James Skemp's StrivingLife

Who's the audience?

While interesting, the lack of a defined audience makes this book an extremely difficult read.

Having read A Brief History of Time I was looking for something with a similar feel to it. Instead the book starts out geared towards anyone with the desire to really read and understand it, then seems to leave most of that audience towards the wayside - seemingly right around when the science gets a little iffy - and then finishes geared back towards the larger audience.

But perhaps the audience isn't as large as I've thought. But why then, in one of these 'higher level' sections do we see jokes added within the text?

Perhaps the authors realized that the theory they state within is too complex for most people, and this is their way of making it bearable for us, until things start getting more understandable.

Either way, while I generally enjoyed the book, and found many noteworthy passages, the ideas expressed within still need some work to be generally accessible. While I'll certainly re-read a Stephen Hawking book, it is unlikely that it will be this one, so I give it 3 of 5 stars.

I submit the following as a postulate:

Given knowledge of the present state of affairs, we can know the future, but not the past. Of the latter we can only make guesses and assumptions, albeit educated ones, but cannot know with certainity that they were the case.

Given that two vehicles are heading towards each other at speed, and neither will be able to stop in time, we can know that they will hit each other and cause a certain amount of damage, knowing the speeds they're going, the integrity of the vehicles, and etcetera.

However, we can only guess, assuming we did not know the state of affairs at the key points in the past, as to why they're headed towards each other. If a child is standing in the road, where one of the vehicles would otherwise be, or would have been, we could assume that the vehicle swerved to avoid striking the child. But given a 'snapshot' of the present referred to above, we cannot know that to be the case.

Why this is important

Absolute knowledge of the current state of affairs is not sufficient to absolute knowledge of the past, even assuming cause and effect reigns supreme (which it seemingly must). Given a present, there are many pasts, but only one future.

The Dover Edition of The World as Will and Representation: Volume I, translated by E.F.J. Payne, suffers from a sparse table of contents, covering only the starting pages of the four books and the appendix (the index being contained in the second volume).

To remedy this, I've presented below an expanded table of contents for this work.

Expanded Table of Contents for Volume I

• Translator's Introduction (v - xi)
• Preface to the First Edition (xii - xvii)
• Preface to the Second Edition (xviii - xxvii)
• Preface to the Third Edition (xxviii)
• Selected Bibliography (xxix - xxx)
• Contents, Volume I (xxxi)
• First Book: The World as Representation. First Aspect (1 - 92)
  • §1 (3 - 4)
  • §2 (5 - 6)
  • §3 (6 - 8)
  • §4 (8 - 13)
  • §5 (13 - 8)
  • §6 (19 - 25)
  • §7 (25 - 35)
  • §8 (35 - 9)
  • §9 (39 - 50)
  • §10 (50 - 1)
  • §11 (51 - 3)
  • §12 (53 - 8)
  • §13 (58 - 61)
  • §14 (61 - 9)
  • §15 (69 - 83)
  • §16 (83 - 91)
• Second Book: THe World as Will. First Aspect (93 - 166)
  • §17 (95 - 9)
  • §18 (99 - 103)
  • §19 (103 - 6)
  • §20 (106 - 9)
  • §21 (109 - 110)
  • §22 (110 - 2)
  • §23 (112 - 9)
  • §24 (119 - 127)
  • §25 (127 - 130)
  • §26 (130 - 9)
  • §27 (139 - 152)
  • §28 (153 - 161)
  • §29 (162 - 5)
• Third Book: The World as Representation. Second Aspect (167 - 268)
  • §30 (169)
  • §31 (170 - 4)
  • §32 (174 - 6)
  • §33 (176 - 8)
  • §34 (178 - 181)
  • §35 (181 - 4)
  • §36 (184 - 194)
  • §37 (194 - 5)
  • §38 (195 - 200)
  • §39 (200 - 7)
  • §40 (207 - 8)
  • §41 (208 - 212)
  • §42 (212 - 3)
  • §43 (213 - 8)
  • §44 (218 - 220)
  • §45 (220 - 6)
  • §46 (226 - 8)
  • §47 (229)
  • §48 (230 - 3)
  • §49 (233 - 6)
  • §50 (237 - 242)
  • §51 (242 - 255)
  • §52 (255 - 267)
• Fourth Book: The World as Will: Second Aspect (269 - 412)
  • §53 (271 - 4)
  • §54 (274 - 286)
  • §55 (286 - 307)
  • §56 (307 - 310)
  • §57 (311 - 9)
  • §58 (319 - 323)
  • §59 (323 - 6)
  • §60 (326 - 331)
  • §61 (331 - 3)
  • §62 (334 - 350)
  • §63 (350 - 7)
  • §64 (357 - 9)
  • §65 (359 - 367)
  • §66 (367 - 374)
  • §67 (375 - 8)
  • §68 (378 - 398)
  • §69 (398 - 402)
  • §70 (402 - 8)
  • §71 (408 - 412)
• Appendix: Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy (413 - 534)