The Proceedings of the Friesian School,
Fourth Series


Taking up again the tradition of the Friesian School, this is a non-peer-reviewed electronic journal and archive of philosophy, inaugurated on line July 6, 1996, four years before the end of the 20th Century, just as the brilliant, courageous, prolific, and little appreciated German philosopher Leonard Nelson (1882-1927) started his Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule, Neue Folge, attempting a "Reformation of Philosophy," four years after the beginning of the 20th Century.

The essays at this site, addressing many philosophical, historical, scientific, religious, economic, legal, and political issues, range from the fully annotated and technical to more informal and discursive discussions, often originally written for undergraduate classes. Many items therefore should be intelligible to those not familiar with all the arcana of academic philosophy, or with academic philosophy at all. This is done deliberately, since the trend, by which philosophy has obscured and esotericized itself and mostly dropped out of popular and literate culture, should be resisted. Work of a similar range, with the appropriate philosophical orientation and grounding, is acceptable and desired.

Submissions will be considered that relate to the persons, issues, and history illustrated in the following statements, biographical sketches, and editorial essays. Treatments of issues that do not involve the Friesians or other philosophers mentioned below directly are sought if they parallel or supplement Kantian or Friesian doctrine, from metaphysics to political economy, or throw light on the history of philosophy in ways at least consistent with Friesian principles. Exemplary and supplementary works from recent philosophy may be found under Reviews. Contributions that do address the Friesians, etc., need not conform to the direction of interpretation that is editorially preferred.

Although now with several contributed works, the number of submissions to the journal remains thin, often inappropriate, and all but never from academic philosophers or graduate students. The website thus may seem largely like the personal project of the editor. That will remain the case as long as interest in the Friesian School is minimal, as it is now (at least outside of Germany), and as long as the tendency of contemporary philosophy is to illiberal and irrationalist nihilism, as detailed below. It must fall upon someone to maintain the tradition, however long it takes until interest will sustain itself. Much of the content of the site, which has accumulated more than 90 megabytes of material, including graphics, is therefore editorial.

The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series, employing the new medium of the World Wide Web, already linked from numerous sites and indices around the world, receiving up to 2,504,524 hits and 153,114 page views from 63,114 unique users a week, rather than becoming another dusty, obscure presence on library shelves, avoids the costs and complications of publishing, binding, mailing, and subscriptions, and establishes a Friesian presence in a way that is immediately accessible to potentially every computer on earth, from California to Australia, Taiwan, Korea, China, Greece, Romania, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Iceland, Brazil, Croatia, Iran, Pakistan, South Africa, and more, an opportunity for the curious, for those concerned with the sterility, obscurantism, and tendentiousness of recent philosophy, and for those dedicated to Leonard Nelson's own project of Socratic Philosophy.


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Home Page last updated 19 April 2008, Solar Term , "Grain Rains"


The Project of the Friesian School

The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series seeks to promote the further development of the Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in the direction indicated by Sir Karl Popper's remark in The Open Society and Its Enemies that "serious men,"
such as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and
Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843) (shown at right), did not at first take seriously the "senseless and maddening webs of words," as Schopenhauer put it, of G.W.F. Hegel.

The Kantian sense of "Critical," it should be noted, is unrelated to recent uses of the term in "critical" literary theory, "critical legal theory," "critical race theory," or even in "multicultural" textbook treatments of "critical thinking," in all of which the word is usually a dissimulating substitute for "Marxist" -- where all analysis is about "power" and class relationships, is contemptuous of "bourgeois" values and freedoms, including freedom of speech, and where the "voices" of other cultures are always coincidentally about oppression by capitalism and/or globalization. Considering the millions murdered, tortured, enslaved, and impoverished by Marxists in the 20th Century, one would have to consider continued true believers among the most uncritical people, let alone the most naive or dishonest, in intellectual history -- a description that is sadly all too applicable to much academic culture in the United States, where Marxist doctrine and Leninist behavior are alive and well. These recent uses of "critical," meaning the dogmatic application of ideology rather than any genuinely critical attitude, are thus oxymoronic examples of Orwellian "double think," just as when terms like "people's republic" and "democratic republic" were used to mean, not popular sovereignty and responsible government, but totalitarian statism and dictatorship. Now, combinations of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and others, as developed by Sartre, Marcuse, Foucault, Derrida, etc., is promoted under the term "Theory," and scholarly work that doesn't invoke the canon and its jargon is dismissed as "under-theorized." Thus, a miserable and largely exploded fragment of 20th Century philosophy comes to be accepted, mainly outside of philosophy, as the equivalent of essential and unproblematic method and truth. Since this preserves a small flame from the moral, political, and economic debacle of Marxism, it is a nice irony that one of the signers of Karl Marx's own doctoral dissertation on Democritus was none other than Jakob Fries.

