Tag: books

Books and More Books

1300 pounds of books arrived at the warehouse today. So if you’re waiting for a book from NDM Express, it should be on the way very soon. This includes volumes 9 and 10 for the Junior Classics demi backers, leaving only the last two leather editions to complete. Which we will do, but not until after the resolution of our dispute with a certain party… Among the new books now available for purchase there include Trafalgar, Sigma Game, the second edition of Probability Zero, and Veriphysics: The Return of the Real.

In other news, JDA has a new trilogy coming out, the first volume of which is now available on Amazon.

Captain Conley of the E.A.S. Valiant is written in the mold of those classic commanding officers. A career fleet man. Competent and principled, but new to command. The Aryshan War ended months ago and now he’s leading a joint human-Aryshan crew into uncharted space. His challenge is not just what lies beyond explored territory. Half his bridge crew were the enemy a few months prior, and he has to earn the trust of people whose worlds his side bombed. That tension sits underneath every decision he makes, every order he gives. He’s not a superhero. He’s not chosen by destiny. He’s a captain trying to hold a fragile crew together while the galaxy throws things at them that nobody planned for.

Fandom Pulse also has a review of one of my favorite novels by Keigo Higashino, Journey Under the Midnight Sun.

Higashino gives us Ryōji and Yukiho only as other people see them — through detectives, classmates, coworkers, lovers, business associates, victims. Across nineteen years and five hundred pages, we never once hear either of them think. We never stand behind their eyes. We read their faces the way a stranger on a train would read them: from outside, inferring, always uncertain.

The effect is disorienting, and then it becomes frightening. In most novels, even cold ones, the reader has a home, a consciousness to rest inside, a voice that organizes the world. 白夜行 offers none. You are passed from hand to hand through people who each see a fragment: Sasagaki sees the unsolved case that will not let him sleep. A classmate sees Yukiho’s strange, perfectly maintained beauty. A colleague sees Ryōji’s quiet talent with computers. A woman sees the man who destroyed her. No one sees the whole shape. Only the reader, slowly, over years and chapters, begins to assemble the outline of what these two people are doing and what they have done to survive since that October in Osaka.

It is reading as detective work. And the thing you are detecting is terrible.

And finally, we are in the process of binding A History of the Freedom of Thought. I have the first test binding, and it is the best the Castalia bindery has produced yet, with an exquisite old-school rounded spine and the most beautiful pigskin leather you can imagine. It’s a small, slender book, but it is an absolute Pocket Venus. We are also binding a small number of books for one of JDA’s omnibuses, The Aryshan War, and he gave me permission to show the very cool endpapers which for some reason really make me want to bind a set of the Traveller Little Black Books. Pictures of both will be posted at Castalia Library when they’re finished next week.

And finally, I’d encourage those of you who enjoyed Dorian Vane to leave a review, or at least a rating there. There is an interesting discussion at Sigma Game of a comparative SSH analysis of the protagonists of the two different magic school novels.

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A Pipeline to the Stars

In which a member of our community has built a system to unlock a whole host of old Hebrew and Latin texts:

This started as an offhand question.

I was chatting with Claude about some obscure Hebrew books related to my interest in the history of astronomy and cosmology. One of them contained a firsthand account of encounters with Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.

I started by asking what Claude knew about the book from reviews, catalogs, and other online references. The information was sparse. Then I thought: why not go to the source?

Knowing that Vox Day had used AI extensively for translation work, I asked Claude what it could do with a scanned PDF.

The answer seemed almost too good to be true.

So I tested it.

“Here’s a 250-page PDF. Translate it.”

That didn’t happen.

Claude explained that the PDF would need to be broken into smaller batches. I would have to upload each section separately, start a new chat for each batch, run a translation prompt, and then manually stitch everything together afterward. It even suggested shell commands to help.

That also didn’t happen.

