The keynote is on the origin of the excessively foolish, but persistent, belief in racist superiority, AND its cure. Here are the details of the International Colloquium and an extended abstract. The times in the program are German times.
How does this concern Indians? Because the colonial myth of civilizational superiority of the West mutated from the myth of racist superiority of Whites. Both myths are based on essentially the same false history of science and mathematics. We still teach that false history of science to our schoolchildren, under colonial influence. See the chapter 5 on “Introduction to Euclid’s geometry” in the class IX NCERT school math textbook.
Despite an enormous amount of secondary literature, there is no primary evidence for the existence of “Euclid”, or that he, or any person or group near his purported date, was the author of the text attributed to him, or that the author was a white male, as shown in our school texts (or Wikipedia etc), or that the text was written for remotely the purposes attributed to “Euclid”. (My challenge prize of Rs 2 lakhs for such primary evidence has been standing unclaimed for the last ten years.) But our government has laid down that, for Western history, we must follow the Wikipedia “standard” that SECONDARY Western (or Western-approved) sources MUST be regarded as definitive proof, because the colonized have no right to demand primary evidence for the master’s tales.
Indian historians seem to have implicitly accepted this historical “principle” of differential evidence, for there was never any hullabaloo regarding false Western history in Indian school texts. Indeed, in two centuries no one else ever checked even the blatantly false and propagandist history of science used by Macaulay, though we changed our education system based on it. Cross-checks will not happen in the near future either, for there are no serious historians of science in any of our numerous university history departments. (It is necessary to emphasize publicly this persistent and collective failure of our historians, because in these time of a Corona tidal wave no one can be sure how long they will last, so if the bitter truth is not stated now it may never be stated.)
“Euclid” (= Uclides = aql-i-des = rational geometry) is a Christian chauvinist myth concocted by the Crusading church in the 12th c. The myth of Greek origins of all science was first used to appropriate all scientific knowledge in Arabic texts to early Greeks. The Crusades failed because Christian Europe was far behind Muslim Europe in scientific knowledge, badly needed even for a religious war. But the church also required an excuse to appropriate it, since the church had earlier declared all non-Christian books as heretical. Attributing the origin of that knowledge to Greeks made it a theologically correct Christian inheritance, since Eusebius had declared early Greeks as the sole “friends of Christians”.
The same trick was later used for a purpose more vital to the church—to support its sudden theological shift to Christian rational theology (set up during the Crusades to compete with Islamic rational theology or aql-i-kalam), by giving “reason” a false Greek origin, to appropriate reason as a Christian inheritance. Note that the fake history of “Aristotle” (of Toledo, not Stagira) alone1 was not enough to appropriate the kind of “reason” the church needed, since “Euclid”, or rather the brazen church “reinterpretation” of the book falsely attributed to him, provided the sole purported example of axiomaticreasoning prior to the Crusading church. Since then, the “Euclid” myth was used to dodge the reality that such peculiar metaphysical reasoning was actually an invention of the crusading church for its political gain.
The world-over everyone used normal reasoning based on facts, as e.g. in India in the Nyaya, Buddhist, or Jain syllogisms. But Christian rational theology used a special type of reasoning, called formal (or faith-based) reasoning, which began from (faith-based) axioms, rather than facts, because facts are so often nakedly contrary to church dogmas. An example is Aquinas’ axiomatic reasoning about angels (which don’t exist, in fact), to deduce that many angels can fit on a pin, in his Summa Theologica. However, most people confound normal reasoning (based on facts) with formal reasoning (why bypasses facts, and is based on faith in axioms), because of the church doublespeak of using only one word “reason” for both.
The Western claim that axiomatic reasoning is a “superior” form of reasoning is a mere church superstition, which glorifies church metaphysics. However, this claim of a “superior” form of reasoning is critical to the claim of civilizational superiority. Hence, even though it has been publicly exposed, over a century that the book, purportedly authored by “Euclid”, does not contain a single axiomatic proof, from its first proposition to its last, even supposedly responsible historians like Needham keep regurgitating this false myth of axiomatic proofs in “Euclid”, as proof of Western civilizational superiority.
And, of course, this myth of axiomatic proofs in “Euclid’s” book is repeated in our school texts, because of our differing standards of history, that for Western history we must blindly trust Western authority, and that no one should actually read an easily available book, imitating Cambridge dons who foolishly avoided reading the book carefully for over 750 years until the end of the 19th c.
Today, the myth of civilizational superiority is used to promote axiomatic mathematics as a “superior” type of mathematics, involving “infallible” deduction, though it is trivial to show that axiomatic deduction is highly error-prone, and, of course, even valid deduction need not result in valid knowledge, since any desired nonsense proposition whatsoever can be proved axiomatically as a theorem, by suitably selecting the axioms, as Aquinas did.
The axioms of mathematics (such as those of set theory) are a pure metaphysics of infinity (aligned to church dogmas of eternity), which are empirically irrefutable. They result in nonsense mathematical theorems such as the Banach-Tarski theorem that one ball of gold can be subdivided and reassembled, without stretching, in to two balls of gold identical to the first. These unrealistic theorems are then defended by further metaphysics such as “measurability” which few understand.
The axioms are to be accepted solely on the strength of Western authority: e.g. calculus must be taught using formal “real” numbers, not the “non-Archimedean” arithmetic and the normal mathematics with which the calculus originated in India, and as I teach it. All practical value (e.g. calculation of rocket trajectories) still comes from normal mathematics: e.g. calculation of rocket trajectories is today done on computers which cannot use formal real numbers, declared essential for calculus, but use floating point numbers instead, which are quite different. Similar remarks apply to AI.
Unlike the claim of racist superiority, which is firmly rejected by Blacks, the closely related claim of civilizational superiority, especially in mathematics and science, has been accepted and internalised by the colonized today, who rush to defend it, typically by abusing the critic. They resort to abuse because so few (none to my knowledge), even in our premier universities, understand or can state even the axiomatic proof of 1+1=2 in formal real numbers, for which I offered a reward of Rs 10 lakhs in JNU. Surprisingly, not a single faculty member in our premier university claimed this reward, or even the reduced reward of Rs 1 lakh offered for the full proof of 1+1= 2 in real numbers, if given in a week’s time.
The cure, as I stated in my censored article, which was censored worldwide, is to stand up to the false history AND bad philosophy of mathematics, at the base of the secular justification for the claim of religious/racist/civilizational (Christian/White/Western) superiority.
Anyone interested in attending the meeting may please get in touch with me or the organizers.
1The published version of this article on logic in the Springer Encyclopedia has gathered some gross gratuitous errors because of the reflexive and unilateral application of this false history by the editor/publisher: e.g. Organon dating factually to the Crusading time of 12th c. CE, has been dated by Springer to 12th c. BCE! 😀
