Hello - here are a few brief remarks on my own specialism:

I want to straighten out a few points relating to philosophy that were
raised by several people on the list (Ken Kahn, Andres Valloud, Hans Beck,
Justin Walsh, to name some), but my first point relates to e-mail and this
list:

(1) I am 51 and hold degrees in philosophy and (mathematical) psychology
and have been systematically reading philosophy and logic now for 35 years.
I have a large site dedicated to aspects of it, and I am willing to discuss
it in e-mail, but I am not going to discuss it extensively or seriously on
this list, for this list is concerned with developing Squeak. 

Also, one of the inconveniences of e-mail is that anybody of any age and
any level of (in)competence and ignorance (or genius) can keep pretending
and talking, hiding semi-anonymously behind a bitstream-format, and talking
Big Words in bad grammar endlessly.

(2) The point of my earlier mail on Leibniz and Kant was NOT to discuss
philosophy on this list, but to give people pointers to really good
philosophical books. You don't learn philosophy by e-mail: you learn it by
reading a lot of the classics; making excerpts; writing comments; and
discussing it with others who have done likewise.

(3) Hans Beck wrote:

> Why ? And what means philosophy ? 

You'll find some of my own answers on my site, to which there is a link
below. Apart from that, the best general and comprehensive answer I know is
the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ed. Paul Edwards. This may be out of print
now, but any decent university has a copy. (It's 4 or 8 volumes, depending
on the edition. It is very well done and contains an enormous amount of
clearly written information on nearly all aspects of philosophy and related
matters.)

(4) Hans Beck also wrote

> And Decartes a bad mathematician ?? I'm not sure.

Descartes was a mathematician, indeed. So were Russell and Leibniz. The
others book-references I gave in mu earlier mail were also all by
mathematical people or physicists. What I said is that MOST philosophers in
history were NOT mathematicians, and knew little mathematics. As it
happens, I like the mathematical and logical approach, and there have been
quite a lot of this in the last 150 years or so. For example, try Peirce,
Whitehead, Ramsey, Carnap, Montague, Tarski, Ajdukiewicz, Suppes, Quine,
Lewis (C.I. and D.). All of these, I think, had degrees in mathematics or
mathematical logic. I could name many more, but the real point is that
naming is of little use if you don't read them. The ones I named were at
least very clever and wrote tolerably well.

There is a very useful internet encyclopedia of philosophy maintained at
Stanford at present. Check out "analytical philosophy" and "philosophy of
science" in a good philosophical encyclopedia or on the net. 

(5) Ken Kahn wrote

> Philosophy intersects programming languages at least in two places:

Well, philosophy intersects with every human cognitive endeavour at many
places. It also produced an enormous amount of purple prose, big words, and
nonsense, next to some of the finest and best formulated thinking. (As
things are in our "human-all-too-human" world, what's good tends to be rare
and is always in a minority.)

(6) Justin Walsh wrote ... a lot I can't say anything serious about (as not
quite as geriatric a case as he claims to be, but as another quite "mature
person"). I'm sorry Justin, I don't know what your academic specialism is,
if any, but it doesn't intersect with mine. If you want to make a logical
point, please do so in terms of standard set theory, and in private mail,
not on this list, and possibly even someone as ignorant as I may be about
philosophy and logic can understand it.

(7) Andres Valloud wrote 

>I was thinking that, eventually, we will get to a point where we will
>ask the question "what's the intention of an electron?"... or, if
>gravity is the effect of an intention, what's that intention in the
>first place? There are certain things we will never know.

True. But if you check out my site, you find a copy of Leibniz's Monadology
with my comments and a long excerpt of Leibniz's "Nouveaux Essays" with my
comments, and you'll learn that Leibniz held that everything is a monad,
and monads are characterized by having intentions. (Others who thought
likewise or similar: Aristotle - entelechies; Whitehead - "Process and
Reality" and many more. Check out "pan-psychism" in a good philosophical
encyclopedia. Also, a search with "propositional attitudes", "intentions",
"intensional logic" etc. on the net, and in a university with a good
computer-library system will produce a lot that's relevant to what you wrote.)

I hope this response clarifies some to some. Those who want to seriously
discuss or ask about philosophy can reach me off-list, and are adviced to
check out my site. My e-mail is in the header, my site's address is in my
signature.

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Regards,

Maarten Maartensz.
Website in Amsterdam about philosophy, logic, M.E. (Myalgic
Encephalomyelitis) and much more:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/