Instead, over the next five days, I used Claude Web and Claude Code to build the functional scaffolding that eventually became my translation pipeline. As an experiment, I kept it completely code-free at first. I wanted to see how far I could get simply by describing what I wanted.

The answer turned out to be: surprisingly far.

Read the rest about how the translation pipeline was constructed and find the link to the growing compendium of ancient and medieval texts at AI Central.

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Good Company

Thanks to everyone who has given Mr. JM Wayland’s new Coming-of-Age Fantasy book, DORIAN VANE AND THE VAMPIRE’S BLOOD, a chance. It should be very interesting to see what people think as the reviews start coming in, but the fact that it’s now in the company of books by Rowling, Tolkien, Madeleine l’Engle, and even the appalling, but inexplicably popular Ursula K. Le Guin is reason for a very small degree of optimism that it and its successors will be numbered in their company for decades to come.

That’s probably not the safe way to bet, but it is off to a good start. Also, what is with those covers? Aside from The Hobbit and A Wrinkle in Time, the Dorian Vane cover looks considerably better than the other top ten books in the category. I suppose that can’t hurt.

And in an inevitable sign that the book is squarely in Gamma country, it has already received its first fake one-star rating sans review, explanation or verified purchase. Someone is very unhappy about this particular entrant to the category…

In the meantime, an excerpt:

CHAPTER ONE: Somerset House

Dorian Vane sat on his thinking stump at the bottom of the forest garden and watched a beetle climb a blade of grass. The beetle was shiny and black and appeared to know exactly where it was going, which put it considerably ahead of most people Dorian had met in his eleven years.

The stump was the remains of an ash tree that had come down in a storm the year he turned five. His grandfather had the trunk cleared and the timber stacked, because Edward Somerset did not waste timber, but he left the stump where it stood. Dorian claimed it that same summer, and it had been generally regarded as his ever since. It had been a giant stump when he was five, and it was still the right height for sitting and thinking six years later. It was at the bottom of the garden, which meant nobody came down to find him unless they had something that required saying. And it was under the biggest oaks, where the forest canopy closed overhead and turned the sunlight green and dark, which mattered to Dorian more than he usually admitted.

His dark glasses were pushed up on his head. Here under the trees, with the sunlight filtered through at least three layers of greenleaf, the brightness dropped to the level his eyes could endure without complaint. They were, in several ways, unusual eyes. They were silver-grey, pale as rain on slate, with pupils that were not round but vertically slit, like a cat’s. And in the dark, they reflected light like a fox’s. No one else in the family had eyes like his. No one Dorian had ever met or even heard of had eyes like his. People stared, or said nothing, or said something out of the side of their mouth in the apparent belief that he was deaf as well. His glasses protected him from their stares the same way they protected him from the light; they put a wall between Dorian and the world.

The garden climbed the slope behind him in three terraces his grandmother had built up over forty years. The herbs nearest the kitchen door were rosemary, sage, thyme, things she cooked with and things she used in workings, which were occasionally the same plants. Next were the vegetable rows, then the old roses on the second terrace, and then the trees running down the slope to where the ground flattened out and the moss took over. The paths were swept clean down the grey bedrock that lay a hand’s breadth under the whole country and sat several inches below the moss and loam on either side. His grandmother said the bedrock was what gave the land its character. His grandfather said that sweeping those paths had taken him the better part of ten years.

On Saturday mornings, Dorian and his grandfather would roam the garden like forest rangers, brooms in hand, making sure that the vegetation hadn’t dared to encroach upon his grandmother’s cherished paths. It seemed to Dorian that every year, the forest gave up a little more hope of ever reconquering the exposed ground.

Beyond his stump the ground dropped to a stream, and beyond the stream it rose to open pasture, and beyond the pasture were the moors. You could see them from the upstairs windows, miles of heather and gorse and granite, running all the way north until the sky got in the way. His grandfather said the moors were the finest thing about the property, which was generous praise for a landscape that was mostly rocks and rain and sheep with strongly held opinions about fences.

