Friday, September 9, 2016

Archimedean Where? and Archimedean When?

While Archimedes presents a transcendent point of leverage as heuristic, some Philosophers have conceived it as real in some respect, though without adequately explaining where the point is located, e. g. Nagel's facetious "Nowhere".  Now, the difficulties that they thereby tend to evade are more clearly articulated in a temporal analog to Archimedes' spatial image, a corresponding transcendent moment that emerges in any Philosophical concept of History.  For, that process of emergence is itself also part of History, which means that it has to be accommodated within the concept that emerges from it.  In other words, the problem of an Archimedean When? cannot be as easily finessed as that of an Archimedean Where? has been.

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