Philosophy and her neglected customer, humanity, truly stand in need of alternative philosophical ideas and approaches. In the Twentieth Century, philosophy was like a confused and clumsy person who repeatedly tries to commit suicide, but keeps failing, though with the addition of debilitating damage at each attempt. In a classic sophistic dilemma of false alternatives, respected academic philosophy often seemed to have offered only two choices:

  1. First, the sterility and agnosticism of positivistic, scientistic, and merely analytic schools, characteristically, if not always originally, Anglo-American, which have frequently denied the possibility of knowledge in metaphysical or ethical matters, and sometimes the possibility of constructive philosophical knowledge at all, with, according to Karl Popper, a "concentration upon minutiae (upon 'puzzles') and especially upon the meanings of words; in brief .... scholasticism." As Allan Bloom said, "Professors of these schools [i.e. positivism and ordinary language analysis] simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students." Students and the intellectually curious looking for some concern, any concern, about the truths of being and value, the content of wisdom, or some humane purpose, found instead what has aptly been called a "valley of bones." Although continuing analytic philosophy sometimes appears as a small island of some sanity in a sea of increasing nonsense, as with John Searle, it retains almost all of its sterility, futility, and what could even be called autism. The Proceedings still receives e-mail from people passionately advocating so miserable, impoverished, and incoherent a theory as Logical Positivism.

  2. Second, the nihilism, relativism, pseudo-science, and frequent political authoritarianism and dogmatism of the originally Continental alternatives:  Existentialism, Marxism, deconstruction, and now "post-modernism." Deconstruction, Bloom said, "is the last, predictable, stage in the suppression of reason and the denial of the possibility of truth in the name of philosophy." The truly last stage, however, is the "post-modern" combination of Anglo-American sterility with the higher irrationalism of a politicized deconstruction, the kind of thing we find in Richard Rorty's denial of philosophical, moral, or even scientific knowledge but affirmation of trendy leftist "solidarity." This combination represents, as Bloom perceived, the appalling, terrifying, and tragically ironic adaptation of the philosophical foundations of Fascism, from people like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, who both despised mere liberalism, to supposedly progressive political causes, replacing the Classical Liberal principles, now widely scorned by both left and right, of the Enlightenment foundations of liberal, free market democracy. Hence, one need hardly ask why students and scholars are more frequently directed to study the authoritarian Thomas Hobbes, a defender of political absolutism and judicial positivism, rather than the libertarian John Locke, one of the inspirations of the American Revolution, as he had been the apologist of the English Glorious Revolution (1688). Indeed, Locke is so widely ignored, that leftists often think of Hobbes as some kind of representative of liberalism and criticize the individualism of his "state of nature"! -- even while breathing deep of his statism and authoritarianism. [note] Western academics and intellectuals have truly and heartily taken up the cause of totalitarianism, fallen from the dead hands of fascism and communism, with the same goals, through the same methods, namely, laws about speech, thought crimes, disarmament of civilians, political control of private property and private relationships, denigration of religion, political propaganda through state schools, the militarization of police, the destruction of the rule of law through discretionary powers given to executive officials and bureaucrats, the subversion of trial by jury, etc. etc. There are also new twists, like the distortion of civil rights law into a means of abolishing civil rights.