A thrush was singing somewhere above him. The beetle reached the top of its grass blade, paused, and appeared to reconsider the entire enterprise. Dorian watched it with the sympathy of a fellow creature who frequently climbed trees only to discover there was nothing at the top beyond the occasional empty birdsnest.

“Dor! Dor! Dorian!”

His grandmother’s voice, from the top of the garden. It wasn’t her emergency voice. This was the ordinary one, albeit with a certain note in it that meant right now.

He reached up with both hands and pulled his glasses down. The lenses were tinted dark, mirrored on the outside, and the world dimmed comfortably behind them. He stood up, brushed the moss off his trousers, and walked up the winding path that curved through the trees.

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A Visit to Wyrmwick College

This is the result of an experiment that got very badly out of hand. After finishing The Refutation of Kant, I definitely had the sense that my analytical engine could use a break and decided to let my mind coast a while. No more amphibolies, contemplations of the true nature of reality or das Ding an sich, no more irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, or infinite sets, no more deconstructing the construction account, and no attempting to decide which aspect of the Veriphysical philosophy to develop next. So the day after Team Castalia finished deciding what was to go into the combined print edition that resulted in The Return of the Real, I found myself dwelling upon all the various nonsensicalities of the Wizarding World concoted by Ms JK Rowling.

I believe that many years ago, I was among the first to point out the absolute absurdities of the Quidditch rules, though I was far from the only one. But there were so many more things that made no sense, such as the pointless points system, the insane dual economies, the bizarre competitions, and the upside-down nature of a craven, spoiled elite that left one wondering how it had gotten there in the first place. Which, in light of recent revelations, actually tends to reconstruct the Wizarding World as a much darker fictional universe than anyone had ever imagined, one in which Tom Riddle is actually the hero seeking vengeance for his childhood abuse at the hands of a schoolmaster with a very dark and nasty secret.

But that’s neither here nor there. My main thought was this: what if the protagonist of an academy novel was not despised, but loved? What if he wasn’t a passive lens for the reader to pass through the world, but a character with strength, independence, and a will of his own? What if there were consequences to historical actions, and if the present was the result of past decisions? And what if the Silent Academy wasn’t the only school to which the Inghitaran elite sent their children? One question led to another, and another, and the sum total of the answers is now available for your exploration if you happen to be so inclined.

While the core concept is obviously derived from the British magical school tradition, the end result reads more as if Susan Cooper was the primary literary influence, with perhaps a dash of Lloyd Alexander, as the various Red Team reviews have noticed.

  • This is one of the strongest Harry Potter-inspired school fantasies I’ve read. It borrows a great deal from Rowling’s structure, but it has sufficiently strong prose, characterization, and worldbuilding that it gradually stops feeling like imitation and starts feeling like a genuine series in its own right.
  • The novel clearly draws from the greats of classic children’s fantasy while forging its own path. The most obvious surface parallel is the magical boarding school with house sorting, rivalries, feasts in a great hall, and a boy discovering his powers and place in a hidden world. Wyrmwick echoes Hogwarts in structure, but the execution diverges sharply. It captures the excitement of arrival and belonging but leans harder into quiet character moments and institutional realism. The story has Susan Cooper’s feel for deep time, hidden powers in the land, and a boy awakening to a larger, dangerous heritage without flashy destiny tropes. Overall, Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood is a strong, heartfelt addition to the magical-school genre—loyal to its influences while carving out a distinctive, moor-rooted identity. Fans of thoughtful fantasy with real emotional texture and British mythic flavor will find it deeply satisfying.
  • Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood is an exceptionally high-quality children’s fantasy novel. It honors the rich, atmospheric traditions of classic British folklore while implementing the rigorous, satisfying world-building mechanics found in modern American fantasy. By replacing cheap whimsy with tactical depth, J.M. Wayland has crafted a story that respects the intelligence of young readers.

Dorian Vane has silver eyes and no idea why.

