W. is still lost in Cohen, he says. What's it all about? He could be reading in Dutch for all he knows. Nevertheless, he sends me some notes for my edification, he says. This is what real scholarship is all about, he says.
I read. Not the apparatus of knowledge itself, but in its outcomes, Ergebnis. Namely, science. And a little later, Unlike all the other fundamental concepts of Erkenntnistheorie, the concept of the infinitesimal does not have its roots in ancient thought.
I'm impressed, I tell W. You're always impressed!, W. says. Anything could impress you, monkey boy.
W. says he can only stand reading Cohen for two hours a day. Two hours, from dawn to six o'clock, then up for breakfast and into the office. He never understands a word, not really.
W.'s come to the section on conic sections, he says. Do you know what a conic section is?, he asks me. It's a transverse section through a cone, I say. It's something to do with Kepler. Now it's W.'s turn to be impressed. You have odd corners of knowledge, he says. Like the German for badger, for example. Remember when you told me when I asked the German word for badger? Der Dachs, I say to W., that's why you get dachshunds.
Anyway, W. says, there are three types of conic section: hyperbolic, parabolic and the other one – it isn't anything -bolic, it's just normal. I think that's what it's called: normal. Anyway, which one are you: hyperbolic or parabolic? Do you view yourself as a hyperbolic man or a parabolic man?
What is decisively new in Kant's conception of reality is that it does not exist in sensation nor even in pure intuition, but is a presupposition of thought and this is true also of the categories such as substance and causality. This is why reality is to be distinguished from actuality, Wirklichkeit.
Sometimes, W. dreams we will become mathematical thinkers, I the philosopher of infinitesimal calculus, he the philosopher of conic sections.
Mathematics is the organon, says W. pedagogically. Do you know what organon means? He didn't know himself, W. says. It comes from Aristotle, and refers to an overall conceptual system – the categories and so on.
W. is growing increasingly certain that the route to religion is a mathematical one. Maths, that's what it's all about. Take Cohen, for example. And Rosenzweig. Of course no one can understand Rosenzweig on mathematics and religion, W. says.
For his part, W. has been reading his Hebrew Bible again, and wondering how to mathematise it. He's serious, he says. He is currently in an email exchange on the topic with one of his cleverer friends, he says.
The infinitesimally small is not a concept of thought, but of science, and the science of magnitudes, Groessen. But does not the idea of magnitude presuppose intuition? Thus there appears to be a contradiction between thought and intuition. How can the infinitesimal be a magnitude and at the same time not an intuition?
W. says he's since discovered that Groessen, in the last paragraph, can also be translated dimension. He's not sure what the implications of that might be, though.
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