superstructure

a tool for Erkenntnis through dialectical notetaking

Contents

• Overview
  • Idea
  • Caveats
• Usage
  • Setup
  • Running
• Contributing
  • General Remarks
  • Setup for Development
  • Testing
  • Style Guide
  • Discussion
• Further Reading
  • Documentation
  • Books, Papers, and other External Resources
  • Development Notes
• Licensing
• Acknowledgements

Overview

tl;dr: tools to help order your thoughts generally do not accommodate dialectical thinking in any meaningful way. superstructure is aiming to do so.

Idea

• as any enlightened person will tell you, dialectical thinking is the only method for gaining any actual Erkenntnis
• dialectical thought inevitably brings about highly complex and interwoven networks of Begriffe
  • keeping track of all the things that have already been considered during contemplation is difficult enough by itself, but to then also continuously integrate each one of your insights with the next to uncover all the relations between them, and to revise your understanding of them, is, for any sufficiently complex reflection, virtually impossible
• hence, people use note taking and thoughtful structuring of data as tools to aid them with all kinds of work that involves the mind
  • however, I could not find any tool that was well equipped to help with a dialectical approach to understanding things: each note taking tool was in some shape or form hierarchical - top-down or bottom-up - to accommodate falsches Bewusstsein
• superstructure aims to do for the dialectic method, what mindmaps do for methods uninterested in any meaningful insight

Caveats

• a computer program by its nature can neither fully replicate nor contain the Absolute
• designing the basic logical structure is difficult, because when talking about the Gegenstand of a Begriff, that Gegenstand is not actually a Gegenstand, but itself just a Begriff, an object in computer land
• isomorphism to the (real) Whole is thus currently not part of the roadmap
• what we can do however, is to facilitate the Erkenntnisprozess in your Bewusstsein
• any (future) claims of the opposite are either ironic, or should be ignored

Usage

superstructure requires python3.7 or higher

Setup

$ python3 -m venv env
$ source env/bin/activate
$ python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python3 -m pip install --editable .

Running

• start superstructure in CLI mode

$ source env/bin/activate
$ python3 superstructure/cli.py

Contributing

Report Bug · Request Feature

General Remarks

Any contributions to superstructure, be they in the form of comments or code, are greatly appreciated. If you want to contribute some code, please do so by following this common procedure:

1. fork the project
2. create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/new_stuff)
3. commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some new stuff')
4. push to the branch (git push origin feature/new_stuff)
5. open a pull request to dev

Setup for Development

$ python3 -m venv env
$ source env/bin/activate
$ python3 -m pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
$ export BETTER_EXCEPTIONS=1
$ pre-commit install && pre-commit install -t pre-push
$ pre-commit run --all-files
$ python3 -m pip install --editable .  # build project according to setup.py
$ python setup.py bdist_wheel  # create wheel
$ twine upload --repository testpypi dist/*  # upload wheel to testpypi (requires ~/.pypirc)
$ twine upload dist/*  # CAUTION: upload wheel to pypi (requires ~/.pypirc)

Testing

• testing is fairly simple: a Bewusstsein gets created and it is prefilled with Begriffe, and then we will check, whether superstructure obeys some fundamental rules of reality

$ source env/bin/activate
$ export BETTER_EXCEPTIONS=1
$ python3 -mpytest --cov=superstructure --cov-report term-missing tests
$ python3 main.py

or simply

$ ./run_tests

Style Guide

• development on superstructure should use black for formatting and bandit + flake8 for linting
• development happens on dev, merging into master constitutes a version bump

Discussion

• General Discussion
• General Questions
• wiki

Further Reading

Documentation

.
├── superstructure
|   |
|   ├── metastructure
|   |   ├── grundbegriffe.py
|   |   ├── form.py
|   |   ├── geist.py
|   |   └── core.py
|   |
|   ├── hyperstructure
|   |   └── vernunft.py
|   |
|   ├── infrastructure
|   |   ├── storage
|   |   |   └── pickled.py
|   |   |
|   |   └── logo.py
|   |
|   └── cli.py
|
└── tests
|       ├── test_geist.py
|       └── test_core.py
|
└── main.py

• metastructure: constitutes the set of structures underlying the superstructure
• hyperstructure: constitutes the tooling for analyzing structures found in metastructure
• infrastructure: constitutes the tooling for user interaction
• tests: constitutes tests

Notes on Phenomenology of Spirit

Summary

Phenomenology of Spirit by G.W.F. Hegel is a philosophical work that explores the concept of Spirit and its relationship to the individual. The book is divided into three sections: the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic, and the Philosophy of Right. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel examines the development of Spirit from its most basic form, the immediate consciousness, to its highest form, the absolute Spirit. He argues that Spirit is a process of self-realization, in which the individual must overcome the limitations of their immediate consciousness in order to reach a higher level of understanding. In the Science of Logic, Hegel examines the nature of logic and its role in the development of Spirit. He argues that logic is the foundation of all knowledge and that it is essential for the development of Spirit. Finally, in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel examines the concept of right and its relationship to the individual. He argues that right is the basis of all ethical behavior and that it is essential for the development of Spirit. The overall message of the book is that Spirit is a process of self-realization, in which the individual must overcome the limitations of their immediate consciousness in order to reach a higher level of understanding.

Important ideas

• The true form of philosophy is intuition, or immediate knowledge of the Absolute.
• The individual's share in the total work of Spirit is very small.
• Language is the more truthful form of expression, as it expresses the true content of sense-certainty.
• The power of the negative is essential to Spirit's progress.
• The ethical order exists as something given, and the customs and laws are a specific ethical substance.
• War is the form in which the essential moment of the ethical substance, the absolute freedom of the ethical self from every existential form, is present in its actual and authentic existence.
• The supreme reality and the reality which stands in the greatest antithesis to universal freedom is the freedom and individuality of actual self-consciousness itself.
• The shapes of the totality of Spirit display themselves in a temporal succession, for only the whole has true actuality and therefore the form of pure freedom in face of an other.
• The divine Being descends from its universality, through the mediation of the Cult, into individuality, and thus unites itself with reality.

Books, Papers, and other External Resources

• G. W. F. Hegel: Die Wissenschaft der Logik
• Thomas Sören Hoffmann: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - Eine Propädeutik
• Yaozhi Jiang: Mathematical Foundation for Dialectical Logic - An Introduction for Making Dialectical Logic Mathematically
• Huacan He, Yanquan Zhou, and Zhicheng Chen: Research on Mathematical Dialectical Logic for Intelligent Information Processing
• nLab: Formalization of Hegel's Science of Logic in Categorical logic / in Modal homotopy type theory
• Hrgb. Andreas Arndt, Christian Iber and Günter Kruck: Hegels Lehre vom Begriff, Urteil und Schluss
• Sven Jürgensen: Freiheit in den Systemen Hegels und Schellings
• hegel.net
• github.com/m-strasser/hegelizer
• https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://archive.org/stream/phenomenology-of-spirit-g-w-f-hegel/Phenomenology%2520of%2520Spirit%2520-%2520G%2520W%2520F%2520Hegel_djvu.txt&expand=1

Development Notes

CHANGES.md

things_to_remember.md

Licensing

Acknowledgements

• thanks Hegel