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Abduction (2006)

This is an independent film that has has both negative and positive reviews. The film has some great outdoor shots and disturbing effects and lighting that show how the town of Process, New, Jersey is so normal and picturesque to the rest of the world while behind closed doors it is unbelievably twisted. The story is about a small town in remote New Jersey that is not on any map. The plot is basically about the townsfolk who steal babies from pregnant women and sell them to barren couples and kidnap unsuspecting tourists and sell them into slavery. They also harvest the kidnapped victims organs to make leather goods out of them or sell them on the black market. They enjoy a booming business until eventually everything begins to come undone when the bodyguards of a pop singing sensation from South America is kidnapped come to town looking for her.

Meanwhile the entire town knows about the abduction. The storyline is rather original and it plays well. After the first 10 minutes the movie picks up very nicely. Tony Rugnetta, who plays Jacob, does an excellent acting job. Roberto Lombardi, who plays Johnny, is very convincingly sexy and evil at the same time. Gerry Kirschbaum, who plays Doc, plays a doctor with a cool demeanor but has a hidden mania and Christy Callas, who plays Lilly, is sinister and vulnerable at the same time. Christina Sampson, who plays Myrtle, and Deana Demko, who plays Rosie, also tun in some notable performance. Seldom do any of the actors stumble. To truly enjoy this film you have to accept it for what it is. That is, it is a well made, low budget thriller/drama that is somewhat e creepy, funny/campy, and a little bloody, with some nudity.

However it's not exactly a horror film and definitely not for everyone. If someone liked the thrills Saw or Rosemary's Baby, this is the movie for them. The film has gotten some bad reviews but those are coming from some former colleagues of the film maker who are simply bitter. So if you are interested in a movie with an interesting plot, a little gore, and some nudity, Abduction is the movie for you. It may not be the very best the web has to offer but it is well made and is far from the worst. Director John Orrichio did a fine job with this one. You can watch this and other movies for free from various websites on the Internet.

During calendar year 2005, I attended two weddings and a handful of other events where I met strangers (gasp!), many of whom were not just unfamiliar with philosophy (gasp gasp!) but didn’t even have much in the way of higher education (gasp gasp gasp!). As is both natural and expected on these sorts of occasions, I was asked what I did. And also quite naturally and expected, I was at a lost for how to explain the work of a philosopher of mathematics to a man who owns and runs a convenience store and got an associate’s in business management twenty-five years ago.

Even once we’re safe and sound back in the ivory tower, it’s still a useful exercise to try to figure out how to explain just what it is we do in the department of philosophy. Quite frankly, most of our fellow intellectuals won’t even have a good idea of what we’re up to: my friend Annie—a psych major who took a class or two on the history of ethics and is about to start her second year of med school—thinks that philosophy is basically just history. Natural scientists, mathematicians, and engineers have plenty of jokes about those crazy philosophers, and the things that literary theorists call `philosophy’ just make my soul hurt.

So let’s imagine you’re the latest junior hire at the University of Somplace, Department of Philosophy, and you meet the young dean of Arts and Sciences at the new faculty mixer. The dean is a psychologist, and doesn’t know much about philosophy beyond `Freud was wrong and Lacan is crazy, but Skinner had some interesting things to say’. How are you going to explain what you, a philosopher of math, write about in your research?

Since I fancy myself more of an epistemologist than a metaphysician, let’s start by talking about mathematical knowledge. While coming up with a solid definition of knowledge is a non-trivial project, let’s work with the Theaetetus definition: knowledge is justified true belief. We’ll work backwards through these three things.

For the most part, we seem to have beliefs about things: I believe that Bush should never have been elected, that the Moon is not made of green cheese, that the sum of the angles of a Euclidean triangle is π radians, and so on. Though Kierkegaard would disagree, it seems weird to have beliefs that aren’t about some thing or another. And we have mathematical beliefs, so we can immediately ask the question: What are mathematical beliefs about?

Let’s take the triangle-sum theorem (about the sum of the angles of a Euclidean triangle) as an example. One group, mathematical realists, will say that there are real things, somewhere and somehow, called triangles, and this belief is about a certain property that these real things really have. Another group, the formalists, will say that the theorem is just a statement in some language-game, with no real meaning or reference to the terms. A third major group, the structuralists, will say that the theorem is talking about the relationships between ordinary things, such as the one these three wine glasses are standing in.

Next up is truth. In what sense are mathematical theorems true? Realists and structuralists will say that mathematical theorems are objective reports of the properties and relations of some real things (though, of course, they’ll disagree over what things). Formalists are more likely to say that these truths are very different from truths about, say, the colour of the tablecloth; the strongest formalists are even liable to say that mathematics is more about convention than truth in any very strong sense. Intuitionists may want to say there’s a certain subjective yet not exactly conventional component that cannot be neglected.