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The Merchant Navy: The chain-locker (Henry Carr: 1942)
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The International Society for
the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC)
Colloque international de philosophie de la chimie,
Paris, 3-6 juillet 2017
Trajective chains in mesology
von
Neumann chains in physics, etc. – and in chemistry ?
by Augustin BERQUE
Abstract – The leading idea of
mesology (the study of milieux) originates in Plato's Timaeus, with the
paradoxical relationship of chôra (milieu) and genesis (relative
being), which are posed as both an imprint and a matrix of each other.
Though foreboded, the idea of milieu was locked out by Plato's
rationalism, because it infriges the principle of the excluded middle : A (an
imprint) cannot be non-A (a matrix), and there is no third term, both A and
non-A. After Uexküll, who proved experimentally that an animal and its proprer
milieu (Umwelt, not to be confused with the general data of the
environment, Umgebung) are precisely in such a relationship, and after
Watsuji, who, as for the human, named this relationship fûdosei (mediance)
and defined it as the structural moment of human existence, mesology has
logically and ontologically formulated empirical reality r (that of concrete
milieux) in the following way : r = S/P, which reads "reality
r is the subject S as the predicate P". Reality is neither S (the Real in
itself) nor P (a subjective representation), but emerges in a process called
trajective chain by dint of which, indefinitely, S is assumed as P,
producing S/P, which in its turn is hypostasized into S' by P', and so on in
the following way : (((S/P)/P')/P'')/P'''... etc. Homologous
chains have been observed also in physics, and named "Neumann
chains". Then what about chemistry?
Plan – § 1. Starting up mesology ; § 2. The establishment of
mesology ; § 3. Mediance and trajective chains ; § 4. Trajective chains,
semiologic chains, von Neumann chains ; § 5. Chemistry in the concrete milieux
of the Ecumene.