    Although Anglo-American philosophy tended to worship at the feet of science, the drift of academia to the left has led to characteristically totalitarian political attacks on science itself. The "post-modern" move may even be called the "post-Copernican" move, where the "de-centering" of meaning and objectivity (giving new meaning to the word "obscurantism"), returns the "marginalized" literary critic or theorist to the Ptolemaic center of the universe, whence modern science, now demystified and unmasked as an instrument of Euro-centric oppression, had proudly thought to have dislodged an arrogant humanity. Where the arrogance has settled now is all too plain to those familiar with American academic life.

The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series takes the editorial view that Schopenhauer and Fries represent the most critical, fruitful, and faithful response to Kant and that Schopenhauer, Fries, Nelson, and all those who have used or been strongly influenced by Critical Kantian and Friesian ideas represent an avenue of development from Kant that provides an alternative philosophical tradition, rational, positive, and Classically Liberal, right through the Twentieth Century and to the present. This journal, therefore, editorially subscribes to certain Principles of Friesian Philosophy, expressed both in summary statements and in editorial essays. [note] Work in their spirit must be encouraged and a forum provided for it, when and if it develops. Such is the project here.

Since The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series is not a peer-review journal, and is seeking specific and rare kinds of work, it has not attracted a large number of submissions over its eleven and a half year (1996-2008) life. But neither has it attracted submissions that were written mainly or merely for credit towards academic tenure. Although philosophy journals reject 90% of submissions and now rarely bother to explain rejections or provide reader reports, submissions here have tended to come from non-academics, students, and independent scholars, rarely from the graduate students or junior faculty who otherwise are desperate for publications, but who will tend to write on trendy "current" issues for peer-review journals. There is still little that is trendy about the Proceedings of the Friesian School.

The editor would like to see academic philosophers working on Friesian (or at least sensible, intelligible, or edifying) material, but the lack of interest seems to be a combination of discordant Zeitgeist, as with Schopenhauer in his day, and perverse institutional incentives:  The peer-review system of publication, while helping to maintain scholarly standards, also serves to screen out innovation and dissent and to promote doctrinal uniformity and a self-referential scholasticism -- the stigmata of academia becoming a rent-seeking bureaucracy. This sort of stagnation was evident in the circumstance that few early modern philosophers were academics. Now the academy has ossified again. As Charles J. Sykes says:

Unread and unreadable, the product of the professoriate is seldom intended to expand the horizons of human knowledge as much as to keep the academic machine running smoothly, the journals filled, the libraries well-stocked, the resumes bulging, and the grants awarded. Volume rather than insight is what counts, and conformity rather than originality is rewarded. [Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education, St. Martin's Griffin, 1988, p. 104]

Academic philosophers thus may not be very interested in the project of the Friesian School, any more than the theologians of Paris were interested in Descartes; but it remains to be seen if the works of contemporary academic philosophy are ever noted or remembered after or outside the incestuous community, the opaque, Hermetic references, and the impenetrable jargon of philosophy departments, clubby conferences, and the prestigious journals.

Twentieth Century philosophy passed by Leonard Nelson, but his memory, commitment, and passion, with the promise of philosophy as more than an esoteric exercise of self-congratulation, but truly as a basis of enlightened moral and political action, are preserved here against a better future, where a dedication to knowledge means that there is actually an interest in discovering the truth (not dismissing that as impossible), and in explaining it (not necessarily even at public expense) to an educated, inquiring public, in a context of Jeffersonian democracy.

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Friesian Journals and Modern Friesian Influence

The original Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule were published by Jakob Fries's principal student, Ernst Friedrich Apelt, from 1847 until his death in 1859. That was effectively the end, for the time being, of the Friesian School. The Friesian School has suffered more than once from the premature death of its principal exponent.

Leonard Nelson rediscovered Fries's work while still a high school student, revived the tradition, usually referred to now as the Neo-Friesian School, and in 1904 began publishing the Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule, Neue Folge. Papers in the Abhandlungen remain of some note in the history of logic and mathematics, although the specifically Friesian material is, of course, largely ignored and forgotten.