Raised by his grandparents on the quiet Somerset moors, Dorian has spent his whole life hiding behind a pair of mirror-shaded glasses. Then the letter from Wyrmwick College arrives, and he is pulled from his comfortable home in the countryside into an exciting world of magic and wonder.

Wyrmwick is a school like no other, ancient, magnificent, and impossible, carved into a mountainside above a lake that reflects its stone towers back into the deep waters. Here, students learn how to hold fire in their hands, to shape metal with their thoughts, and to create wards that protect the living from things that dwell in the dark and hunt in the night. At Wyrmwick, Dorian finds unexpected friends, magical challenges, a misfit house that claims him as its own, and professors who seem to know more about his heritage than he does.

But the ancient college conceals old and bloody secrets in its foundations. Even hidden behind his glasses, Dorian’s eyes mark him as something the magical world hasn’t seen in centuries, and someone at the school wants him gone. In addition to his lessons, he learns that wonder and danger stalk the same stone corridors, and that being special is not the same as being safe.

Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood is the gripping first novel in a gothic magical fantasy series of courage, self-discovery, and the darkness that every new generation finds that it must face.

Now available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

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Mailvox: The Significance of the Refutation

Can you explain how the refutation of Kant affects our life today in simplified terms that anyone can understand?

Most people have never heard of Immanuel Kant, but almost everyone lives inside a concept he created. The idea sounds humble enough. Human reason can’t truly know reality as it is, only how it appears to us through our limited human senses. That sounds modest and even wise. But once you accept the idea as a real limitation, a strange thing follows. If nobody can actually know how things really are, then every statement about reality becomes just one more opinion, one more “perspective,” and none of those opinions or perspectives can ever be proven true. Refuting Kant’s idea and showing that it isn’t a rule or a real limitation is extremely significant because it puts the possibility of actual knowledge back on the table.

Here are five ways the refutation of Kant’s idea about unknowability changes your world.

First, expertise and “the science.” For decades, people were told to accept various statements because experts agreed or studies showed, and to treat the matter as settled and beyond any possibility of question. Kant’s rule props this up: if reason can’t reach reality directly, then truth becomes whatever the credentialed authorities say it is, because there’s no independent reality you can check them against. Refuting the rule restores the obvious: there is a real world, then those expert scientific predictions either come true or they don’t, and an expert who keeps being wrong is wrong no matter how many credentials he holds. You’re not dependent upon either the experts or the scientists; you’re allowed to check reality yourself.

Second, the idea that everyone has their own truth” This phrase is everywhere now, and it descends directly from Kant’s idea. If reality is locked away and we only ever see our own version of it, then your truth and my truth are just two filtered views and neither can be more correct than the other. Refuting the doctrine eliminates this. There is one reality. People can be honestly mistaken about it, and perspectives can be particually correct, but “true for me” stops being a relevant position. Some claims match reality and some don’t, and which is which is not up to how you feel about it.

Third, morality. If we can’t know how things really are, then we also can’t know how things really should be, and right and wrong collapse automatically into preference, culture, or power, with the strongest, loudest voice defining it. This is why so many moral arguments today end in “who are you to judge.” Refuting unknowability reopens the possibility that good and evil are real features of the world, discoverable like other truths, not just labels we stick on things we happen to like or dislike. That changes how seriously you can take a moral claim, your own included.

Fourth, science and discovery itself. Kant’s rule says human reason can’t identify anything about reality that isn’t already handed to us through experience. But that’s not how the greatest discoveries actually worked. The planet Neptune was found by pure calculation first: a mathematician worked out that something unseen had to be tugging on Uranus, predicted exactly where to point the telescope, and there it was. The same thing happened with antimatter, predicted on paper before anyone detected it. Reason reached out and grabbed a piece of reality nobody had experienced yet. If Kant’s rule were true, those triumphs couldn’t have happened. Refuting it explains why the human mind really can discover the world, not just sort the impressions it’s given.

