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Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein on their book Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes (slightly NSFW)
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[H]appiness (beatitudo) is the good which, once achieved, leaves nothing further to be desired. It is the highest of all goods, containing all goods with itself; if any good was lacking to it, it could not be the highest good since there would be something left over to be desired. So happiness is a state which is made perfect by the accumulation of all the goods there are.
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One has animal knowledge about one’s environment, one’s past, and one’s own experience if one’s judgements and beliefs about these are direct responses to their impact – e.g., through perception or memory – with little or no benefit of reflection or understanding.
One has reflective knowledge if one’s judgment or belief manifests not only such direct response to the fact known but also understanding of its place in a wider whole that includes one’s belief and knowledge of it and how these come about.
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The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point — more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance — and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.
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I wondered why the founders of philosophy would admit no one to the pursuit of wisdom who was unversed in mathematics; as if they thought that this discipline was the easiest and most indispensable of all for cultivating and preparing the mind to grasp other more important sciences.
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Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e. the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.
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Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extend that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extend that he can make them. Their “in-itself” becomes “for him”. In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature.
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A philosopher is not a philosopher if he is not a metaphysician. And it is the intuition of being […] that makes the metaphysician.
