Time will tell—he’s still writing, and I find his dispatches from the front lines of patient care more interesting than some of his posts prior to that.
And it may yet be a good thing. Two quotes come to mind, one by Popper and one by Von Neumann:
“The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that 1 can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy...Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted outside philosophy & they die if these roots decay...These roots are easily forgotten by philosophers who ‘study’ philosophy instead of being forced into philosophy by the pressure of nonphilosophical problems.”
“As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or still more, if it is a second or third generation only indirectly inspired by ideas coming from ‘reality’, it is beset with very grave dangers. It becomes more and more purely aestheticizing, more and more purely l’art pour l’art. This need not be bad, if the field is surrounded by correlated subjects, which still have closer empirical connections, or if the discipline is under the influence of men with an exceptionally well-developed taste. But there is a grave danger that the subject will develop along the line of least resistance, that the stream, so far from its source, will separate into a multitude of insignificant branches, and that the discipline will become a disorganized mass of details and complexities. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much ‘abstract’ inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration.”
I don’t think I agree with the Von Neumann quote (vide “pure mathematics”). One thing that does seem to guard against some of the problems discussed in the first quote is the rigor of proof (i.e. either be empirically-driven or formal (or both)).
Time will tell—he’s still writing, and I find his dispatches from the front lines of patient care more interesting than some of his posts prior to that.
And it may yet be a good thing. Two quotes come to mind, one by Popper and one by Von Neumann:
I don’t think I agree with the Von Neumann quote (vide “pure mathematics”). One thing that does seem to guard against some of the problems discussed in the first quote is the rigor of proof (i.e. either be empirically-driven or formal (or both)).
Has there been anything since I Aten’t Dead?
Not that I know of, alas.