Pharaoh Akhenaten and his family adoring the Aten, second from the left is Meritaten who was the daughter of Akhenaten.
Mostrar mensagens com a etiqueta gradiva. Mostrar todas as mensagens
Mostrar mensagens com a etiqueta gradiva. Mostrar todas as mensagens

segunda-feira, 12 de novembro de 2012

A Condição Pós-Moderna (La Condition Postmoderne)


































































Info On The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge:

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (French: La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir) is a 1979 book by Jean-François Lyotard that analyzes the epistemology of postmodern culture as the end of 'grand narratives' or metanarratives, which Lyotard considers a quintessential feature of modernity. Short but influential, the book was originally written as a report to the Conseil des universités du Québec.[1][2] The book introduced the term 'postmodernism', which was previously only used by art critics, in philosophy with the following quotation: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives".[3][4]
Among the metanarratives are reductionism and teleological notions of human history such as those of the Enlightenment and Marxism. These have become untenable, according to Lyotard, by technological progress in the areas of communication, mass media and computer science. Techniques such as artificial intelligence and machine translation show a shift to linguistic and symbolic production as central elements of the postindustrial economy and the related postmodern culture, which had risen at the end of the 1950s after the reconstruction of western Europe. The result is a plurality of language-games (a term coined by Ludwig Wittgenstein[5]), without any overarching structure. Modern science thus destroys its own metanarrative.
Lyotard professes a preference for this plurality of small narratives that compete with each other, replacing the totalitarianism of grand narratives. For this reason, The Postmodern Condition has been criticized as an excuse for unbounded relativism. However, Lyotard suggests that there is an objective truth, but because of the limited amount of knowledge that humans can understand, humans will never know this objective truth. In other words, there is no certainty of ideas, only better or worse ways to interpret things.
The Postmodern Condition was written as a report on the influence of technology on the notion of knowledge in exact sciences, commissioned by the Québec government. Lyotard later admitted that he had a 'less than limited' knowledge of the science he was to write about, and to compensate for this knowledge, he 'made stories up' and referred to a number of books that he hadn't actually read. In retrospect, he called it 'a parody' and 'simply the worst of all my books'.[4] Despite this, and much to Lyotard's regret, it came to be seen as his most important piece of writing.[citation needed]


Extract Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postmodern_Condition

More Info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard - http://www.amazon.com/Postmodern-Condition-Knowledge-History-Literature/dp/0816611734

Edition: http://www.gradiva.pt/index.php?q=C/BOOKSSHOW/117


Jean-François Lyotard, photo by Bracha L. Ettinger, 1995

segunda-feira, 24 de setembro de 2012

Filosofia Analítica


































































































General Info On Book's Content:

Analytic philosophy (sometimes analytical philosophy) is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand, the vast majority of university philosophy departments identify themselves as "analytic" departments.[1]

The term "analytic philosophy" can refer to:

A broad philosophical tradition[2][3] characterized by an emphasis on clarity and argument (often achieved via modern formal logic and analysis of language) and a respect for the natural sciences.[4][5][6]

The more specific set of developments of early 20th-century philosophy that were the historical antecedents of the broad sense: e.g., the work of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, Gottlob Frege, and the logical positivists.

In this latter, narrower sense, analytic philosophy is identified with specific philosophical commitments (many of which are rejected by contemporary analytic philosophers), such as:

The logical positivist principle that there are not any specifically philosophical truths and that the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. This may be contrasted with the traditional foundationalism, which considers philosophy as a special, elite science that investigates the fundamental reasons and principles of everything.[7] As a result, many analytic philosophers have considered their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, those of the natural sciences.[8]

The principle that the logical clarification of thoughts can only be achieved by analysis of the logical form of philosophical propositions.[9] The logical form of a proposition is a way of representing it (often using the formal grammar and symbolism of a logical system) to display its similarity with all other propositions of the same type. However, analytic philosophers disagree widely about the correct logical form of ordinary language.[10]

The rejection of sweeping philosophical systems in favour of attention to detail,[11] or ordinary language.[12]

According to a characteristic paragraph by Bertrand Russell:

"Modern analytical empiricism [...] differs from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy. It has the advantage, as compared with the philosophies of the system-builders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent at one stroke a block theory of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of science. I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such methods that it must be sought; I have also no doubt that, by these methods, many ancient problems are completely soluble."[13]

Analytic philosophy is often understood in contrast to other philosophical traditions, most notably continental philosophy, and also Indian philosophy, Thomism, and Marxism.[14]

Contents

1 History
1.1 Ideal language analysis
1.2 Logical positivism
1.3 Ordinary language analysis
2 Contemporary analytic philosophy
2.1 Philosophy of mind and cognitive science
2.2 Ethics in analytic philosophy
2.2.1 Normative Ethics
2.2.2 Meta-Ethics
2.2.3 Applied Ethics
2.3 Analytic philosophy of religion
2.4 Political philosophy
2.4.1 Liberalism
2.4.2 Analytical Marxism
2.4.3 Communitarianism
2.5 Analytic metaphysics
2.6 Philosophy of language
2.7 Philosophy of science
2.8 Epistemology
2.9 Aesthetics
3 See also
4 Notes
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links

History

Late 19th-century English philosophy was dominated by British idealism, as taught by philosophers such as F.H. Bradley and Thomas Hill Green. It was against this intellectual background that the founders of analytic philosophy, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, articulated the program of early analytic philosophy.

Since its beginning, a basic principle of analytic philosophy has been conceptual clarity,[15] in the name of which Moore and Russell rejected Hegelianism, which they accused of obscurity and idealism.[16][17] Inspired by developments in modern logic, the early Russell claimed that the problems of philosophy can be solved by showing the simple constituents of complex notions.[15]

Russell, during his early career, along with collaborator Alfred North Whitehead, was much influenced by Gottlob Frege, who developed predicate logic, which allowed a much greater range of sentences to be parsed into logical form than was possible by the ancient Aristotlean logic. Frege was also an influencial philosopher of mathematics in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. In contrast to Husserl's 1891 book Philosophie der Arithmetik, which attempted to show that the concept of the cardinal number derived from psychical acts of grouping objects and counting them,[18] Frege sought to show that mathematics and logic have their own validity, independent of the judgments or mental states of individual mathematicians and logicians (which were the basis of arithmetic according to the "psychologism" of Husserl's Philosophie). Frege further developed his philosophy of logic and mathematics in The Foundations of Arithmetic and The Basic Laws of Arithmetic where he provided an alternative to psychologistic accounts of the concept of number.

Like Frege, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead attempted to show that mathematics is reducible to fundamental logical principles. Their Principia Mathematica (1910–1913) encouraged many philosophers to renew their interest with the development of symbolic logic. Additionally, Bertrand Russell adopted Frege's predicate logic as his primary philosophical method, a method he thought could expose the underlying structure of philosophical problems. For example, the English word “is” has three distinct meanings by predicate logic:

For the sentence 'the cat is asleep', the is of predication means that "x is P" (denoted as P(x))

For the sentence 'there is a cat', the is of existence means that "there is an x" (∃x);

For the sentence 'three is half of six', the is of identity means that "x is the same as y" (x=y).

Russell sought to resolve various philosophical issues by applying such definite distinctions, most famously in his analysis of definite descriptions in "On Denoting."[19]

Ideal language analysis

From about 1910 to 1930, analytic philosophers like Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasized creating an ideal language for philosophical analysis, which would be free from the ambiguities of ordinary language that, in their opinion, often made philosophy invalid. This philosophical trend can be called "ideal-language analysis" or "formalism". During this phase, Russell and Wittgenstein sought to understand language, and hence philosophical problems, by using formal logic to formalize the way in which philosophical statements are made. Ludwig Wittgenstein developed a comprehensive system of logical atomism in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He thereby argued that the world is the totality of actual states of affairs and that these states of affairs can be expressed by the language of first-order predicate logic. So a picture of the world can be made by expressing atomic facts as atomic propositions, and linking them using logical operators.

Logical positivism

Main article: Logical positivism

During the late 1920s, '30s, and '40s, Russell and Wittgenstein's formalism was developed by a group of philosophers in Vienna and Berlin, who were known as the Vienna Circle and Berlin Circle respectively, into a doctrine known as logical positivism (or logical empiricism). Logical positivism used formal logical methods to develop an empiricist account of knowledge.[20] Philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, along with other members of the Vienna Circle, claimed that the truths of logic and mathematics were tautologies, and those of science were verifiable empirical claims. These two constituted the entire universe of meaningful judgments; anything else was nonsense. The claims of ethics, aesthetics and theology were, accordingly, pseudo-statements, neither true nor false, simply meaningless nonsense. Karl Popper's insistence upon the role of falsification in the philosophy of science was a reaction to the logical positivists.[21] With the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism in Germany and Austria, many members of the Vienna and Berlin Circles fled Germany, most commonly to Britain and America, which helped to reinforce the dominance of logical positivism and analytic philosophy in the Anglophone countries.[22]

Logical positivists typically considered philosophy as having a very limited function. For them, philosophy concerned the clarification of thoughts, rather than having a distinct subject matter of its own. The positivists adopted the verification principle, according to which every meaningful statement is either analytic or is capable of being verified by experience. This caused the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy, especially those of metaphysics or ontology, as meaningless.

Ordinary language analysis

Main article: Ordinary language philosophy

After World War II, during the late 1940s and 1950s, analytic philosophy took a turn toward ordinary-language analysis. This movement had two main strands. One followed in the wake of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, which departed dramatically from his early work of the Tractatus. The other, known as "Oxford philosophy", involved J. L. Austin. In contrast to earlier analytic philosophers (including the early Wittgenstein) who thought philosophers should avoid the deceptive trappings of natural language by constructing ideal languages, ordinary language philosophers claimed that ordinary language already represented a large number of subtle distinctions that had been unrecognized in the formulation of traditional philosophical theories or problems. While schools such as logical positivism emphasize logical terms, supposed to be universal and separate from contingent factors (such as culture, language, historical conditions), ordinary language philosophy emphasizes the use of language by ordinary people. Some have argued that ordinary language philosophy is of a more sociological grounding, as it essentially emphasizes on the use of language within social contexts. The best-known ordinary language philosophers during the 1950s were Austin and Gilbert Ryle. Some say[citation needed]that this movement marked a return to the common sense philosophy advocated by G.E. Moore.

Ordinary language philosophy often sought to disperse philosophical problems by showing them to be the result of misunderstanding ordinary language. See for example Ryle (who attempted to dispose of "Descartes' myth") and Wittgenstein, among others.

Contemporary analytic philosophy

Although contemporary philosophers who self-identify as "analytic" have widely divergent interests, assumptions, and methods—and have often rejected the fundamental premises that defined the analytic movement before 1960—analytic philosophy, in its contemporary state, is usually taken to be defined by a particular style[4] characterized by precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic, and resistance to "imprecise or cavalier discussions of broad topics."[23]

In the 1950s, logical positivism was influentially challenged by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, Quine in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", and Sellars in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Following 1960, Anglophone philosophy began to incorporate a wider range of interests, views, and methods[citation needed]. Still, many philosophers in Britain and America still consider themselves to be "analytic philosophers."[1][4] Largely, they have done so by expanding the notion of "analytic philosophy" from the specific programs that dominated Anglophone philosophy before 1960 to a much more general notion of an "analytic" style, characterized by precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic and opposed to "imprecise or cavalier discussions of broad topics".[23] This interpretation of the history is far from universally accepted, and its opponents would say that it grossly downplays the role of Wittgenstein in the sixties and seventies.