Fifth, your ability to have confidence in your own thinking. The quiet cost of Kant’s rule is humility turned into paralysis: who am I to claim I know anything, when the smart position is that real knowledge is impossible? That mindset trains people to defer, to hedge, to assume the truth is forever out of reach and someone else’s call. Refuting the doctrine gives that back. Your reasoning is a real instrument that makes real contact with the real world. You can investigate, conclude, and stand on what you find. You will not be right about everything, and partial knowledge is still the human condition. But the door to truth was never locked and reality was never off limits. Kant just declared that it was, and a lot of people placed false trust in his assertions for two hundred and fifty years.

The refutation of Kant is therefore akin to a creature that thought it was a fish discovering that it’s simply been swimming in water this whole time, and realizing that not only can it breathe in the air and walk on the land too, but also that it has wings and can fly.

In related news, VERIPHYSICS: THE RETURN OF THE REAL is now available for preorder in hardcover and paperback editions from NDM Express. They should be available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other bookstores next week. It contains both The Treatise, The Refutation, and the Agrippan Trilemma challenge.

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Common Sense Calculus

I’m not going to lie. I think I would have grasped calculus a lot more easily, and perhaps even remembered it better, if it had been taught to me by starting with the actual meaning of the symbols instead of with all the jargon and symbols unconnected to the underlying concepts, as it used to be taught to 15-year-old American boys instead of not being taught to university graduates.

The preliminary terror, which chokes off most fifth-­form boys from even attempting to learn how to calculate, can be abolished once for all by simply stating what is the meaning—in common-sense terms—of the two principal symbols that are used in calculating.

These dreadful symbols are:

(1) d which merely means “ a little bit of.” Thus dx means a little bit of x; or du means a little bit of u. Ordinary mathematicians think it more polite to say “ an element of,” instead of “ a little bit of.” Just as you please. But you will find that these little bits (or elements) may be considered to be indefinitely small.

(2) f which is merely a long S, and may be called (if you like) “ the sum of.” Thus fdx means the sum of all the little bits of x or fdt means the sum of all the little bits of t. Ordinary mathematicians call this symbol “the integral of.”

Now any fool can see that if x is considered as made up of a lot of little bits, each of which is called dx, if you add them all up together you get the sum of all the dxs, which is the same thing as the whole of x. The word “integral” simply means “the whole.” If you think of the duration of time for one hour, you may (if you like) think of it as cut up into 3,600 little bits called seconds. The whole of the 3,600 little bits added up together make one hour.

When you see an expression that begins with this terrifying symbol, you will henceforth know that it is put there merely to give you instructions that you are now to perform the operation (if you can) of totalling up all the little bits that are indicated by the symbols that follow.

That’s all.

If anyone is interested in Castalia re-releasing this early 20th century introduction to Calculus, let me know. Although I have to say, I think we’d lose the parentheticals, which are unnecessary and don’t help at all.

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Napoleon at Chamartín

The fifth volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain

Napoleon at Chamartín by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It returns the protagonist Gabriel to Madrid in the closing weeks of 1808, as the imperial Grande Armée, recovered from its humiliation at Bailén, marches on the capital with the Emperor himself at its head.

Gabriel’s Inés has vanished into another world. Discovered to be the lost heiress of one of the greatest houses in Spain, she has been carried off to a palace on the Cuesta de la Vega and groomed for a marriage of fortune to the young Count of Rumblar — the dissolute, easily led Don Diego, who divides his nights between gaming dens, comic masonic lodges, and the salons of the manolería, where the celebrated greengrocer beauty known as the Zaina holds court. Barred from the palace and reduced to flinging pebbles at a lighted window, Gabriel shadows his rival through this doomed demimonde — while behind the marriage scheme moves the afrancesado Santorcaz, who has his own secret plans for Inés.