Nelson's efforts brought Fries to the notice of one of the most important 20th Century philosophers of religion Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), who then became an early collaborator with Nelson at the University of Göttingen. Nelson also influenced the great philosopher of science,
Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994), who was a relative of one of Nelson's students, Julius Kraft (1898-1960). Popper and Kraft argued for years about Nelson's views, although Popper had described himself as a kind of Friesian.

Popper's doctrine of falsification, in turn, based on the Friesian theory of justification, influenced his friend, the Nobel Laureate, Austrian School economist, Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) (at left) in his theories of free market economics and constitutional government. Hayek, in turn, was one of the formative influences on the "Chicago" school of economics, which includes figures like Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Gary Becker, etc.

Otto's theory of "numinosity," based on the Friesian epistemology of Ahndung, came to be used by the founder of the "Chicago School" of history of religion, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), and by the great psychologist
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) (at right), whose ideas, on their philosophical side, were also formatively and independently influenced by Kant and Schopenhauer.

Nelson's early death and the coming of National Socialism -- some in Nelson's group fled the very day of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor -- cut short the life of the School in Germany. The Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule were then discontinued in 1937.

Many of Nelson's students became refugees during World War II, including Julius Kraft, who had first fled Nazi Germany to teach at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and then happened to find himself in the United States when the War broke out. After the War, Kraft taught in the United States and then was in London between 1954 and 1957, renewing his relationship with Karl Popper. Then, despite having lost both his parents in the Nazi Holocaust, Kraft returned to Germany and took up teaching again at the University of Frankfurt, which he had left in 1933. (Popper, on the other hand, refused to return to Vienna.) It was also in 1957 (December) that Kraft founded the journal Ratio, with both English and German editions, trusting in the Liberal inspiration of the English tradition. Ratio ran to six issues (three volumes) under Kraft's editorship, before his death in 1960.

Meanwhile, L.H. Grunebaum, another from Nelson's circle, oversaw, through the "Leonard Nelson Foundation" ("to keep before and make available to the public and to perpetuate the ethical and pedagogical ideals and ideas of Leonard Nelson..."), the translation and publication in the United States of two books containing Nelson's works, Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy [Yale, 1949; Dover, 1965], and the System of Ethics [Yale, 1956]. Nelson's great Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) was also translated but never published. Copies of the manuscript translation, however, were bound and made available in 1970.

Ratio may be considered to be the "Third Series" of the Proceedings of the Friesian School. Although it merely claimed to continue "in a new form philosophical aims pursued with uncommon seriousness and courage in the Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule," it initially featured several key articles by Kraft, by Popper, and by people from Nelson's circle, such as Gustav Heckmann, Paul Bernays, and Stephen Körner. Under the subsequent editorship of Körner himself, Ratio, with the occasional piece about Nelson, began to function as a mainstream philosophy journal. The German edition was financed by Nelson's Philosophisch-Politische Akademie e.V., which has continued under some of Nelson's students and their successors as a center for interest in Socratic Method, philosophy of mathematics, politics, and other issues -- although not acknowledging the importance of figures like Otto and Hayek for the Friesian tradition.

The English edition of Ratio was published by Basil Blackwell for the "Society for the Furtherance of the Critical Philosophy," directed by Paul Branton (1916-1990). This continued through 29 volumes until 1987, with Martin Hollis (1938-1998) as the final editor, when the German edition was discontinued and complete responsibility for the English journal was assumed by Blackwell's. A Ratio (New Series) was started and continues, but it was and is entirely without connection to the Friesian School. Now the "New Series" part of the title has been dropped, and it is called Ratio, An International Journal of Analytic [sic!] Philosophy.