Many philosophers and historians have attempted to define or describe analytic philosophy. Those definitions often include a focus on conceptual analysis: A.P. Martinich draws an analogy between analytic philosophy's interest in conceptual analysis and analytic chemistry, which "aims at determining chemical compositions."[24] Steven D. Hales described analytic philosophy as one of three types of philosophical method practiced in the West: "[i]n roughly reverse order by number of proponents, they are phenomenology, ideological philosophy, and analytic philosophy".[25]

Scott Soames agrees that clarity is important: analytic philosophy, he says, has "an implicit commitment—albeit faltering and imperfect—to the ideals of clarity, rigor and argumentation" and it "aims at truth and knowledge, as opposed to moral or spiritual improvement [...] the goal in analytic philosophy is to discover what is true, not to provide a useful recipe for living one's life". Soames also states that analytic philosophy is characterised by "a more piecemeal approach. There is, I think, a widespread presumption within the tradition that it is often possible to make philosophical progress by intensively investigating a small, circumscribed range of philosophical issues while holding broader, systematic questions in abeyance".[26]

A few of the most important and active fields and subfields in analytic philosophy are summarized in the following sections.

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science

Main article: Philosophy of mind

Motivated by the logical positivists' interest in verificationism, behaviorism was the most prominent theory of mind in analytic philosophy for the first half of the twentieth century.[citation needed] Behaviorists tended to hold either that statements about the mind were equivalent to statements about behavior and dispositions to behave in particular ways or that mental states were directly equivalent to behavior and dispositions to behave. Behaviorism later became far less popular, in favor of type physicalism or functionalism, theories that identified mental states with brain states. During this period, topics in the philosophy of mind were often in close contact with issues in cognitive science such as modularity or innateness. Finally, analytic philosophy has featured a few philosophers who were dualists, and recently forms of property dualism have had a resurgence, with David Chalmers as the most prominent representative.[27]

John Searle suggests that the obsession with linguistic philosophy of the last century has been superseded by an emphasis on the philosophy of mind,[28] in which functionalism is currently the dominant theory. In recent years, a central focus for research in the philosophy of mind has been consciousness. And while there is a general consensus for the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness,[29] there are many views as to how the specifics work out. The best known theories are Daniel Dennett's heterophenomenology, Fred Dretske and Michael Tye's representationalism, and the higher-order theories of either David M. Rosenthal—who advocates a higher-order thought (HOT) model—or David Armstrong and William Lycan—who advocate a higher-order perception (HOP) model. An alternative higher-order theory, the higher-order global states (HOGS) model, is offered by Robert van Gulick.[30]

Ethics in analytic philosophy

Main article: Ethics

Philosophers working in the analytic tradition have gradually come to distinguish three major branches of moral philosophy.

normative ethics whose function is the examination and production of normative ethical judgments

meta-ethics whose function is the investigation of moral terms and concepts,

applied ethics whose function is the investigation of how existing normative principles should be applied in difficult or borderline cases, often cases created by the appearance of new technologies or new scientific knowledge.

Normative Ethics

The first half of the twentieth century was marked by skepticism toward, and neglect of, normative ethics. Related subjects, such as social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of history, moved to the fringes of English-language philosophy during this period.

During this time, utilitarianism was the only non-skeptical approach to ethics to remain popular. However, as the influence of logical positivism began to wane mid-century, contemporary analytic philosophers began to have a renewed interest in ethics. G.E.M. Anscombe’s 1958 Modern Moral Philosophy sparked a revival of Aristotle's virtue ethical approach and John Rawls’s 1971 A Theory of Justice restored interest in Kantian ethical philosophy. At present, contemporary normative ethics is dominated by three schools: utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and deontology.

Meta-Ethics


Twentieth-century meta-ethics has two roots. The first is G. E. Moore's investigation into the nature of ethical terms (e.g. good) in his Principia Ethica (1903), which identified the naturalistic fallacy. Along with Hume's famous is/ought distinction, the naturalistic fallacy was a central point of investigation for analytical philosophers.

The second is in logical positivism and its attitude that statements which are unverifiable are meaningless. Although that attitude was adopted originally as a means to promote scientific investigation of the world by rejecting grand metaphysical systems, it had the side effect of making (ethical and aesthetic) value judgments (as well as religious statements and beliefs) meaningless. But since value judgments are obviously of major importance in human life, it became incumbent on logical positivism to develop an explanation of the nature and meaning of value judgements. As a result, analytic philosophers avoided normative ethics, and instead began meta-ethical investigations into the nature of moral terms, statements, and judgments.

The logical positivists held that statements about value—including all ethical and aesthetic judgments—are non-cognitive; that is, they make no statements that can be objectively verified or falsified. Instead, the logical positivists adopted an emotivist position, which held that value judgments expressed the attitude of the speaker. Saying, "Killing is wrong", they thought, was equivalent to saying, "Boo to murder", or saying the word "murder" with a particular tone of disapproval.

While non-cognitivism was generally accepted by analytic philosophers, emotivism had many deficiencies, and evolved into more sophisticated non-cognitivist positions such as the expressivism of Charles Stevenson, and the universal prescriptivism of R. M. Hare, which had its foundations in J. L. Austin's philosophy of speech acts.

These positions were not without their critics. Phillipa Foot contributed several essays attacking all these positions. J. O. Urmson's article "On Grading" called the is/ought distinction into question.

As non-cognitivism, the is/ought distinction, and the naturalistic fallacy began to be called into question, analytic philosophers began to show a renewed interest in the traditional questions of moral philosophy. Perhaps most influential in this area was Elizabeth Anscombe, whose landmark monograph "Intention" was called by Donald Davidson "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle", and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of moral psychology. A favorite student and close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein, her 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy" introduced the term "consequentialism" into the philosophical lexicon, declared the "is-ought" impasse to be a dead end, and led to a revival in virtue ethics.

Applied Ethics


A significant feature of analytic philosophy since approximately 1970 has been the emergence of applied ethics—an interest in the application of moral principles to specific practical issues.

Areas of special interest for applied ethics include environmental issues, animal rights issues, and the many challenges created by advancing medical science.[31][32][33]


Analytic philosophy of religion

Main article: Philosophy of religion

As with the study of ethics, early analytic philosophy tended to avoid the study of philosophy of religion, largely dismissing (as per the logical positivists view) the subject as part of metaphysics and therefore meaningless.[34] The collapse of logical positivism renewed interest in philosophy of religion, prompting philosophers like William Alston, John Mackie, Alvin Plantinga, Robert Merrihew Adams, Richard Swinburne, and Antony Flew not only to introduce new problems, but to re-open classical topics such as the nature of miracles, theistic arguments, the problem of evil, (see existence of God) the rationality of belief in God, concepts of the nature of God, and many more.[35]

Plantinga, Mackie and Flew debated the logical validity of the free will defense as a way to solve the problem of evil.[36] Alston, grappling with the consequences of analytic philosophy of language, worked on the nature of religious language. Adams worked on the relationship of faith and morality.[37] Analytic epistemology and metaphysics has formed the basis for a number of philosophically-sophisticated theistic arguments, like those of the reformed epistemologists like Plantinga.

Analytic philosophy of religion has also been preoccupied with Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as his interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy of religion.[38] Using first-hand remarks (which was later published in Philosophical Investigations, Culture and Value, and other works), philosophers such as Peter Winch and Norman Malcolm developed what has come to be known as contemplative philosophy, a Wittgensteinian school of thought rooted in the "Swansea tradition," and which includes Wittgensteinians such as Rush Rhees, Peter Winch and D. Z. Phillips, among others. The name "contemplative philosophy" was first coined by D. Z. Phillips in Philosophy's Cool Place, which rests on an interpretation of a passage from Wittgenstein's "Culture and Value."[39] This interpretation was first labeled, "Wittgensteinian Fideism," by Kai Nielsen but those who consider themselves Wittgensteinians in the Swansea tradition have relentlessly and repeatedly rejected this construal as caricature of Wittgenstein's considered position; this is especially true of D. Z. Phillips.[40] Responding to this interpretation, Kai Nielsen and D.Z. Phillips became two of the most prominent philosophers on Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion.[41]


Political philosophy

Liberalism

Current analytic political philosophy owes much to John Rawls, who in a series of papers from the 1950s onward (most notably "Two Concepts of Rules" and "Justice as Fairness") and his 1971 book A Theory of Justice, produced a sophisticated and closely argued defence of a liberalism in politics. This was followed in short order by Rawls's colleague Robert Nozick's book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a defence of free-market libertarianism. Isaiah Berlin has had a notable influence on both analytic political philosophy and Liberalism with his lecture the Two Concepts of Liberty.

Recent decades have also seen the rise of several critiques of liberalism, including the feminist critiques of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, the communitarian critiques of Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre (though it should be noted both shy away from the term), and the multiculturalist critiques of Amy Gutmann and Charles Taylor. Although not an analytic philosopher, Jürgen Habermas is another important—if controversial—figure in contemporary analytic political philosophy, whose social theory is a blend of social science, Marxism, neo-Kantianism, and American pragmatism.

Consequentialist libertarianism also derives from the analytic tradition.

Analytical Marxism


Another development in the area of political philosophy has been the emergence of a school known as Analytical Marxism. Members of this school seek to apply the techniques of analytic philosophy, along with tools of modern social science such as rational choice theory to the elucidation of the theories of Karl Marx and his successors. The best-known member of this school is Oxford University philosopher G.A. Cohen, whose 1978 work, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence is generally taken as representing the genesis of this school. In that book, Cohen applied the tools of logical and linguistic analysis to the elucidation and defense of Marx's materialist conception of history. Other prominent Analytical Marxists include the economist John Roemer, the social scientist Jon Elster, and the sociologist Erik Olin Wright. The work of these later philosophers have furthered Cohen's work by bringing to bear modern social science methods, such as rational choice theory, to supplement Cohen's use of analytic philosophical techniques in the interpretation of Marxian theory.

Cohen himself would later engage directly with Rawlsian political philosophy to advance a socialist theory of justice that stands in contrast to both traditional Marxism and the theories advanced by Rawls and Nozick. In particular, he points to Marx's principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Communitarianism


Communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer and Michael Sandel advance a critique of Liberalism that uses analytic techniques to isolate the key assumptions of Liberal individualists, such as Rawls, and then challenges these assumptions. In particular, Communitarians challenge the Liberal assumption that the individual can be viewed as fully autonomous from the community in which he lives and is brought up. Instead, they push for a conception of the individual that emphasizes the role that the community plays in shaping his or her values, thought processes and opinions.

Analytic metaphysics


Main article: Metaphysics

One striking break with early analytic philosophy was the revival of metaphysical theorizing in the second half of the twentieth century. Philosophers such as David Kellogg Lewis and David Armstrong developed elaborate theories on a range of topics such as universals, causation, possibility and necessity, and abstract objects.

