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Science, People & Politics ISSN 1751-598X ISSUE THREE (July - Sept) 2017 PAGE 8

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one disprove the hypothesis? It is such common underpinnings in logic that C.I.Lewis dismantles and seeks to understand. Bentham, Hume, Kant - he traverses the minds of each. Egoism and egotism concern C.I.Lewis, and it is a measure of the man's decency that I have found no mention of hedonism in his work. However there is no index, so I might be wrong. And, though I have worked hard in reading this book, it will be some time yet before I can say with confidence I have followed the thinking of C.I.Lewis, and identified all he was writing.

Both the author and I are native English speakers. He was American. I am British. I am well acquainted with the erudition and beauty of many writers of American English. Consider William Styron. Yet the English structure in this book was hard for me to navigate. Often I was taken off guard, and could not immediately identify what he intended as verb, noun or emphasis. I do not know whether the unexpected placing of parts of speech are a teacher's ploy to make sure I was paying attention. Perhaps so, because C.I.Lewis was an academic. He died in 1964. This book is created from his papers, edited by Professor Lange, who, at the time C.I Lewis died, had only recently completed a C.I.Lewis course on Imannuel Kant's book "The Critique of Pure Reason".

C.I. Lewis writes,

"The universe can doubtless bear with equanimity the extinction of our species, as it has had a great deal of practise in this sort of thing. We may not matter to it, but we matter to us."

Were I having an anti-entropic moment I'd disagree in a multi-dimensional way with every postu-late in the quote above. That would be unfair. In the context of this book the quote is the editor's way of establishing that for the author self-governance and choosing are human attributes at odds with a deterministic world view. The further point of the quote is that C.I.Lewis was preoccupied in his philosophy with ethical concepts underpinning self governance.

Finally, any failure in understanding was wholly mine, not the exposition and writing of C.I.Lewis.

ONE FOR THE HISTORY BOOKS

A book review by Ferdinando Patat*

The Metaphysics of the Pythagorean Theorem
Thales, Pythagoras, Engineering, Diagrams, and the
Construction of the Cosmos out of Right Triangles
By Robert Hahn
$95.00 Hardback: 300 pages
Available in electronic formats
Release date June 2017
Suny Press. Suny series in Ancient Greek Philosophy.
ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6489-3

The author's thesis is that what we call Pythagoras' Theorem stemmed from a deep metaphysical problem: the search for the "fundamental figure to which all figures dissect". That turns out to be the right-angled triangle.
[Continued on page 9]

8 SCIENCE, PEOPLE & POLITICS [ISSN 1751-598X]


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CONTENTS

PAGE 3
LIGO

PAGE 4
LIGO

PAGE 5
LIGO

PAGE 6
LIGO

PAGE 7
BOOK REVIEWS:Ethics, Pythagoras, Megatech

PAGE 8
BOOK REVIEWS:Ethics, Pythagoras, Megatech

PAGE 9
BOOK REVIEWS:Ethics, Pythagoras, Megatech



PAGE 13
BOOK REVIEWS:Ethics, Pythagoras, Megatech

PAGE 14
From British Courts

PAGE 15
From British Courts

PAGE 16
From British Courts

PAGE 17
Poems of Science

PAGE 18
Poems of Science

PAGE 19
Quiz

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