Date: Wed, 05 Jun 1996 22:34:44 -0400
To: Athena Discuss 
Subject: Re: state of the question (esp to SFT)

FISHERGM@jmu.edu wrote:
> 
> Could be, S F, could be.  I have the matter under study.
> I received today in the mail a book by Diop, and one
> edited by Ivan Van Sertima (is his last name Sertima or
> van Sertima?).  I do reach conclusions sometimes.

van Sertima I should think--there is some Dutch "influence"
(ha ha) in Guyana.
 
> Just one thing:  why the dichotomy between theft and
> independent invention?  There are numerous other
> possibilities, such as (for example) considerable
> learning by early Greeks from Egyptians without
> intent to steal.  Numerous people on this list
> have cited ancient Greeks saying they learned
> this or that in Egypt.  As we know, there has been
> and still is a tendency in popular European-based
> culture to overpraise the Greeks for their originality,
> but that doesn't seem to be the fault of the ancient
> Greeks.  Also, the early Greeks could have learned a
> great deal from the Egyptians (and others), and still
> added a lot of their own.
 
We've been through this one before, I think.  I don't think
the indictment requires that ALL Greeks stole, only that
SOME did, such as Archimedes appropriating to himself and
to his tombstone the theorem that bears his name and of which
he said he was most proud, also the Archimedean Screw, which
he also claimed to himself, and thereby "re"inventing that
which he saw in Egypt.  To Diop's credit, he makes claims
which are in principle refutable.  The charges are specific,
and as they say nowadays in Washington DC where I now 
reside, he "names names".

> As to whether or not the ancient Egyptians were black
> or not, I am simply confused by the constrasting pieces
> of evidence and argument, up to now.  I rather tend
> toward the theory that they were.  I even rather hope
> they were.  But if I had to lecture about this to a
> class (of students of many colors, as most classes
> around my school seem to be nowadays), I would have
> to simply present contrasting points of view (there
> are more than two, I think), and let the students
> make up their own minds.

Fair enough.  Would that the ones who wrote the history books
and produced the television documentaries had done the same.


> However, I never carried
> it very far, and as it turned out, fuzzy logic offers an
> alternative and worked-out solution.  

Not so well as is claimed however, which I attempt to show
in the book... I pick nits with the best.
Btw, that was Zadeh, not Ziadeh.  

> By the time it sppeared,
> though, I'd been captured by chaos theory and non-linear
> dynamics, and now I seem to be captured by history (not only
> on this list).

 No, not a dilettante!  I was hoping I could use 
chaos theory to make money in the stock market, but it seems,
well, too chaotic...

> Best wishes
> Gordon Fisher     fishergm@jmu.edu

Regards,
(who is at this moment asking himself whether he too is, shudder,
a dilettante!  I'll say only that I was the only engineer ever
to cite Wittgenstein in his Ph.D thesis!  Or so I was told)

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