Among the developments that led to the revival of metaphysical theorizing were Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction, which was generally taken to undermine Carnap's distinction between existence questions internal to a framework and those external to it.[42]

Metaphysics remains a fertile area for research, having recovered from the attacks of A.J. Ayer and the logical positivists. And though many were inherited from previous decades, the debate remains fierce. The philosophy of fiction, the problem of empty names, and the debate over existence's status as a property have all risen out of relative obscurity to become central concerns, while perennial issues such as free will, possible worlds, and the philosophy of time have had new life breathed into them.[43][44]

Science has also played an increasingly significant role in metaphysics. The theory of special relativity has had a profound effect on the philosophy of time, and quantum physics is routinely discussed in the free will debate.[45] The weight given to scientific evidence is largely due to widespread commitments among philosophers to scientific realism and naturalism.

Philosophy of language


Main article: Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is another area that has slowed down over the course of the last four decades, as evidenced by the fact that few major figures in contemporary philosophy treat it as a primary research area. Indeed, while the debate remains fierce, it is still strongly under the influence of those figures from the first half of the century: Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Alfred Tarski, and W.V.O. Quine.

In Naming and Necessity, Kripke influentially argued that flaws in common theories of proper names are indicative of larger misunderstandings of the metaphysics of necessity and possibility. By wedding the tools of modal logic to a causal theory of reference, Kripke was widely regarded as reviving theories of essence and identity as respectable topics of philosophical discussion.

Philosophy of science


Main article: Philosophy of science

Reacting against the earlier philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper, who had suggested the falsifiability criterion on which to judge the demarcation between science and non-science, discussions in philosophy of science in the last forty years were dominated by social constructivist and cognitive relativist theories of science.[dubious – discuss] Thomas Samuel Kuhn is one of the major philosophers of science representative of the former theory, while Paul Feyerabend is representative of the latter theory. Philosophy of biology has also undergone considerable growth, particularly due to the considerable debate in recent years over evolution. Here again, Daniel Dennett and his 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea stand at the foreground of this debate.[dubious – discuss]

Epistemology


Main article: Epistemology

Owing largely to Gettier's 1963 paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", epistemology saw a resurgence in analytic philosophy over the last 50 years. A large portion of current epistemological research aims to resolve the problems that Gettier's examples presented to the traditional justified true belief model of knowledge. Other areas of contemporary research include basic knowledge, the nature of evidence, the value of knowledge, epistemic luck, virtue epistemology, the role of intuitions in justification, and treating knowledge as a primitive concept.

Aesthetics


Main article: Aesthetics

In the wake of attacks on the traditional aesthetic notions of beauty and sublimity from post-modern thinkers, analytic philosophers were slow in taking on analyses of art and aesthetic judgment. Susanne Langer[46] and Nelson Goodman[47] addressed these problems in an analytic style in the 1950s and 60s. Rigorous efforts to pursue analyses of traditional aesthetic concepts were undertaken by Guy Sircello in the 1970s and 80s, resulting in new analytic theories of love,[48] sublimity,[49] and beauty.[50]

See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postanalytic_philosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

Notes

1.^ a b "Without exception, the best philosophy departments in the United States are dominated by analytic philosophy, and among the leading philosophers in the United States, all but a tiny handful would be classified as analytic philosophers. Practitioners of types of philosophizing that are not in the analytic tradition—such as phenomenology, classical pragmatism, existentialism, or Marxism—feel it necessary to define their position in relation to analytic philosophy." John Searle (2003) Contemporary Philosophy in the United States in N. Bunnin and E.P. Tsui-James (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, 2nd ed., (Blackwell, 2003), p. 1.

2.^ See, e.g., Avrum Stroll, Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 5: "[I]t is difficult to give a precise definition of 'analytic philosophy' since it is not so much a specific doctrine as a loose concatenation of approaches to problems." Also, see ibid., p. 7: "I think Sluga is right in saying 'it may be hopeless to try to determine the essence of analytic philosophy.' Nearly every proposed definition has been challenged by some scholar. [...] [W]e are dealing with a family resemblance concept."

3.^ See Hans-Johann Glock, What Is Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 205: "The answer to the title question, then, is that analytic philosophy is a tradition held together both by ties of mutual influence and by family resemblances."

4.^ a b c Brian Leiter (2006) webpage “Analytic” and “Continental” Philosophy. Quote on the definition: "'Analytic' philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities."

5.^ H. Glock, "Was Wittgenstein an Analytic Philosopher?", Metaphilosophy, 35:4 (2004), pp. 419–444.

6.^ Colin McGinn, The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey through Twentieth-Century Philosophy (HarperCollins, 2002), p. xi.: "analytical philosophy [is] too narrow a label, since [it] is not generally a matter of taking a word or concept and analyzing it (whatever exactly that might be). [...] This tradition emphasizes clarity, rigor, argument, theory, truth. It is not a tradition that aims primarily for inspiration or consolation or ideology. Nor is it particularly concerned with 'philosophy of life,' though parts of it are. This kind of philosophy is more like science than religion, more like mathematics than poetry – though it is neither science nor mathematics."

7.^ See Aristotle Metaphysics (Book II 993a), Kenny (1973) p. 230.

8.^ This is an attitude that begins with John Locke, who described his work as that of an "underlabourer" to the achievements of natural scientists such as Newton. During the twentieth century, the most influential advocate of the continuity of philosophy with science was Willard Van Orman Quine: see, e.g., his papers "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and "Epistemology Naturalized".

9.^ A.P. Martinich, "Introduction," in Martinich & D. Sosa (eds.), A Companion to Analytic Philosophy (Blackwell, 2001), p. 1: "To use a general name for the kind of analytic philosophy practiced during the first half of the twentieth century, [...] 'conceptual analysis' aims at breaking down complex concepts into their simpler components."

10.^ Wittgenstein, op. cit., 4.111

11.^ Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century Vol. 1 (Princeton UP, 2003), p. xv: "There is, I think, a widespread presumption within the tradition that it is often possible to make philosophical progress by intensively investigating a small, circumscribed range of philosophical issues while holding broader, systematic questions in abeyance. What distinguishes twentieth-century analytical philosophy from at least some philosophy in other traditions, or at other times, is not a categorical rejection of philosophical systems, but rather the acceptance of a wealth of smaller, more thorough and more rigorous, investigations that need not be tied to any overarching philosophical view." See also, e.g., "Philosophical Analysis" (catalogued under "Analysis, Philosophical") in Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Vol. 1 (Macmillan, 1967), esp. sections on "Bertrand Russell" at p. 97ff, "G.E. Moore" at p. 100ff, and "Logical Positivism" at p. 102ff.

12.^ See, e.g., the works of G.E. Moore and J.L. Austin.

13.^ A History of Western Philosophy (Simon & Schuster, 1945), p. 834.

14.^ A.C. Grayling (ed.), Philosophy 2: Further through the Subject (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 2: "Analytic philosophy is mainly associated with the contemporary English-speaking world, but it is by no means the only important philosophical tradition. In this volume two other immensely rich and important such traditions are introduced: Indian philosophy, and philosophical thought in Europe from the time of Hegel." L.J. Cohen, The Dialogue of Reason: An Analysis of Analytical Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 5: "So, despite a few overlaps, analytical philosophy is not difficult to distinguish broadly [...] from other modern movements, like phenomenology, say, or existentialism, or from the large amount of philosophizing that has also gone on in the present century within frameworks deriving from other influential thinkers like Aquinas, Hegel, or Marx." H.-J. Glock, What Is Analytic Philosophy? (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 86: "Most non-analytic philosophers of the twentieth century do not belong to continental philosophy."

15.^ a b Mautner, Thomas (editor) (2005) The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, entry for 'Analytic philosophy, pp.22–3

16.^ See for example Moore's A Defence of Common Sense and Russell's critique of the Doctrine of internal relations,

17.^ "Analytic philosophy opposed right from its beginning English neo-Hegelianism of Bradley's sort and similar ones. It did not only criticize the latter's denial of the existence of an external world (anyway an unjust criticism), but also the bombastic, obscure style of Hegel's writings." Jonkers, Peter (2003). "Perspectives on Twentieth Century Philosophy:A Reply to Tom Rockmore". Ars Disputandi 3. ISSN 1566-5399. http://www.arsdisputandi.org/publish/articles/000129/article.pdf.

18.^ Willard, Dallas. "Husserl on a Logic that Failed". Philosophical Review 89 (1): 52–53.

19.^ Russell, Bertrand (1905). "On Denoting". Mind 14: 473–93. http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/anglica/Chronology/20thC/Russell/rus_deno.html.

20.^ Carnap, R. (1928). The Logical Structure of the World. ?.

21.^ Popper, Karl R. (2002). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-27844-9.

22.^ Important amongst these were Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap. Karl Popper might also be included, since despite his rejection of the term his method is similar to the analytic tradition.

23.^ a b Analytic Philosophy [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

24.^ A.P. Martinich, ed. (2001). A companion to analytic philosophy. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. pp. 1–5. ISBN 0-631-21415-1.

25.^ Hales, Steven D. (2002). Analytic philosophy : classic readings. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. pp. 1–10. ISBN 0-534-51277-1.

26.^ Soames, Scott (2003). The dawn of analysis (2nd print., 1st paperb. print. ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. pp. xiii-xvii. ISBN 0-691-11573-7.

27.^ Dualism entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

28.^ Postrel and Feser, February 2000, Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle at http://www.reason.com/news/show/27599.html

29.^ Dennett, Daniel C. (2001) "Are We Explaining Consciousness Yet?" Cognition 79 (1–2):221-37.

30.^ For summaries and some criticism of the different higher-order theories, see Van Gulick, Robert (2006) "Mirror Mirror—Is That All?" In Kriegel & Williford (eds.), Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The final draft is also available here [1]. For Van Gulick's own view, see Van Gulick, Robert. "Higher-Order Global States HOGS: An Alternative Higher-Order Model of Consciousness." In Gennaro, R.J., (ed.) Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness: An Anthology. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

31.^ Brennan, Andrew and Yeuk-Sze Lo (2002). "Environmental Ethics" §2, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

32.^ Gruen, Lori (2003). "The Moral Status of Animals," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

33.^ See Hursthouse, Rosalind (2003). "Virtue Ethics" §3, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Donchin, Anne (2004). "Feminist Bioethics" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

34.^ (a notable exception is the series of Michael B. Forest's 1934–36 Mind articles involving the Christian doctrine of creation and the rise of modern science).

35.^ Peterson, Michael et al. (2003). Reason and Religious Belief

36.^ Mackie, John L. (1982). The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God

37.^ Adams, Robert M. (1987). The Virtue of Faith And Other Essays in Philosophical Theology

38.^ Creegan, Charles. (1989). Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: Religion, Individuality and Philosophical Method

39.^ Phillips, D. Z. (1999). Philosophy's Cool Place. Cornell University Press. The quote is from Wittgenstein's Culture and Value (2e): "My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them.

40.^ Fideism entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

41.^ Nielsen, Kai and D.Z. Phillips. (2005). Wittgensteinian Fideism?

42.^ S. Yablo and A. Gallois, Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 72, (1998), pp. 229-261+263-283 first part

43.^ Everett, Anthony and Thomas Hofweber (eds.) (2000), Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-Existence.

44.^ Van Inwagen, Peter, and Dean Zimmerman (eds.) (1998), Metaphysics: The Big Questions.

45.^ Ibid.

46.^ Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (1953)

47.^ Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976. Based on his 1960-61 John Locke lectures.

48.^ Guy Sircello, Love and Beauty. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

49.^ Guy Sircello "How Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 541-550

50.^ Guy Sircello, A New Theory of Beauty. Princeton Essays on the Arts, 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.