Although Grete Henry-Hermann's completion of the project of editing and issuing the nine volumes of Nelson's Gesammelte Schriften [Felix Meiner Verlag Hamburg] in 1974 coincided with a significant effort to promote Nelson's thought, including a two volume 1971 English edition of Progress and Regress in Philosophy (Fortschritte und Rückschritte der Philosophie) [Blackwell's], little came of this, while professional and academic philosophy continued, as noted above, on its persistently unsatisfactory courses. The end of the Friesian Ratio in 1987 seemed to represent the nadir, the final exhaustion, in the Friesian revival begun by Nelson, as philosophical interest in Nelson was insignificant, as Nelson's students had pretty much died out, and as Nelson's works in English had completely fallen out of print. Scholarly work on Fries has grown in Germany, and successors to Nelson's Academy have continued activity with Socratic Method in Germany, the Netherlands, and England, but there remains little notice of this in America, in English language philosophy, or on the international stage. The revolutionary and seminal principles of Kant-Friesian epistemology, at the same time, seem to have been abandoned by all.

The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series is therefore founded on the determination that the lapse of Friesian philosophy in English cannot be allowed to be. Now, Leonard Nelson and Friesian principles will be here on the World Wide Web for anyone looking for alternatives to the sterile or nihilistic mainstream of 20th Century thought. Let this be the Palladium of Friesian Philosophy.

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...the more a subject is understood, the more briefly it may be explained.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816 (after example of Jean Baptiste Say and others).


Topics and Essays

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Contact Addresses

Write letters, or submit articles (identified as such, with name, postal address, e-mail address, and academic affiliation, if any, of author), by e-mail to Kelley L. Ross, DrKelley@AOL.com, or by snail mail, on diskette (for articles) or in print, to:

Kelley L. Ross
Department of Philosophy
Los Angeles Valley College
Van Nuys, CA 91401-4096

E-mails to The Proceedings of the Friesian School should use a subject line that clearly identifies them by the webpage referenced, the class at my college, or "personal." Subject lines like "Hi!" or "Hello!" or even "Thanks!", or with cryptic references to topics (like a recent complaint about Ayn Rand with nothing in the subject line but "very innacurate"), are used by spammers and may be blocked by filters.

Information about typographical or formatting errors, dead links, missing pages, or just fan mail, is especially welcome. Recently, the proof-reading help of William Bruce has been invaluable. He has read much of the site and uncovered some typos that have been in place for years.

Do not send articles in any word processing format (e.g. Microsoft Word or Word Perfect), or in HTML. Special formatting is worthless when files must be converted into HTML, which is basically ASCII text; and the HTML produced by most composers will not be in the style of the Proceedings. Special symbols, if necessary (e.g. logical or mathematical symbols), should be glossed in situ. Graphic files to accompany articles may be described but should not be sent until the text article is accepted. Because of the threat of viruses, large attachments, of any format, not cleared in advance, will be deleted without being opened. Items submitted in hard copy, or on hard media, for publication, or correspondence sent by mail, become the property of the publisher and will not be returned.

Writers of insulting or abusive letters should consider that such correspondence may not be answered or, once its nature is recognized, even read. Merely hostile letters are welcome if their points are stated politely and succinctly. In general, missives larger than 5K are in some danger of being disregarded. It is usually part of polite exchange for correspondents to give their names.

Any kind of correspondence received that is considered significant, as information, criticism, or discussion of the material or views presented in The Proceedings of the Friesian School, may be edited and posted at the site. These are "letters to the editor." However, correspondence considered personal, that the writer does not want to be subject to posting, need merely be clearly identified as such. Names will also be withheld upon request.

It has been suggested that an online message board be established for The Proceedings of the Friesian School. However, although the material at the Friesian site generates steady e-mail comment and feedback, often from people who have their own axes to grind, either philosophically or politically, there is rarely anything specifically concerning Friesian philosophy, and still little from philosophy students, either graduate or undergraduate. I will consider that there is sufficient interest in Friesian philosophy to warrant a message board when there is actually a philosophy student, preferably a graduate student, who is interested in supervising such a site. Anyone desiring such a responsibility can create a message board. If I am persuaded of their Friesian bona fides, it will be linked and promoted from this page.

