientism, but they have little to do with either historical reality or authentic philosophy.