References


Aristotle, Metaphysics

Geach, P., Mental Acts, London 1957

Kenny, A.J.P., Wittgenstein, London 1973.

Analytic philosophy entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Aaron Preston

Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Further reading


The London Philosophy Study Guide offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein

Dummett, Michael. The Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Hirschberger, Johannes. A Short History of Western Philosophy, ed. Clare Hay. Short History of Western Philosophy, A. ISBN 978-0-7188-3092-2

Hylton, Peter. Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Soames, Scott. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 1, The Dawn of Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Passmore, John. A Hundred Years of Philosophy, revised ed. New York: Basic Books, 1966.

Weitz, Morris, ed. Twentieth Century Philosophy: The Analytic Tradition. New York: Free Press, 1966.

External links


Analytic philosophy entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://www.iep.utm.edu/analytic/

Analytic philosophy entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/s6

Analytic philosophy at the Open Directory Project
http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Philosophy/Analytic_Philosophy/


Wikipedia Article Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy

More Info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottlob_Frege
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._E._Moore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Circle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Carnap
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Van_Orman_Quine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Ayer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Ryle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._F._Strawson

Edition:
Gradiva
Bertrand

terça-feira, 17 de maio de 2011

Cosmos by Carl Sagan


Info On The TV Series:

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as presenter. It was executive-produced by Adrian Malone, produced by David Kennard, Geoffrey Haines-Stiles and Gregory Andorfer, and directed by the producers, David Oyster, Richard Wells, Tom Weidlinger, and others. It covered a wide range of scientific subjects, including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe.

The series was first broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1980 and was the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until The Civil War (1990). As of 2009, it was still the most widely watched PBS series in the world.[1] It won an Emmy and a Peabody Award and has since been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 500 million people.[2][3] A book was also published to accompany the series.

Overview

Cosmos was produced in 1978 and 1979 by Los Angeles PBS affiliate KCET on a roughly $6.3 million budget, with over $2 million additionally allocated to promotion. The program's format is similar to earlier BBC documentaries like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man and David Attenborough's Life on Earth. (The BBC — a co-producer of Cosmos — later screened the series, but episodes were cut to fit 50-minute slots.) However, unlike those series, which were shot entirely on film, Cosmos used videotape for interior scenes and special effects, with film being used for exteriors.The series was notable for its groundbreaking use of special effects, which allowed Sagan to seemingly walk through environments that were actually models rather than full-sized sets. The soundtrack included pieces of music provided by Greek composer Vangelis such as Alpha, Pulstar, and Heaven and Hell Part 1 (the last movement serving as the signature theme music for the show, and is directly referenced by the title of episode 4). Throughout the 13 hours of the series, it used many tracks from several 1970s albums such as Albedo 0.39, Spiral, Ignacio, Beaubourg, and China. The worldwide success of the documentary series also put Vangelis' music in the homes of many and brought it to the attention of a global audience.

Turner Home Entertainment purchased Cosmos from series producer KCET in 1989. In making the move to commercial television, the hour-long episodes were edited to shorter lengths, and Sagan shot new epilogues for several episodes in which he discussed new discoveries (and alternate viewpoints) that had arisen since the original broadcast. Additionally, a 14th episode was added which consisted of an interview between Sagan and Ted Turner, and this "new" version of the series was eventually released as a VHS box set. This same re-edited version was also released on 12" Laserdisc, a popular consumer format at the time and precursor to the DVD. Two episodes were released per disc (one episode on each side). The laserdiscs were sold separately, not in a boxed set configuration like the VHS tapes.

Cosmos had long been unavailable after its initial release because of copyright issues with the included music, but was released in 2000 on worldwide NTSC DVD, which includes subtitles in seven languages,[4] remastered 5.1 sound, as well as an alternate music and sound effects track. In 2005, The Science Channel rebroadcast the series for its 25th anniversary with updated computer graphics, film footage, digital sound and updated scientific knowledge that had occurred in the past 25 years. Despite being shown again on the Science Channel, the total amount of time for the original 13 episodes (780 minutes) was reduced 25% to 585 minutes (45 minutes per episode) in order to make room for commercials.[5][6][7]

In 2009, Freemantle Media Enterprises released in the UK, a 5-disc DVD set of the original series plus with bonus science updates. The DVD set was digitally restored and remastered. Although a little grainy in places, it is generally considered to be the best reproduction of the original series to date.[citation needed]

Extract Taken From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage

More Info: http://www.facebook.com/pages/EST%C3%89VEZ-SEVEN-Portugal/153443424733225#!/pages/EST%C3%89VEZ-SEVEN-Portugal/153443424733225?sk=info , http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081846/ & http://213.60.250.189:99/ESTEV/INICIO?WEB=3
 


Info On The Book:

Cosmos (1980) is a popular science book by astronomer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Sagan. Its 13 illustrated chapters, corresponding to the 13 episodes of the Cosmos TV series on which the book was based, explore the mutual development of science and civilization. Spurred in part by the popularity of the TV series, Cosmos spent 50 weeks on the Publishers Weekly best-sellers list and 70 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list to become the best-selling science book ever published at the time. In 1981, it received the Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book. The book's unprecedented success ushered in a dramatic increase in visibility for science-themed literature. The sequel to Cosmos is Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994).[1]

Summary

Cosmos has 13 heavily illustrated chapters, corresponding to the 13 episodes of the Cosmos television series.[2] In the book, Sagan explores 15 billion years of cosmic evolution and the development of science and civilization.[3] Cosmos traces the origins of knowledge and the scientific method, mixing science and philosophy, and speculates to the future of science.[4] The book also discusses the underlying premises of science by providing biographical anecdotes about many prominent scientists throughout history, placing their contributions into the broader context of the development of modern science.[5] Cornell News Service characterized the book as "an overview of how science and civilization grew up together."[6]

The book covers a broad range of topics, comprising Sagan's reflections on anthropological, cosmological, biological, historical, and astronomical matters from antiquity to contemporary times. Sagan reiterates his position on extraterrestrial life—that the magnitude of the universe permits the existence of thousands of alien civilizations, but no credible evidence exists to demonstrate that such life has ever visited earth.[7]

Legacy

Cosmos became the best-selling science book ever published in the English language.[12][13][14][15] It was only surpassed in the late 1980s by Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time.[16] Though spurred in part by the popularity of the television series, Cosmos became a best-seller by itself.[17] Cosmos spent 50 weeks on the Publishers Weekly best-seller's list,[6] where it became the first science book to sell more than half a million copies.[18] The book also spent 70 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.[19] Cosmos sold more than 900,000 copies while on the best sellers list and continued to sell well for years later,[20] selling around five million copies internationally.[21] Shortly after Cosmos was published, Sagan received a $2 million advance for the novel Contact.[22] This was the largest release given for an unwritten fiction book at the time.[18] The success of Cosmos made Sagan "wealthy as well as famous."[23] It also ushered in a dramatic increase in visibility for science books.[20] Science historian Bruce Lewenstein of Cornell University noted that among science books "Cosmos marked the moment that something different was clearly going on."[17]

Lewenstein also noted the power of the book as a recruitment tool. Along with Microbe Hunters and The Double Helix, he described Cosmos as one of the "books that people cite as 'Hey, the reason I'm a scientist is because I read that book'."[17] Particularly in astronomy and physics, he said, the book inspired many people to become scientists.[22]

Extracts Taken From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_(book)

More Info: http://www.gradiva.pt/?q=C/BOOKSSHOW/1273 (paperback without illustrations - capa fina, só texto...)

sexta-feira, 19 de novembro de 2010

O Código Da Bíblia (The Bible Code)

















































Info About The Book & Related (in english):

I

The Bible Code is a best-selling book by Michael Drosnin, first published in 1997. A sequel, The Bible Code II, was published in 2002 and also reached best-seller status.

Drosnin describes an alleged "Bible code", in which messages are encoded in the Hebrew bible. The messages are purported to be hidden in the Torah, and can be deciphered by placing the letters of various Torah passages at equal intervals in a text that has been formatted to fit inside a graph.

Drosnin suggests that the Code was written by extraterrestrial life (which he claims also brought the DNA of the human genetic code to Earth). Drosnin elaborates on this theory in The Bible Code II, suggesting that the alien who brought the code left the key to the code in a steel obelisk. Drosnin attempted to find this obelisk, which he believes is buried near the Dead Sea.

Drosnin's book is based on the technique described in the paper "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis" by Professor Eliyahu Rips of the Hebrew University in Israel with Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg. The Bible Code makes numerous predictions and post-diction, such as the coming (not having come to pass) of the apocalypse in 2006, and a claim of "proof" that Lee Harvey Oswald was destined to assassinate John F. Kennedy.

( source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_Code_(book) )

II

The Bible code (Hebrew: צפנים בתנ"ך‎), also known as the Torah code, is a purported set of secret messages encoded within the text Hebrew Bible and describing prophesies and other guidance regarding the future. This hidden code has been described as a method by which specific letters from the text can be selected to reveal an otherwise obscured message. Though Bible codes have been postulated and studied for centuries, the subject has been popularized in modern times by Michael Drosnin's book The Bible Code.

Many examples have been documented in the past. One cited example is that by taking every 50th letter of the Book of Genesis starting with the first taw, the Hebrew word "torah" is spelled out. The same happens in the Book of Exodus. Modern computers have been used to search for similar patterns and more complex variants, and published in a peer-reviewed academic journal in 1994. Proponents hold that it is exceedingly unlikely such sequences could arise by chance, while skeptics and opponents hold that such sequences do often arise by chance, as demonstrated on other Hebrew and English texts.[citation needed]

Overview

Contemporary discussion and controversy around one specific encryption method became widespread in 1994 when Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg published a paper, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis", in the scientific journal Statistical Science.[1] The paper, which was presented by the journal as a "challenging puzzle", presented strong statistical evidence that biographical information about famous rabbis was encoded in the text of the Book of Genesis, centuries before those rabbis lived.

Since then the term "Bible codes" has been popularly used to refer specifically to information encrypted via this ELS method.

Since the Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (WRR) paper was published, two conflicting schools of thought regarding the "codes" have emerged among proponents. The traditional (WRR) view of the codes is based strictly on their applicability to the Torah, and asserts that any attempt to study the codes outside of this context is invalid. This is based on a belief that the Torah is unique among biblical texts in that it was given directly to mankind (via Moses) in exact letter-by-letter sequence and in the original Hebrew language.

Equidistant Letter Sequence method

The primary method by which purportedly meaningful messages have been extracted is the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS). To obtain an ELS from a text, choose a starting point (in principle, any letter) and a skip number, also freely and possibly negative. Then, beginning at the starting point, select letters from the text at equal spacing as given by the skip number. For example, the bold letters in this sentence form an ELS. With a skip of -4, and ignoring the spaces and punctuation, the word safest is spelled out.

Often more than one ELS related to some topic can be displayed simultaneously in an ELS letter array. This is produced by writing out the text in a regular grid, with exactly the same number of letters in each line, then cutting out a rectangle. In the example below, part of the King James Version of Genesis (26:5–10) is shown with 33 letters per line. ELSs for BIBLE and CODE are shown. Normally only a smaller rectangle would be displayed, such as the rectangle drawn in the figure. In that case there would be letters missing between adjacent lines in the picture, but it is essential that the number of missing letters be the same for each line.


Although the above examples are in English texts, Bible codes proponents usually use a Hebrew Bible text. For religious reasons, most Jewish proponents use only the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy).