Occasionally, some rare correspondents are so enthusiastic that they hope to organize a sort of Friesian movement. In general, such things seem rather hopeless. It would be enough just to have some general interest. Instead, the movement should be for the restoration of Constitutional Government and Jeffersonian Democracy in the United States, and for the promotion of the principles of liberal democracy and the free market elsewhere. There are plenty of organizations, political and non-political, partisan and non-partisan, for people to join if they wish to help in that effort.

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EGON SPENGLER (HAROLD RAMIS): "Print is Dead."

Ghostbusters, 1984, Columbia Pictures


Ownership, Copyright, & Disclaimer

The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series is a non-periodic journal and archive of philosophy, updated as needed, published and edited by Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.. All materials, unless otherwise indicated, are copyrighted (c) 1979, 1985, 1987, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 by the editor.

All rights are reserved, but fair and good faith use with attribution may be made of all contents for any non-commercial educational, scholarly, and personal purposes, including reposting, with links to the original page, on the internet. It is not necessary to obtain copyright release for such uses, but the Proceedings would be grateful to be voluntarily informed, for informational purposes only, of the use of its materials. Commercial use of these materials may not be made without written permission.

Various pages and graphics from this site have been reproduced elsewhere, often without informing the Proceedings. Many of these have been modified or represent older versions of Proceedings pages. Such sites might be advised to use links instead, or at least keep their mirrors, if that is their intention, updated. Persons who unnecessarily request permission for references, quotes, or links should be aware of their "fair use" rights under copyright law. Some authors and organizations do not want to even be mentioned or discussed, let alone quoted, without their permission, but this is a legally excessive and unenforceable preference. Copyright law is already getting a bit out of hand, and everyone should vigorously exercise and maintain fair use rights.

The term "Friesian School" is neither a trademark nor the name of a corporate person but the public domain designation of a historic school of philosophy. The term "Friesian School" therefore may be found used elsewhere, and various statements may be found made concerning the school, by other parties who have no connection to, and for whose claims no responsibility can be taken by, this publication, its editor, or publisher.

The use of this site is subject to the condition that neither the editor, publisher, nor the contributors will be held liable for any damages, including any general, special, incidental, or consequential damages, that may arise from the use of, or inability to use, this site, any of its contents, or the off-site links that it contains.

Although the editor is an employee of Los Angeles Valley College, and part of this site is used for his classes at the College, nothing at this site is owned, sponsored, or endorsed by the College or by the Los Angeles Community College District, and the editor is not operating as an agent of the College or District. The College has no connection to, interest in, or responsibility or liability for those views or their expression at this site, although the views of the editor, as a teacher at the College, are protected by the principles of academic freedom.

"The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series" is the copyright-protected name of a non-commercial, non-profit, unincorporated educational enterprise for which payments or donations for any purpose are neither solicited nor accepted. The expenses of this site are personally defrayed by the publisher. The contents of this journal are therefore protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, without the specious exceptions generated under the judicial sophistries of "commercial speech" (Valentine v. Chrestensen, 1942) or of the wicked and bad faith "relaxed review" of rights under "ordinary commercial relations" (the infamous and despicable 4th footnote to United States v. Carolene Products Co., 1938). Nor may the First Amendment in this case be abridged by the Federal Communications Commission of the United States, which has neither natural, moral, nor (honest) constitutional jurisdiction over the medium of the Internet.

Unfortunately, since the Internet has no particular owner, it has become subject to the "tragedy of the commons" as spammers have abused the system of e-mail and deluged users with unsolicited and unwanted advertisements and offers, not to mention swindles. Since this is not just annoying to private users, but costing businesses a great deal of time and money, it is beginning to draw down legislation against it, creating the dangerous precedent of regulating Web communication. This is a grave and undesirable development, but it does reinforce that lesson that common ownership leads to overuse of any resource. Without a private owner or owners, the internet by default is left to the state, which is beginning to move, for better or worse, against spammers.

