Dead German guys

If you’re a regular, you know that I often write about niche topics ranging from electronic circuit theory to snowblower maintenance. For the past several weeks, I’ve been also trying to cover a bit of geek-adjacent philosophy: formal logic and its paradoxes, the question of sentient machines, a critique of scientific materialism, and the nature of truth.The challenge is how do I keep it interesting: similarly to mathematics, philosophy is one of the disciplines most people learn to tune out. Why this happens with mathematics is no mystery: as my colleague Thomas Dullien put it, we treat math education as a filter, not a ladder. We pile on cryptic abstractions until most students give up. This endows the field with a mystique of an apex intellectual activity, which I suspect suits some career mathematicians. It means that every university worth a dime has a math department and that the organization is left to its own devices, working on problems no one else dares to…