[edit] ELS extensionsOnce a specific word has been found as an ELS, it is natural to see if that word is part of a longer ELS consisting of multiple words.[2] For example, in the middle of the rightmost column of the boxed matrix above is the ELS "he". After searching immediately above and below this ELS, we see another ELS ("toe") that is right below the "he" ELS. Code pioneers Haralick and Rips have published an example of a longer, extended ELS, which reads, "Destruction I will call you; cursed is Bin Laden and revenge is to the Messiah."[3]

ELS extensions that form phrases or sentences are of interest. Bible code proponents claim that the longer the extended ELS, the less likely it is to be the result of chance.[4]

ELS extensions

Once a specific word has been found as an ELS, it is natural to see if that word is part of a longer ELS consisting of multiple words.[2] For example, in the middle of the rightmost column of the boxed matrix above is the ELS "he". After searching immediately above and below this ELS, we see another ELS ("toe") that is right below the "he" ELS. Code pioneers Haralick and Rips have published an example of a longer, extended ELS, which reads, "Destruction I will call you; cursed is Bin Laden and revenge is to the Messiah."[3]

ELS extensions that form phrases or sentences are of interest. Bible code proponents claim that the longer the extended ELS, the less likely it is to be the result of chance.[4]

History

Jewish culture has a long tradition of interpretation, annotation, and commentary regarding the Bible, leading to both exegesis and eisegesis (insightful and false interpretations). The Bible code can be viewed as a part of this tradition, albeit one of the more controversial parts. Throughout history, many Jewish, and later Christian, scholars have attempted to find hidden or coded messages within the Bible's text, notably including Isaac Newton.[5][6]

The 13th-century Spanish Rabbi Bachya ben Asher may have been the first[citation needed] to describe an ELS in the Bible. His four-letter example related to the traditional zero-point of the Hebrew calendar. Over the following centuries there are some hints that the ELS technique was known, but few definite examples have been found from before the middle of the 20th century. At this point many examples were found by the Slovak Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl and published by his students after his death in 1957. Nevertheless, the practice remained known only to a few until the early 1980s, when some discoveries of an Israeli school teacher Avraham Oren came to the attention of the mathematician Eliyahu Rips at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rips then took up the study together with his religious studies partners Doron Witztum and Alexander Rotenberg, and several others.

Rips and Witztum designed computer software for the ELS technique and subsequently found many examples. About 1985, they decided to carry out a formal test, and the "Great rabbis experiment" was born. This experiment tested the hypothesis that ELS's of the names of famous rabbinic personalities and their respective birth and death dates form a more compact arrangement than could be explained by chance. Their definition of "compact" was complex but, roughly, two ELSs were compactly arranged if they can be displayed together in a small window. When Rips et al carried out the experiment, the data was measured and found to be statistically significant, supporting their hypothesis.

The "great rabbis experiment" went through several iterations, and was eventually published in 1994, in the peer-reviewed journal Statistical Science. Prior to publication, the journal's editor, Robert Kass, subjected the paper to three successive peer reviews by the journal's referees, who according to Kass were "baffled". Though still skeptical,[7] none of the reviewers had found any flaws. Understanding that the paper was certain to generate controversy, it was presented to readers in the context of a "challenging puzzle."

Witztum and Rips also performed other experiments, most of them successful, though none were published in journals. Another experiment, in which the names of the famous rabbis were matched against the places of their births and deaths (rather than the dates), was conducted in 1997 by Harold Gans, former Senior Cryptologic Mathematician for the United States National Security Agency.[8] Again, the results were interpreted as being meaningful and thus suggestive of a more than chance result.[9] These Bible codes became known to the public primarily due to the American journalist Michael Drosnin, whose book The Bible Code (Simon and Schuster, 1997) was a best-seller in many countries. Rips issued a public statement that he did not support Drosnin's work or conclusions;[10] even Gans has said that although the book states that the codes in the Torah can be used to predict future events: This is absolutely unfounded. There is no scientific or mathematical basis for such a statement, and the reasoning used to come to such a conclusion in the book is logically flawed.[11] In 2002, Drosnin published a second book on the same subject, called Bible Code II: the Countdown. The Jewish outreach group Aish-HaTorah employs Bible Codes in their Discovery Seminars to persuade secular Jews of the divinity of the Torah, and to encourage them to trust in its traditional Orthodox teachings. Use of Bible code techniques also spread into certain Christian circles, especially in the United States. The main early proponents were Yakov Rambsel, who is a Messianic Jew, and Grant Jeffrey. Another Bible code technique was developed in 1997 by Dean Coombs (also Christian). Various pictograms are claimed to be formed by words and sentences using ELS.[12]

Since 2000, physicist Nathan Jacobi, an agnostic Jew, and engineer Moshe Aharon Shak, an orthodox Jew, claim to have discovered hundreds of examples of lengthy, extended ELSs.[13] The number of extended ELSs at different lengths is compared with those expected from a non-encoded text, as determined by a formula from Markov chain theory.[14]

Criticism

The primary objection advanced against Bible codes is that information theory does not prohibit "noise" from appearing to be sometimes meaningful. Thus, if data chosen for ELS experiments are intentionally or unintentionally "cooked" before the experiment is defined, similar patterns can be found in texts other than the Torah. Although the probability of an ELS in a random place being a meaningful word is small, there are so many possible starting points and skip patterns that many such words can be expected to appear, depending on the details chosen for the experiment, and that it is possible to "tune" an ELS experiment to achieve a result which appears to exhibit patterns that overcome the level of noise.

Criticism of the original paper

In 1999, four authors, the Australian mathematician Brendan McKay, the Israeli mathematicians Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, and the Israeli psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel (collectively known as "MBBK") published a paper in Statistical Science, in which they argue that the case of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (WRR) is "fatally defective, indeed that their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it."[15] The MBBK paper was reviewed anonymously by four professional statisticians prior to publication. In the introduction to the paper, Robert Kass, the Editor of the Journal who previously had described the WRR paper as a "challenging puzzle" wrote that "considering the work of McKay, Bar-Natan, Kalai and Bar-Hillel as a whole it indeed appears, as they conclude, that the puzzle has been solved".[7]

In the MBBK paper, the authors present the following arguments:

- that because of problems in WRR's test method, the results of WRR's 1994 paper "may reflect (at least to some extent) uninteresting properties of the word list [the appellation-date word pairs] rather than an extraordinary property of Genesis,"[16] and that the test method used by WRR has properties that make it "exceptionally susceptible to systematic bias."[17]

- that WRR had many choices available when selecting the appellations, the dates, and the date forms.[18]

- that, despite the claims by WRR and S. Z. Havlin that Havlin prepared the appellations independently, the earliest available documents on the experiments do not state that the lists of appellations were prepared by an independent expert. Similarly, the authors quote a 1985 lecture by Eliyahu Rips, in which he describes the appellation selection process as taking "every possible variant that we considered reasonable", and makes no mention of Havlin or an independent expert.[19]

- that, by adding some appellations and removing some appellations from WRR's list 2, and then repeating the test on the initial 78,064 letters (the length of Genesis) of a Hebrew translation of War and Peace, they achieved a significance level of one in a million. The authors say this shows that "the freedom provided just in the selection of appellations is sufficient to explain the strong result" in WRR's 1994 paper.[20]

- The authors present a "study of variations", in which they repeated the experiments many times, each time making one or more minimal changes to the test method, the dates, or the date forms.[21] The authors conclude that "only a small fraction of variations made WRR's result stronger and then usually by only a small amount ... we believe that these observations are strong evidence for tuning ... "[22]

- The authors present experiments they conducted which they say show that some results of experiments by WRR and Harold Gans are "too good to be true." That is, some of the results are statistically improbable even if one accepts that WRR's hypothesis is true. The authors say that these studies "give support to the theory that WRR's experiments were tuned toward an overly idealized result consistent with the common expectations of statistically naïve researchers."[23]

- The authors present multiple experiments they conducted in which they attempted to replicate WRR's experiments. The authors used an independent expert to prepare the appellations and dates for each of these experiments. The authors report that the results of these attempted replications were negative.[24]

- that the available evidence indicates that the text of Genesis used by WRR is substantially different from its original form, and that ELSs with large skips (which WRR's experiments rely on) could not survive such changes.[25]

From these observations, MBBK created an alternative hypothesis to explain the "puzzle" of how the codes were discovered. MBBK's claim, in essence, was that the WRR authors had cheated[26][27] MBBK went on to describe the means by which the cheating might have occurred, and demonstrate the tactic as presumed.

MBBK's refutation was not strictly mathematical in nature, rather it asserted that the WRR authors and contributors had intentionally or unintentionally (a) selected the names and/or dates in advance and (b) designed their experiments to match their selection and thereby achieved their "desired" result. The MBBK paper argued that the ELS experiment is extraordinarily sensitive to very small changes in the spellings of appellations, and that the WRR result "merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it."

The MBBK paper demonstrated that this "tuning", when combined with what MBBK asserted was available "wiggle" room, was capable of generating a result similar to WRR's Genesis result in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace. Psychologist and MBBK co-author Maya Bar-Hillel subsequently summarized the MBBK view that the WRR paper was a hoax, an intentionally and a carefully designed "magic trick".[28]

The Bible codes (together with similar arguments concerning hidden prophecies in the writings of Shakespeare) have been quoted as examples of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

Replies to MBBK's criticisms

Harold Gans has argued that MBBK's hypothesis implies a conspiracy between WRR and their co-contributors to fraudulently tune the appellations in advance. Gans argues that the conspiracy must include Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and S. Z. Havlin, because all of them say that Havlin compiled the appellations independently. Gans argues further that such a conspiracy must include the multiple rabbis who have written a letter confirming the accuracy of Havlin's list. Finally, argues Gans, such a conspiracy must also include the multiple participants of the cities experiment conducted by Gans (which includes Gans himself). Gans concludes that "the number of people necessarily involved in [the conspiracy] will stretch the credulity of any reasonable person."[29]

Brendan McKay has replied that he and his colleagues have never accused Havlin or Gans of participating in a conspiracy. Instead, says McKay, Havlin likely did what WRR's early preprints said he did: he provided "valuable advices". Similarly, McKay accepts Gans' statements that Gans did not prepare the data for his cities experiment himself. McKay concludes that "there is only ONE person who needs to have been involved in knowing fakery, and a handful of his disciples who must be involved in the cover-up (perhaps with good intent)."[30]

The WRR authors issued a series of responses regarding of the claims of MBBK,[31] including the claim that no such tuning did or even could have taken place.[32] An earlier WRR response to a request by MBBK authors presented results from additional experiments that used the specific "alternate" name and date formats which MBBK suggested had been intentionally avoided by WRR.[33] Using MBBK's alternates, the results WRR returned showed equivalent or better support for the existence of the codes, and so challenged the "wiggle room" assertion of MBBK. In the wake of the WRR response, author Bar-Natan issued a formal statement of non-response.[34] After a series of exchanges with McKay and Bar-Hillel, WRR author Witztum responded in a new paper[35] claiming that McKay had used smoke screen tactics in creating several straw man arguments, and thereby avoided the points made by WRR authors refuting MBBK.[36] Witztum also claimed that, upon interviewing a key independent expert contracted by McKay for the MBBK paper, that some experiments performed for MBBK had validated, rather than refuted the original WRR findings, and questioned why MBBK had expunged these results from their paper. McKay replied to these claims.[37]

No publication in a peer reviewed scientific journal has appeared refuting MBBK's paper. In 2006, three new Torah Codes papers were published at the 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'06).[38] Each of the three works was supported by Yuri Pikover, founder of the company Xylan (acquired in 1999 by Alcatel).