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Note on Viewing and Printing These Pages

Articles at this site are posted with a black on white (or light colored) format. Some pages, however, like this homepage and the index pages, have white print on a black background, and some readers may find these hard to read. Others will experience difficulty attempting to print out such pages from the screen, since the white type prints out as blank pages.

These problems can be overcome in the web browser Netscape 3.0 by opening the "Options" menu, going to "General Preferences...", and then to "Colors." On the "Colors" menu, the default options should be set as desired, and then the box at the bottom of the menu that says, "Always use my colors, overriding document," should be marked. The appearance of the screen can thus be set to taste; and with dark type on a light background, pages and files will print out normally. In Netscape 4.0 and higher these options appear under the "Preferences" entry in the "Edit" menu: The "Category" tree will contain an "Appearance" entry, under which is "Colors," with the same options as in Netscape 3.0. Other browsers should make similar provisions for overriding the format of the document. Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 evidently does not make provision for overriding the format, but I am informed that with version 5.01, one goes to the Advanced tab of "Options" and unchecks "Print background colors and images." If this proves unsatisfactory, I recommend purchasing Netscape, whose 7.2 version is now available.

One can also increase the readability of any webpage, with any colors, by changing to a larger type font. These pages are formatted for a 640x480 screen with 12 point type. Expanding to an 800x600 (or larger) screen will both leave many empty spaces on some pages and make the type look relatively smaller. In Netscape, the font controls are on the same menus as the color controls, and almost any size of type can be selected. It is also suggested that the window used for the web browser not be expanded to the whole screen, but adjusted in size to suit the layout of the page being viewed. Some pages have "optimum window width" bars as a guide to this, as shown below.

In 2003 and 2004 I stayed at hotels where Web access was available through televisions in the guests' rooms. In each case, in hotels as far apart as Flagstaff, Arizona, and Atlantic City, New Jersey, the screen was fixed at 640x480 pixels with a large type face that could not be reset. Users should be cautioned that this will cause some images and text to overlap and be obscured, with no remedy. Hopefully, hotels will soon employ more flexible systems.

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Favicon & Server

In newer web-browsers, the location line at the top of the screen displays an icon before the URL. This will be a default icon if the website being visited does not have one posted, but will otherwise show one designed for the site. This is called the "favicon.ico" or the "favorite [site] icon" since it was originally to provide an icon leading to what had been bookmarked as a favorite site. The favicon.ico of the The Proceedings of the Freisian School is a colored version of the Borromean Rings, three overlapping circles that were originally found on the crest of the Renaissance Italian Borromeo family. The Borromean Rings as such are intertwined in such a way that removing any one of them leaves the other two unlinked. The topological implications of this are explored in a marvelous computer generated film, Not Knot, by the Geometry Center of the University of Minnesota (directed by Charlie Gunn and Delle Maxwell, distributed by Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc., Boston), where the rings are related to non-Euclidean space. The rings are also found in logic, where they represent all the possible ways that three sets can overlap each other. This is called a "Venn Diagram." Finally, the diagram is used here to display all the polynomic categories of value. This is explained at A New Kant-Friesian System of Metaphysics and the Six Domains of the Polynomic System of Value.

This page first appeared in July 1996 with the appalling URL, http://bestla.calstatela.edu/www/lavc/philosophy/friesian.htm, under the Los Angeles Valley College webpage, hosted by California State University, Los Angeles. My thanks to John Beck for helping set up the original site. Unfortunately, after John left, it was a long time before Valley again was ready to host faculty web sites. I soon made alternative plans.

By August 1996 the "friesian.com" domain name was obtained, and the site came to be hosted, with gratitude, by Jonathan Hartman and his Fountainhead Internet Systems.

Service was later transfered to Bite Networks, ISP and carried there for many years with the technical advice of Ed Saavedra. In February 2006 the site is now carried by GoDaddy.com. The Proceedings is now also accessible through the "friesian.org" domain as well as the "friesian.com" domain.

Valley College itself has its website at http://www.lavc.cc.ca.us/.

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