“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, April 25, 2011

Hunks of Matter

The Grand Arche at La Défense: A nice tesseract, a 3D model of a 4D object

OMG as they say I'm so excited. I wrote a report for Cambridge UP and this time they're paying me in books, as I need to bone up on theories of physical objects and causality if I'm ever going to write Realist Magic over the summer.

So this one plopped into my mailbox, with the rather wonderful title (because strangely ordinary): The Ontology of Physical Objects: Four-Dimensional Hunks of Matter, by Mark Heller.

I think I can safely predict what it's going to say but the adventure will be in reading it. If anyone has a sense of this let me know, I'm all ears.

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