Robert Aumann, a notable game theorist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005, has followed the Bible Code research and controversy for many years. He wrote:[39] "Though the basic thesis of the research seems wildly improbable, for many years I thought that an ironclad case had been made for the codes; I did not see how 'cheating' could have been possible. Then came the work of the 'opponents' (see, for example, McKay, Bar-Natan, Bar-Hillel and Kalai, Statistical Science 14 (1999), 149–173). Though this work did not convince me that the data had been manipulated, it did convince me that it could have been; that manipulation was technically possible. "After a long and interesting analysis of the experiment and the dynamics of the controversy, stating for example that "almost everybody included [in the controversy] made up their mind early in the game" Aumann concluded:

"A priori, the thesis of the Codes research seems wildly improbable... Research conducted under my own supervision failed to confirm the existence of the codes - though it also did not establish their non-existence. So I must return to my a priori estimate, that the Codes phenomenon is improbable". [40]

Criticism of Michael Drosnin

Journalist Drosnin's books have been criticized by some who believe that the Bible Code is real but that it cannot predict the future.[41] On Drosnin's claim of Rabin's death, Drosnin wrote in his book "The Bible Code" (published in 1997) on page 120; "Yigal Amir could not be found in advance". This is very telling in that dangerous period of Israeli politics from the Oslo Accords of 1993 to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995.[42] Critics have noted a huge error in the "code" Drosnin claimed to have found, they note Drosnin used the Biblical verse Deuteronomy 4:42. Scholars note; "For example, citing again the passage intersecting with Rabin: that passage is from Deuteronomy 4:42, but Drosnin ignores the words immediately following "a murderer who will murder." What comes next is the phrase "unwittingly" (biveli da'at). This is because the verse deals with the cities of refuge where accidental killers can find asylum. In this case, then, the message would refer to an accidental killing of (or by) Rabin and it would therefore be wrong. Another message (p. 71) supposedly contains a "complete" description of the terrorist bombing of a bus in Jerusalem on February 25, 1996. It includes the phrase "fire, great noise," but overlooks the fact that the letters which make up those two words are actually part of a larger phrase from Genesis 35:4 which says: "under the terebinth that was near Shechem." If the phrase does tell of a bus bombing, why not take it to indicate that it would be in Nablus, the site of ancient Shechem?" [43]

Drosnin also made a number of claims and alleged predictions that have since failed. Among the most important, Drosnin clearly states in his book "The Bible Code II", published on December 2, 2002, that there was to be a World War involving a "Atomic Holocaust" that would allegedly be the end of the world.[44] Another claim Drosnin makes in "The Bible Code II" is that the nation of Libya would develop weapons of mass destruction that they would then be given to terrorists who would then use them to attack the West (specifically the United States).[45] In reality Libya improved relations with the West in 2003 and gave up all their existing weapons of mass destruction programs.[46] A final claim Drosnin made in "The Bible Code II" was that Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat would allegedly be assassinated by being shot to death by gunmen which Drosnin specifically stated would be from the Palestinian Hamas movement.[47] This prediction by Drosnin also failed, as Yasser Arafat died on November 11, 2004[48] of what was later declared to be natural causes (specifically a stroke brought on by an unknown infection).[49][50] The only conspiracy theories about Yasser Arafat allegedly being murdered have been made by a few Palestinian figures, and have involved alleged poisoning that was supposed to have been on the orders of Israeli officials. The only alleged Palestinian collaboration in this conspiracy theory involve two leading Palestinian figures from the Palestinian Fatah movement; those are current Palestinian Authority and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan the former head of Fatah in Gaza.[51] Writer Randy Ingermanson criticized Drosnin by stating that; "And that's all they are, even for Drosnin -- possibilities. He believes that the future is not fixed, and that the Bible code predicts all possible outcomes. Which makes it not much of a predictive tool, but again, he seems not to mind this very much. If you are laying bets based on Drosnin, you had better be willing to bet on all possible outcomes." [52]

Some accuse him of factual errors, claiming that he has much support in the scientific community,[53] mistranslating Hebrew words[54] to make his point more convincing, and using the Bible without proving that other books do not have similar codes.[55]

Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that other texts such as Moby-Dick would not yield ELS results comparable to the Torah, McKay created a new experiment that was tuned to find many ELS letter arrays in Moby-Dick that relate to modern events, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He also found a code relating to the Rabin assassination, containing the assassin's first and last name and the university he attended, as well as the motive ("Oslo", relating to the Oslo accords).[56] Drosnin and others have responded to these claims, saying the tuning tactics employed by McKay were simply "nonsense", and providing analyses[57] to support their argument that the tables, data and methodologies McKay used to produce the Moby Dick results "simply do not qualify as code tables".[58]

Skeptic Dave Thomas claimed to find other examples in many texts. While Thomas' methodology was alleged to have been refuted by Robert Haralick[59] and others, Thomas's criticisms were aimed at Drosnin, whose methodology was actually far worse. (In fact, Drosnin's example of "Clinton" in his first book violated the basic Bible Code concept of "Minimality"; Drosnin's "Clinton" was a completely invalid "code"). In addition, McKay claimed that Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to reach the desired meaning. In his television series John Safran vs God, Australian television personality John Safran and McKay again demonstrated the "tuning" technique, demonstrating that these techniques could produce "evidence" of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York in the lyrics of Vanilla Ice's repertoire. Additionally, "coded" references in non-Torah Bible texts, as for instance the famous Number of the Beast, do not use the Bible code technique. And, the influence and consequences of scribal errors (e.g., misspellings, additions, deletions, misreadings, ...) are hard to account for in the context of a Bible coded message left secretly in the text. McKay and others claim that in the absence of an objective measure of quality and an objective way to select test subjects, it is not possible to positively determine whether any particular observation is significant or not. For that reason, most of the serious effort of the skeptics has been focused on the scientific claims of Witztum, Rips and Gans.

Other types of Bible codes

Another example of an alleged prediction coded in the text of the Bible, which is also attributed to Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl (who was mentioned above),[60] concerns the hanging of 10 Nazi leaders on 16 October 1946 following the Nuremberg Trials. Rabbi Weissmandl claimed that this event was predicted by the Biblical story about the hanging of the 10 sons of Haman, also as a final consequence of a (failed) genocidal plan against the Jews. The "coded" aspect of his speculation is that in the Masoretic text of the Bible, three letters within the list of Haman's sons are marked as small letters:[61] the tav ת of Parshandatha, the shin ש of Parmashtha and the zayin ז of Vajezatha. Rabbi Weissmandl pointed out that if you combine the three small letters together they form the word תשז, which in the accepted Hebrew notation for year numbers (using Gimatria) corresponds to the Jewish year [5]707 Anno Mundi,[62] which is the Jewish year that the 10 Nazi leaders were executed (October 16, 1946 corresponds to Tishrei 21, 5707, the day known as Hoshanna Rabba, the day of severe judgments for the nations of the world, according to the Jewish calendar).[63][64] Many people criticize various aspects of this speculation.[65][66][67][68][69][70] They point out that there are several different traditions about what are the small letters in the names of Haman's sons. Also they point out that the proponents only mention the similarities between the cases, but ignore the many differences. More in general they point out that this is not exactly an a priori prediction, but rather a postdiction, and therefore the statistical significance of it, if there is any at all, cannot be reliably calculated.

( source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code )

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliomancy ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shemhamphorasch


Info About The Book & Related (in portuguese):


Bíblia - Código Secreto


N’«O CÓDIGO DA BÍBLIA», DOSNIN, JORNALISTA AMERICANO, NARRA A DESCOBERTA FEITA POR UM MATEMÁTICO ISRAELITA DA CHAVE QUE PÕE A BÍBLIA A CONTAR O FUTURO

Texto de MICHAEL DOSNIN

BÍBLIA não é apenas um livro - é também um programa computacional. Foi originalmente insculpida na pedra e manuscrita num rolo de pergaminho, por fim impressa em forma de livro, à espera da invenção do computador para poder ser compreendida integralmente. Agora pode ser lida como sempre foi pretendido que fosse lida.

Para descobrir o código, Rips teve de eliminar todos os espaços entre as palavras, transformando a Bíblia original num fio contínuo de letras, com a extensão de 304.805 letras.

Ao fazê-lo estava, na verdade, a restaurar a Tora segundo o que os grandes sábios dizem que ela era na sua forma original. De acordo com a tradição, foi assim que Moisés recebeu a Bíblia de Deus - «contígua, sem divisão de palavras».

O computador pesquisa esse fio de letras em busca de nomes, palavras e frases ocultos pelo código de espaços. Começa na primeira letra da Bíblia e procura todas as possíveis sequências - palavras obtidas com intervalos de 1,2,3, e assim sucessivamente, até vários milhares. Depois repete a busca, começando na segunda letra, e assim, sucessivamente, até chagar à última letra da Bíblia.

Depois de encontrar a palavra-chave, o computador pode então procurar informações afins. Frequentemente encontra nomes, datas e lugares correlacionados codificados em conjunto - Rabin, Amir, Telavive, o ano do assassínio, tudo no mesmo lugar.

O computador regista a correspondência entre palavras, fazendo dois testes: o grau de proximidade com que aparecem juntas e se os saltos gerados pelas palavras procuradas são os mais curtos.

Rips explicou como isto funciona, usando a guerra do Golfo como exemplo.

- Pedimos ao computador que procurasse Saddatn Hussein - disse ele. - Então procurámos palavras aparentadas para vermos se apareciam juntas de maneira matematicamente relevante. Com a guerra do Golfo encontrámos «Scuds» com mísseis russos e, codificada com o nome Hussein, a data em que a guerra começaria.

As palavras formavam um quebra-cabeças. De uma forma consistente, o código da Bíblia aproxima entre si palavras interligadas que revelam informações correlativas. Com Bill Clinton, presidente. Com o desembarque na Lua, nave especial e Apollo 11. Com Hitler, nazi. Com Kennedy, Dallas.

Após inúmeras experiências, as palavras cruzadas foram apenas encontradas na Bíblia. Não foram encontradas em Guerra e Paz, nem em qualquer outro livro, nem em 1 O milhões de testes gerados por computador.

Segundo Rips, há uma infinidade de informações codificadas na Bíblia. Sempre que é descoberto um novo nome, palavra ou frase, formam-se novas palavras cruzadas. As palavras afins aparecem na vertical, na horizontal e na diagonal.

Podemos usar o assassínio de Rabin como exemplo. Primeiro, pedimos ao computador para pesquisar na Bíblia o nome «Yitzhak Rabin». Apareceu uma única vez, com uma sequência de intervalos de 4772.

O computador dividiu a Bíblia inteira - o fio completo de 304.805 letras - em 64 filas de 4772 letras. O quadro anterior é um aspecto do centro dessa matriz. No meio da imagem encontra-se o nome «Yitzhak Rabin», com cada letra rodeada por um círculo.

Se «Yitzhak Rabin» fosse revelado por um código de intervalos de 10, então cada fila teria uma extensão de 10 letras. Se fossem 100 intervalos, então as filas teriam uma extensão de 100 letras. E, sempre que as filas são reordenadas, cria-se um novo conjunto de palavras e frases interligadas.