Around this private drama, Madrid braces for the French. The city throws up earthworks and musters a citizen militia, and Galdós fills these chapters with the comic Gran Capitán playing at general, the swaggering bully Mañara, and the whole brawling life of the lower town. Then comes the unthinkable betrayal that Galdós renders into one of the great crowd scenes of European fiction, and the mob, sold out and maddened, falls upon Mañara.

Madrid falls. Napoleon installs himself at Chamartín, just north of the city, and from his headquarters dictates the decrees that will remake Spain entirely to his design. Amid the wreckage Gabriel is captured and swept out of the conquered capital in a chained column of deported “patriots,” driven past the Emperor’s own coach on the road by Chamartín, and sent toward a city about to endure the most terrible siege of the entire war.

Napoleon at Chamartín is at once a panoramic chronicle of a nation’s capital under siege, a savage comedy of Madrid society, and a love story pursued through a falling city, narrated with the older Gabriel’s characteristic blend of self-deprecating wit and moral seriousness.

Available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook on Amazon. The ebooks have already been sent out to the paid subscribers. An excerpt is available at Castalia Library.

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10 Readers Wanted

If this cover image particularly appeals to you, and if you’re the sort of reader who really likes to read a certain style of book and has read the entire series, preferably multiple times, I’d like to run a rough draft we will be publishing soon past you. So get in touch, please. But only email if you’ve actually got the time to read it this week and you’re willing to send back a pre-publication review with suggestions about what you think works, and what you think doesn’t. I’ll freely admit that I don’t know enough about this specific genre to be confident about my impressions.

Don’t worry about typos and inconsistencies. That sort of thing, I can handle. It’s more what works, what doesn’t work, and so forth.

In almost completely unrelated news, VERIPHYSICS: The Recovery of the Real will be released in hardcover and paperback this coming week. It’s the two ebooks combined, plus a significant paper.

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A Refutation, Reviewed

The first review of THE REFUTATION OF KANT has been posted.

A refutation of Kant has to do one of two things: produce a counterexample the system cannot deal with, or locate the move inside the system that doesn’t actually argue for what it concludes. The second part of Day’s Veriphysics does both, and the interlocking of the two halves is what makes the book hard to answer because every defense of one wing concedes ground on the other.

The argument worth focusing on is the Master Amphiboly, and Vox is right about it. The “Thing-in-itself” runs two readings across a single word: that every cognizer is shaped by its apparatus, and that no feature of reality is in principle accessible to human cognition. The first is trivially true and Kant argues for it. The second is the load-bearing claim of the whole edifice and Kant never argues for it once, and instead moves to it under cover of the first. Once you see the slide, you can’t unsee it. Neptune is the cleanest empirical counterexample, though not the only one: Le Verrier worked an inverse problem through pure formalism and Galle confirmed the prediction within a degree, and the positron case is structurally identical: Dirac’s equation required it before anyone looked. If formal cognition cannot in principle identify features of reality not already given in experience, these events did not happen.

The mathematical half is harder to evade and simpler to state. Construction in Kant’s sense was tied to constructibility, which was already a problem with the irrationals in 1781 and decisively broken by Cantor a century later. The available retreat is to recast synthetic a priori as analytic, which costs the system the work it was built to do. The pincer is real and no version of Kant survives both jaws. One place worth pressing further is that the amphiboly used is portable. The slide from an apparatus-relative epistemic limit to an ontological claim about reality runs through Hume on causation, through Wittgenstein on private language, and through most of the strong-program science studies literature. Naming it generalizes the refutation.

Worth reading. Excellent work by Day

That is an intriguing observation about the potential portability of the Master Amphiboly. I shall have to examine the situation and see just how far the intellectual rot goes.

UPDATE: A second review has been posted.

I would like to thank Vox for writing this excellent book. Since Kant is the foundational philosophical thinker of the “Enlightenment”, its easy to see why many people cannot think straight these days. I enjoy reading St. Thomas Aquinas. Vox mentions that he may have called Kant a heretic and that sounds spot on.

