"Pseudo-philosophical ramblings"??! Well, I thought, why not? Andy Rooney impersonating Alfred North Whitehead, or something of that-a-sort. "Have you ever noticed those childproof aspirin bottles? There's no way into or out of them, and no two are exactly alike inside, though there's a sort of preestablished harmony between the aspirin tablets in all the different bottles. Almost like windowless monads. I wonder what Leibnitz would've thought of childproof aspirin bottles..."
So I cannibalized some entries out of the journal which for many years now I've kept on my hard drive. Add to this some letters to long-suffering friends-- excerpted and reprinted here by permission-- and you have a glimpse of the rocks that tumble round and round in that rock tumbler known as my head. I picked some of my funkier writings, you don't want to hear all about my daily grind complete with laundry and car repairs. Also I skewed my selection toward a handful of fairly cohesive topics-- I chose from half a dozen, instead of half a hundred.
You may notice, I don't sweat details. Of documentation. Of fact. Of interpretation. I learned long ago in math, don't bother to memorize formulas or proofs, just be able to re-derive them on the fly. With a certain amount of "hand-waving" permitted.
Then I read logician and philosopher of science Charles Sanders Peirce-- and I bid farewell to Descartes, and to the world as a graph-paper Cartesian coordinate grid-- and I got even worse. Or as Peirce once put it:
Philosophy ought to... trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (CP 5.265)
Do I expect you to read this stuff? To take it seriously?? To agree with me??? No, of course not... Think for yourself, and "let the finder beware!"