Cada palavra de código determina a maneira como o computador apresenta o texto da Bíblia e as palavras cruzadas que se formam. Há 3000 anos, a Bíblia foi codificada de forma que a descoberta do nome «Rabin» revelasse automaticamente informações correlativas.

Cruzando o nome «Yitzhak Rabin», descobrimos as palavras «assassino assassinará», que aparecem no quadro que se segue, com cada letra metida num quadrado.

As probabilidades de o nome completo de Rabin aparecer juntamente com a profecia do seu assassínio eram apenas de 1 para 3000. Os matemáticos dizem que 1 para 100 já é improvável. O teste mais rigoroso jamais usado é de 1 para 1000.

Voei para Israel, para avisar Rabin, em 1 de Setembro de 1994. Mas só um ano depois de ele ter sido assassinado encontrámos o nome do assassino. «Amir» estava codificado no mesmo lugar que «Yitzhak Rabin» e «assassino que assassinará».

o nome de Amir estava ali há 3000 anos, à espera de ser detectado. Contudo, o código da Bíblia não é uma bola de cristal - não é possível encontrar seja o que for se não se souber o que se procura.

É claro que isto nada tinha a ver com Nostradamus nem com «uma estrela nascerá a oriente e um grande rei será destituído», palavras que poderiam mais tarde ser lidas por forma a significarem fosse o que fosse que na verdade acontecesse.

Pelo contrário, havia pormenores tão precisos como na história noticiada pela CNN: o nome completo de Rabin, o nome do assassino, o ano em que foi assassinado - tudo isto, com excepção de Amir, descoberto antes de ter acontecido.

HOLOCAUSTO ATÓMICO

O TEXTO corrente, tanto do Antigo como do Novo Testamento, profetiza que a «batalha final» terá início em Israel, com um ataque à Cidade Santa, Jerusalém, acabando por envolver o mundo inteiro.

No Livro do Apocalipse isso surge expresso da seguinte maneira: «Satanás será libertado da prisão e sairá a enganar as nações que se encontram espalhadas pelos quatro cantos da Terra, Gog e Magog, para as ajuntar na batalha. Cercaram o arraial do povo do Senhor e a cidade amada. Mas desceu fogo do céu e devorou-os.»

No código da Bíblia só uma palavra se adapta tanto a «guerra mundial» como a «holocausto atómico» - «Jerusalém».

No dia em que Rabin foi assassinado encontrei as palavras «todo o seu povo à guerra» codificadas na Bíblia. O aviso de guerra total encontrava-se oculto na mesma matriz de código que previa o assassínio.

«Todo o seu povo à guerra» aparecia mesmo por cima de «assassino assassinarás no mesmo sítio que «Yitzhak Rabin».

Apanhei imediatamente um avião de regresso a Israel. O assassínio de Rabin modificou tudo. Foi o primeiro momento em que o código da Bíblia me pareceu totalmente real, o momento em que o que se encontrava codificado se tomou um facto de vida ou de morte. E agora o código avisava que o país inteiro corria perigo.

Enquanto Israel chorava a morte de Rabin, fiquei a trabalhar com Eli Rips na sua casa nos arredores de Jerusalém.

Tentámos descodificar os pormenores do novo vaticínio «todo o seu povo à guerra».

Rips e eu procurámos no código da Bíblia sinais de um conflito catastrófico. Ainda não sabíamos que o código avisava que iria haver um ataque atómico a Jerusalém. Ainda não tínhamos encontrado «guerra mundial».

Porém, na primeira busca do computador encontrámos as palavras «holocausto de Israel». O «holocausto» estava codificado uma vez no versículo do Genesis onde o patriarca Jacob diz aos filhos o que acontecerá a Israel no «fim dos tempos».

- A primeira questão é quando - disse Rips, que verificou imediatamente os cinco anos seguintes, cada ano do resto do século. De súbito empalideceu e mostrou-me os resultados.

O ano hebraico que estava a decorrer, 5756- o final de 1995 e a maior parte de 1996 no calendário moderno -, aparecia no mesmo lugar que o novo «holocausto» vaticinado.

Era um quadro assustador. O ano estava associado a «holocausto de Israel». Tratava-se de uma combinação perfeita. «5756» aparecia no versículo da Bíblia em que se encontrava codificado o «holocausto».

O ano 2000, 5760 do calendário antigo, era também uma boa combinação. Mas o último ano do século parecia distante naquele momento. Na segunda semana de Novembro de 1995, nos dias que se seguiram ao assassínio de Rabin, o facto mais importante foi a nítida modificação do «holocausto» associada ao ano em curso.

- Quais são as probabilidades de isso acontecer por acaso? - perguntei a Rips. 1 em 1000 - respondeu-me.

- Que pode causar um holocausto na Israel moderna? - perguntei-lhe.

- A única coisa que podíamos imaginar era um ataque nuclear. Encontrámo-lo então codificado na Bíblia, uma assustadora afirmação de perigo moderno no antigo texto «holocausto atómico».

«Holocausto atómico» aparecia uma única vez. Três anos dos cinco seguintes estavam codificados no mesmo sítio - 1996, 1997 e o ano 2000. Mas, mais uma vez, o ano que nos prendeu a atenção foi o ano em curso, 5756. «Em 5756» estava codificado logo acima de «holocausto atómico».

- Quais são as probabilidades de isso acontecer duas vezes por acaso? - perguntei.

- 1 em 1.000.000 - respondeu Rips.

Havia indicações de perigo em todo o resto do século e mais para além. Se o código da Bíblia estivesse certo, Israel correria riscos sem precedentes durante, pelo menos, cinco anos.

Mas só um outro ano estava tão claramente codificado com «holocausto atómico» como 1996 - 1945, o ano de Hiroxima.

Debruçámo-nos novamente sobre a frase «todo o seu povo à guerra» que surgia com o assassínio de Rabin. As mesmas palavras - «todo o seu povo à guerra» - estavam também codificadas com «holocausto atómico». De facto, essas palavras apareciam três vezes no texto da Bíblia e estavam codificadas duas vezes com «holocausto atómico».

Rips calculou de novo as probabilidades. Mais uma vez eram inferiores a 1 para 1000.

Perguntei a Rips que probabilidades havia de cada elemento do perigo profetizado - a guerra, o holocausto, o ataque atómico - não estar codificado.

- Não é possível fazer o cálculo - respondeu Rips. Mas é na ordem de um para muitos milhões.

O código da Bíblia parecia profetizar um novo holocausto, a destruição de todo um país. Se eclodisse uma guerra nuclear no Médio Oriente, isso poderia desencadear um conflito global, talvez uma guerra mundial.

E os acontecimentos profetizados estavam de facto a acontecer como haviam sido vaticinados. Um primeiro-ministro estava já morto. Não podia ficar à espera para ver se a próxima profecia também se realiza.

Tínhamos informação que podia ter salvo Rabin, mas que não conseguiu impedir o assassínio. Agora tínhamos informação que podia impedir uma guerra. Em minha opinião, estávamos perante uma situação bizarra. Casualmente, tinha-se-me deparado um código na Bíblia que revelava acontecimentos futuros. Mas não era religioso, não acreditava em Deus e nada daquilo fazia sentido para mim.

Tinha trabalhado como jornalista par o «Washington Post» e o «Wall Street Journal». Tinha escrito um livro baseado em 10. documentos, estava habituado a factos difíceis nas nossas três dimensões. Não era estudioso da Bíblia. Nem sequer falava hebraico, a língua da Bíblia e do código Tinha de aprender tudo isso desde o início.

Mas encontrara o assassínio de Rabin codificado na Bíblia. Praticamente mais ninguém sabia que esse código existia. Só Rips sabia que ele também parecia prever um ataque atómico, um novo holocausto, talvez uma guerra mundial. E ele era matemático, não era jornalista. Não tinha experiência de lidar com figuras proeminentes de governos. Não se mostrara disposto a avisar Rabin. Não estava preparado para informar o novo primeiro-ministro, Shimon Peres.

Os meus instintos de jornalista diziam-me que este novo perigo não podia ser real. Todos os dirigentes árabes tinham comparecido no funeral de Rabin. A paz parecia mais segura do que no final de 1995.

«Todo o seu povo à guerra» parecia uma ameaça muito remota. Não havia uma verdadeira guerra desde que Israel derrotara o Egipto e a Síria em 1973. Não havia qualquer sublevação interna desde que a Intifada terminara com o aperto de mão Rabin-Arafat em 1993. Não havia ataques terroristas dignos de menção desde a criação do Estado moderno depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Um «holocausto atómico» parecia altamente improvável. Uma «guerra mundial» era algo de inacreditável. Mas também nunca acreditara que Rabin fosse assassinado. Só sabia que o seu assassínio estava codificado. E agora Rabin estava morto. Fora assassinado, exactamente como havia sido profetizado, em 5756, o ano hebraico que teve início em Setembro de 1995.

Olhei de novo para as novas folhas impressas. «A próxima guerra» estava codificada uma vez na Bíblia. «Será depois da morte do primeiro-ministro», afirmava o texto oculto. Os nomes «Yitzhak» e «Rabin» estavam codificados no mesmo versículo.

Agora tinha a certeza de que o código da Bíblia revelava o futuro. Continuava, porém, sem saber se cada profecia se realizaria. E também não sabia se o futuro poderia ser alterado.

Estava eu sem conseguir dormir a perguntar-me como poderia ter acesso a Shimon Peres e que iria dizer-lhe quando de súbito me surgiu a resposta para a pergunta principal.

Em hebraico, cada letra do alfabeto é também um número. As datas e os anos podem ser escritos com letras e no código da Bíblia aparecem sempre desta maneira. As mesmas letras que representavam o ano em curso, 5756, também formavam uma pergunta.

As letras que representavam os algarismos 5756, o ano do holocausto vaticinado, também representavam uma frase que era um desafio para todos nós - «Poderá isso ser alterado?»

Letras a esmo

PARA entender a arbitrariedade de algumas leituras de O Código da Bíblia, é necessário ter uma ideia de como a Bíblia está escrita no original A escrita do hebraico, tal como a do árabe, apenas retém as consoantes, o que, não oferecendo dificuldade aos falantes, torna impossível a pronúncia a quem não conheça a língua. Para palavras estrangeiras, ou em raros casos que podem provocar confusão, podem ainda usar-se três consoantes, o «aleph», o «yod» e o «waw» (para usar os nomes hebraicos) para «a», «i» e «u». ‘St ‘ psvl, perdão, isto é possível devido à estrutura das línguas semitas: em termos grosseiros, podemos dizer que cada esfera de sentido, amar, comer, falar, por exemplo, é dada por um conjunto de três consoantes, a chamada raiz triliteral, enquanto a função gramatical, amado, comida, falador, é dada pelo esquema vocálico, eventualmente com sufixos ou prefixos. O particípio presente, por exemplo, tem sempre a primeira sílaba em «a» e a segunda em «e». Assim, a raiz para a ideia de falar é D-B-R; «aquele que fala» é MDaBer, em que as vogais indicam o particípio presente e o «M» é um prefixo que indica uma nuance do verbo. Pode parecer complicado, mas qualquer estudante, ao fim de cinco lições, começa a achar normal ler as frases que conhece escritas sem vogais. Se repararmos que «talho» e «telha» têm a mesma sequência de consoantes, vemos a diferença de estrutura entre a nossa língua e as línguas semitas.

