Michel,
Do you know the Jewish-German mathematician Felix Hausdorff? Vol. VII of his
"Gesammelte Werke" has been published recently (Springer 2004, 902 pages)
with his philosophical work. In a review of this volume that was published
in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Dietmar Dath, June 7, 2004, Nr.130,
p. 41) there is an interesting sentence on points. The "Hausdorffraum"
(Hausdorff-space) is such that two points are then distinguishable if (and
only if?) they are situated in two separate spaces ("in zwei nicht
zusammenh�ngenden Umgewungen"). This would mean, following also Aristotle,
that points are defined only by their position and that they are therefore
(following Hausdorff) only distinguishable if this position is done in
different "places". Other kinds of differentiations are external to the
concept of a point and bring interesting questions but do not belong to the
problem itself.
By the way, Hausdorff wrote on Niezsche and in some of his essays he could
be a postmodernist � la Deleuze!
His "Nachlass" is being administraded by the University of Bonn and is
catalogued under: http://www.aic.uni-wuppertal.de/fb7/hausdorff
Hausdorff comit suicide (together with his wife and her sister) in Bonn
1942. In his last letter to his lawyer he wrote: "Was in den letzten Monaten
gegen die Juden geschehen ist, erweckt begr�ndete Angst, dass man uns einen
f�r uns ertr�glichen Zustand nicht mehr erleben lassen wird." (roughly:
"What was done against Jews in the last months gives me a reason to be
anxious, concerning the fact that they ("man") will not let us live in a
bearable way")
Rafael
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Received on Tue Jun 8 21:11:56 2004
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