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User:Peter Damian

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Peter Damian (talk | contribs) at 10:38, 4 January 2009 (→Why Wikipedia cannot claim the earth is flat). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Castle Hill
File:Small castle.JPG
The Castle
It was late evening when K arrived. The village lay deep in snow. Nothing could be seen of Castle Hill, it was wrapped in mist and darkness, not a glimmer of light hinted at the presence of the great castle. K stood for a long while on the wooden bridge that led from the main road to the village, gazing up into the seeming emptiness.

The Land Surveyor is the central character in the book The Castle. The character finds himself trapped in a village overlooked by a castle, run by a bureacracy governed by apparently arbitrary and bizarre rules which must be obeyed without question, and surrounded by servants who comply entirely with these rules.

Kafka died prior to finishing the book, but suggested the book would end with the Land Surveyor dying in the village; the castle notifying him on his death bed that his "legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there" [1].

Articles currently being developed

Banned


Things

2008 elections


Peter Damian Background

The following summarises the articles to which I have made significant contributions in my time at Wikipedia. The articles in bold are those to which I was the main contributor, and whose subject is important or notable (e.g. History of logic, which had not been covered properly until 2008). My main area of expertise is in Anglo-American analytic philosophy (I graduated from a top-class British university in the 1970's, did my PhD there, and taught there until the late 1980's. I have published in a number of good quality journals, and continue to work and publish, although I no longer teach). I also have an interest in medieval philosophy, and set theory and mathematics. My contributions to the project mostly reflect these specialisms.

For the entire time I have edited at Wikipedia I have been concerned about the way that experts are treated on the project (often with disdain, often with complete misunderstanding of the principles underlying true expert editing). I was a founder member of the Expert retention project.

Mathematics, logic and set theory

Philosophy and Logic

Medieval philosophy and logic

Aristotle

Biographies

Gospel music

Architecture

Why Wikipedia cannot claim the earth is flat

  1. X's article on 'Well-known fallacies' contains only passing reference to the 'flat earth fallacy'
  2. The flat-earth theory is not amenable to scientific approaches and methods.
  3. Flat-earth theorists are pragmatic. They are not interested in what is 'true', they are interested in 'what works'.
  4. Scientist X, who claimed the flat-earth theory was nonsense, clearly had not read the literature on the flat-earth theory.
  5. Scientist X was not trained in flat-earth theory, and therefore could not make an expert judgment.
  6. The criticisms made by scientist X were valid only against Rosencrantz' version of the flat-earth theory, long since outmoded. They fail to address Guildernstein's improved version of the theory.
  7. You must not say 'the earth is not flat' but 'according to critics of the flat-earth theory, the earth is not flat'.
  8. X Y and Z are hard-line skeptics about flat-earthism. They often publish in skeptics magazines and take a hard line with any approach to any theory which is not empirically verified.
  9. There is no reliable source for the statement that 'flat-earthism has entirely been ignored by reliable sources'
  10. The statement 'there is no scientific consensus for the flat-earth view' has no scientific consensus.
  11. X's statement "Informal soundings amongst scientists revealed an almost total absence of awareness of the flat earth theory" is mere opinion. X is using personal experience as evidence. This is not a scientific evidence and is therefore mere opinion.
  12. The statement 'The earth is round' has reliable sources in scientific literature. The statement 'If the X is round, X is not flat' is a valid inference that can be sourced from any reliable logic textbook. But 'The earth is not flat', while a conclusion validly yielded by these two reliably-sourced premisses, is a violation of WP:SYNTH: "Even if published by reliable sources, material must not be connected together in such a way that it constitutes original research".
  13. There has been no serious study of whether the earth is flat since 1493. Therefore we cannot claim in Wikipedia that earth is not flat, only that a study in 1493 came to this conclusion.
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