Se escrevermos um texto hebraico sem separação de palavras, poderemos sempre isolar um razoável grupo de letras seguidas que formem palavras isoladas - embora já seja mais difícil acontecer a possibilidade de encontrar duas frases completas com sentidos diferentes (algumas dúvidas de leitura de poucas passagens da Bíblia tiveram que ver com isto). Quem diz letras seguidas diz letras igualmente espaçadas: potencialmente, cada conjunto de três letras é portador de sentido, mesmo se nem todas as combinações existem efectivamente na língua.

Ora, o que Rips e Dosnin fazem é precisamente terem reunido as letras igualmente espaçadas que formam o nome que procuram, vão em busca de palavras soltas que se relacionem com esse nome: o único limite é que o intervalo entre as letras seja constante; mesmo assim, conseguem sempre qualquer coisa, como se pode calcular pelo que atrás dissemos

Quando não viram a sequência de letras ao contrários Assim o nome do assassino de Rabin, 'Amir, não está lá: o que está é RYM ‘. Na passagem sobre a extinção dos dinossauros, que referimos noutro local (ver «Antes do Mundo»), encontram a palavra «Rahab», nome de um monstro primordial em Isaías, ao pé de «asteróide»: mas, para isso, tornam a inverter a ordem de leitura. Em qualquer dos casos – e há mais – as outras palavras continuam a ser lidas normalmente, isto é, no caso do hebraico, da direita para a esquerda. As palavras lidas na vertical semelhantemente, tanto o são de baixo para cima como de cima para baixo. Nada no modelo permite predizer os casos em que se deve escolher um ou outro sentido de leitura, o mesmo é dizer que estamos no meio do arbitrário total. Com os nomes estrangeiros, passa-se algo de semelhante: ou se retém apenas a estrutura consonântica, ou se tomam em conta as três consoantes auxiliares de leitura. E que dizer do americanismo de Quem se refere a Los Angeles como La Calif?. A mesma liberdade se toma com as variantes ortográficas do hebraico antigo- nuns casos é YeRuSHaLaYM como YeRuSHaLaiM, quando não a designação metafórica Ariel. Encontram-se no texto as duas ortografias e a metáfora: o problema não é esse, é que nada é predizível pelo modelo, e sem predicatabilidade não há método. nem ciência.

A falácia e a prova

Texto de RUI ROCHA

RARAS são as vezes em que as ciências humanas têm ocasião de mostrar o seu rigor próprio face às ciências exactas e à matemática. A vertigem provocado pela leitura de O Código da Bíblia, do jornalista americano Michael Drosnin, provém da nossa fé na verdade matemática. Conta-se que Napoleão, visitando o Observatório, perguntou ao astrónomo Laplace, que lhe explicara o seu sistema astronómico: «E Deus?», ao que o cientista lhe respondera: «Senhor, não tive necessidade dessa hipótese.» O método estatístico desenvolvido pelo matemático Eliyahu Rips que Drosnin apresenta traz a questão inversa: desenha matematicamente o dedo de Deus. A questão de saber de Quem exactamente é o dedo - Deus para Rips, talvez um ET para Drosnin - tomasse irrelevante perante a conclusão directa: a Bíblia é um texto revelado. O método de Rips permitiria assim realizar o sonho de todos os apóstolos: um modo seguro e infalível de saber qual a religião verdadeira. O sistema das letras equidistantes aplicado ao Alcorão não prevê a ascensão da casa de Saud, a queda do Muro ou a viagem de Gagarine? Então é porque o Alcorão não é «revelado». E os Veda? O cânone pali? Por razões ligadas à escrita de cada língua (ver «Letras a esmo»), seria interessante aplicar o método, pelo menos, ao Alcorão. As implicações em termos de fanatismo são assustadoras.

Porque tudo se baseia numa falácia. A prova que Rips, Drosnin e os diversos estatísticos citados apresentam é, à primeira vista, perturbante: as co-ocorrências das palavras detectadas têm uma probabilidade baixíssima de ocorrer por acaso, 1 em 2000, por vezes 1 em 5 milhões, quando o critério de fiabilidade científica se situa habitualmente em 1 /1 000. O curioso é que esta impressionante indicação da presença de uma intenção não quer dizer nada. Absolutamente nada. Por razões específicas de que apresentamos à parte dois exemplos, e por uma razão geral: a probabilidade de acertar no totoloto é de 1 para 13 milhões, segundo dizem os jornais. E, no entanto, há quem ganhe; e, no entanto, ninguém considera isso sinal de uma indicação divina. Num diálogo narrado por Drosnin entre ele e Rips, este explica que não há limite para o número de co-ocorrências, apesar do número finito de caracteres da Tora. E é aqui que se revela a falácia básica, não do método, mas da sua utilização: o chamado «wishful thinking», como quem diz, ir à procura do que se quer encontrar. O problema não é a proximidade entre as palavras «Clinton» e «presidente»; é saber se não estão também próximas palavras como «servo» e «Satã», numa agradável confirmação da opinião iraniana sobre a América, ou se as palavras «santo» e «Deus» não andarão por perto do nome de Amir, o assassino de Rabin. É que ' dada a estrutura da escrita hebraica, e as liberdades que com ela são tomadas, a escolha das palavras significativas é totalmente dependente da intenção de sentido daquele que as procura. A probabilidade da co-ocorrência pode ser medida depois, mas o método não permite definir previamente quais as escolhas a reter e quais a eliminar: isto é, não há maneira de determinar as sequências de letras relevantes se não se souber hebraico, como quem diz, se o sentido não preexistir à descoberta. Em resumo: não há método algum e, contra isto, não existe probabilidade estatística que valha.

E quando, nas págs. 176/177, o autor nos apresenta primeiro a profeciado holocausto nuclear, depois a ocorrência da pergunta «Poderá isso ser alterado?» e, em segunda ocorrência, a resposta «Isso pode ser alterado», a conclusão descomprometida só pode ser uma: as três frases em conjunto anulam-se umas às outras, isto não quer dizer nada. Em vez de passar de jornalista a estatístico, Michael Drosnin teria feito bem em tirar um curso básico de epistemologia.

(Michael Dosnin, O Código da Bíblia, Gradiva, 1997,264 págs.)

UM DOS MAIS curiosos pormenores do Código da Bíblia é a datação usada. Mais curioso ainda é que os autores achem normalíssimo que um código que prevê tudo, desde o início à consumação dos tempos, use a era hebraica, também conhecida por «annomundi», ou ano do Mundo: obtém-se somando 3760 anos à era cristã, a que se usa no Ocidente, e provém de eruditos e tardios cálculos feitos por doutores da Lei, já depois da destruição do Terceiro Templo, que a partir da duração das gerações indicados na Bíblia procuraram a data da Criação. Nos tempos bíblicos, aliás, não existia pretensão de cronologia absoluta e usavam o ano ordinal da subida ao trono do soberano, embora se note no Livro de Reis, anterior ao exílio da Babilónia, a tentativa de criar uma datação a partir da fuga do Egipto (embora com uma base puramente convencional, pois tinham já perdido a memória dos séculos passados).

Mas não há, aparentemente, dúvidas: para o misterioso Codificador, a data que vale é a da criação do Mundo, 3760 anos antes da Encarnação de Cristo (que não foi no ano 1, diga-se de passagem). Fica-nos uma terrível dúvida: como os navegadores do Código encontraram também a indicação de que os dinossauros tinham sido destruídos por um asteróide, e sabendo-se que os bichos desapareceram há cerca de 60 milhões de anos, como é que é a data correspondente: 59 milhões Antes do Mundo?

Por outro lado convém notar que as letras em hebraico têm valor numérico, segundo a sucessão alfabética, as primeiras nove de 1 a 9, as nove seguintes de 10 a 90, as quatro restantes de 100 a 400 (usando-se algumas variantes na forma de certas letras para chegar a 900). Qualquer palavra é, pois, também um número; e qualquer número, uma palavra. E aqui tanto é lido da direita para esquerda, como da esquerda para a direita, de cima para baixo, ou de baixo para cima.

A tradicional Cabala é muito mais séria. As regras de substituição e permutação de letras são claramente definidas. O campo de aplicação das equivalências numéricas está claramente delimitado. Existem parâmetros formais de controlo. O que é mais grave nisto tudo é que não parece tratar-se de vigarice voluntária, mas sim de um genuíno convencimento, que só pode sair da mais completa impreparação intelectual. Rips será um grande estatístico e um indiscutível fanático: ignora é tudo de epistemologia e está completamente afastado da tradição viva da religião que professa - ou perceberia imediatamente o dislate formal do seu «código», em vez de ilustrar penosamente essa mistura de tecnologia moderna com ignorância teológica e cegueira espiritual que encontramos na prática dos fundamentalismos modernos. E Dosnin escusava de ilustrar tão descaradamente os piores estereótipos (injustos, como todos) sobre o nível cultural americano

( source - fonte: http://lindoro.no.sapo.pt/bilbia.htm )






















Michael Drosnin (born January 31, 1946) is an American journalist and author, best known for his writings on the Bible code.

Drosnin was born in New York City. He worked as a journalist for the Washington Post (1966–1968) and the Wall Street Journal (1969–1970). His first book, "Citizen Hughes", a biography of the American businessman Howard Hughes based on stolen documents, was published in 1985. Drosnin began researching the Bible Code in 1992 after meeting the mathematician Eliyahu Rips in Israel, and with Rip's associate Alexander Rotenberg. At the time Drosnin claims that he was not a religious person and was very skeptical about the Bible Code at first. He became convinced that it was important in 1994 when he found a code relating to the future assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in the Bible. Drosnin sent a warning to Rabin, and claims that he became even more convinced of the ability of the code to predict the future when Rabin was assassinated in 1995. In 1997 Drosnin published his most famous book, Bible Code, which asserts that the Bible Code predicts the future and that events can be affected by our actions. The book also states that many famous assassinations—both past and future—were foretold in the Bible, and that the code can be interpreted with the help of a computer program. The book also implies that extraterrestrials delivered the message of the Bible encoded with these prophesies,[1] and that the code contains predictions of disasters and an apocalypse to occur between 1998 and 2006. Drosnin wrote a second book in 2002 named The Bible Code II:The Countdown.

His new book The Bible Code III: Saving the World (October 2010), is also in the market.

Criticisms

Drosnin has been criticized by some who believe that the Bible Code is real but that it cannot predict the future.[2] Some accuse him of factual errors, incorrectly claiming that he has much support in the scientific community,[3] mistranslating Hebrew words[1] to make his point more convincing, and using the Bible without proving that other books do not have similar codes.[4] Drosnin challenged his critics to find a code similar to the Bible Code in the notable novel Moby Dick. An article published in the "teaching aids" section of the Dartmouth College math department's "Chance" program, claims that Brendan McKay has found equidistant letter sequences (ELS's) in Moby Dick which approximate the alleged prediction of the assassination of Rabin.[5] Drosnin has responded to these claims, saying that the Moby Dick code results are simply "nonsense'; he said codes found in the Bible Code were "truth" and contained real predictions.[6]

( source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Drosnin )

More: http://www.amazon.com/The-Bible-Code-Michael-Drosnin/dp/0684810794 ; http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Code-II-The-Countdown/dp/0670032107 & http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Code-III-Saving-World/dp/0615399630