Now if we could just convince the world to abandon Kant, things might improve. His notion of “…the thing-in-itself is unknowable by theoretical reason..” amazed me. Really??? Kant never did applied physics, medicine, or skilled trades, did he? That said, the world is heavily invested in Kant, just like Darwin, and seems to like to double down, not change its thinking. Indeed I enjoyed Vox pointing out that the current defenders of both have moved WAY beyond the original works in their defenses thereof.

Hegel’s thought confuses me too, perhaps he’s in the queue as well for a refutation? I highly recommend this book to anyone who seeks an understanding of why we need a 21st Century philosophy that is actually workable.

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On the Print Edition

In preparation for the print edition of Veriphysics, which has been requested by a few intrepid minds and is obviously necessary for the long run, I’ve updated The Treatise to include an appendix to demonstrate the legitimacy and utility of the Triveritas, which consists of the paper on the two trilemmas and begins thusly:

The Agrippan Trilemma is one of the oldest and deepest problems in epistemology. First articulated by Agrippa the Skeptic, recorded by Sextus Empiricus in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, and reformulated for modern philosophy by Hans Albert in his 1968 Treatise on Critical Reason, it holds that any attempt to justify a claim must terminate in one of three failures: the chain of justification extends forever (infinite regress), loops back on itself (circularity), or stops at a premise that is itself unjustified (dogmatic stopping). Since these three options appear to exhaust the logical possibilities, and since none of them constitutes genuine justification, the Trilemma concludes that justified knowledge is impossible.

The major epistemological traditions of the modern era have each responded by conceding one horn. Foundationalism accepts dogmatic stopping, identifying certain beliefs as properly basic and terminating the chain there. Coherentism accepts circularity, holding that beliefs are justified by mutual support within a web. Infinitism accepts the regress, arguing that an infinite chain of reasons is not inherently defective. Each of these frameworks treats one horn as a feature rather than a defect. None defeats the Trilemma. Each surrenders to it.

This paper solves the Agrippan Trilemma. The solution is not a trick, not a reframing, and not a claim that the problem is somehow misconceived. The Trilemma is a legitimate argument. Its conclusion follows from its premises. The solution is to show that one of its premises is false: specifically, that the third horn, dogmatic stopping, is built on an amphiboly that, once identified, breaks the horn entirely.

The amphiboly is this: the Trilemma treats “terminates” as equivalent to “terminates arbitrarily.” It assumes that any stopping point is an unjustified stopping point, that all termination is epistemically equal, that there is no distinction between stopping because you have run out of reasons and stopping because you have run out of unchecked dimensions. This conflation is not argued for in the Trilemma. It is assumed. And it is false.

The Triveritas demonstrates that it is false. The Triveritas holds that warranted assent requires the simultaneous satisfaction of three independently necessary conditions: logical validity (L), mathematical coherence (M), and empirical anchoring (E). Each dimension terminates at its own bedrock: L at logical axioms, M at mathematical axioms, E at observation. The Triveritas takes the third horn. It terminates. But it terminates at three independent stopping points of fundamentally different kinds, each constraining the others. The probability of all three stopping points being wrong in a way that produces a coherent false positive is strictly lower than the probability of any single stopping point being wrong. This is proved mathematically and confirmed empirically across twelve historical cases spanning four centuries and seven fields.

Checked termination is not dogmatic stopping. The third horn breaks.

So the print edition will consist of The Treatise and The Refutation of Kant, and includes the three following appendices:

  • Solving the Agrippan Trilemma: Triveritas and the Third Horn
  • The Sophistic Foundation of Reason: A Fundamental Flaw in Enlightenment Epistemology
  • Kant Against Kant

It should be available in hardcover and paperback sometime next week. I already have plans for second, third, and possibly fourth volumes, but only the second is likely to be out this year. In the meantime, it should be interesting to see if anyone comes up with any substantive criticisms, or if, as with Probability Zero, no one will be able to do so.

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