November 2011
1 post
2 tags
September 2011
1 post
3 tags
“[E]ven with all their ethics men would never have been anything but monsters if...”
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The First and Second Discourses (translated by Judith and Roger Masters), from the Second Discourse
August 2011
9 posts
3 tags
How many Marxists does it take to change a lightbulb?
None. The lightbulb contains the seeds of its own revolution.
3 tags
“The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the...”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Blue Book
4 tags
“Today’s person spends way more time in front of screens. In fluorescent-lit...”
– David Foster Wallace, in interview with David Lipsky, in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
4 tags
5 tags
“[T]he theory of meaning is the fundamental part of philosophy which underlies...”
– Michael Dummett: “Can Analytical Philosophy Be Systematic, and Ought It to Be?”
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“I mean moral virtue; for it is this that is concerned with passions and actions,...”
– Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, 1106b (translated by W. D. Ross)
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“Memory is of past things. But the past is referred to by reference to a definite...”
– Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, 1a q. 79, a. 6, 2
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Dean, to the physics department. “Why do I always have to give you guys so much money, for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff. Why couldn’t you be like the math department - all they need is money for pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper.”
4 tags
“From its seeming to me - or to everyone - to be so, it doesn’t follow that...”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein: On Certainty (translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M.Anscombe)
July 2011
1 post
6 tags
May 2011
2 posts
2 tags
4 tags
“It is in areas like math and metaphysics that we encounter one of the average...”
– David Foster Wallace: Everything and More. A Compact History of ∞
April 2011
1 post
3 tags
February 2011
6 posts
3 tags
“A book, even a fragmentary one, has a center which attracts it. This center is...”
– Maurice Blanchot: The Space of Literature (translated by A. Smock)
4 tags
“What does it mean to be virtuous? This is really quite a complex problem. If it...”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, Talks in Europe 1968, Rome 3rd Public Talk, 17th March 1968
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“To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, notes
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“When we say that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of...”
– Epicurus, letter to Menoeceus (translated by A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley)
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“It was never contended or conceived by a sound, orthodox utilitarian, that the...”
– John Austin: The province of jurisprudence determined (1832)
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“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the...”
– Immanuel Kant: Critique of Practical Reason (translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott)
September 2010
1 post
3 tags
“One must […] take refuge in philosophy; this pursuit, not only in the eyes of...”
– Seneca: Moral letters to Lucilius, Letter 14 (translated by Richard Mott Gummere)
August 2010
5 posts
4 tags
3 tags
“Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the...”
– Francis Bacon: Novum Organum
2 tags
3 tags
“To ask whether there really are electrons is the same – from the Ramsey point of...”
– Rudolf Carnap: The Philosophical Foundations of Physics
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“What is a happy (beata) life? Peacefulness and constant tranquillity. Loftiness...”
– Seneca: Letters
July 2010
10 posts
3 tags
“A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put...”
– Willard Van Orman Quine: ‘On What There Is’ (1948 version)
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“Logic has a tendency to correct, first, inaccuracy of thought, secondly,...”
– Augustus De Morgan: On the Syllogism and Other Logical Writing
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“When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a...”
– Henry Habberley Price: Perception
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“A work of rhetoric is pragmatic; it comes into existence for the sake of...”
– Lloyd Bitzer: The Rhetorical Situation
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“Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say...”
– Emil Cioran: The New Gods
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“To inform a traveler respecting the place of his ultimate destination, is not to...”
– John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism
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“Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and...”
– Ch’ing Yuan, as quoted by Arthur C. Danto in The Artworld
3 tags
1 tag
June 2010
3 posts
5 tags
“e tekhne mimeitai ten physin – This phrase is falsely rendered as “Art is an...”
– James Joyce, 27 March, 1903, Paris
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“Change is faster and slower. But time is not. For the slow and the fast are...”
– Aristotle: Physics
2 tags
May 2010
4 posts
2 tags
Willard Van Orman Quine wrote his doctoral thesis on a 1927 Remington typewriter, which he used ever since. However, he “had an operation on it” to change a few keys to accommodate special symbols. “I found I could do without the second period, the second comma – and the question mark.”
“You don’t miss the question mark?”
“Well, you see, I deal in certainties.”
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“Einstein stated that a theory’s truth can never be proved, as future experience...”
– Malachi Haim Hacohen: Karl Popper – The Formative Years 1902–1945. Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
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“The experience of the agreement between the meaning and what is itself present,...”
– Edmund Husserl: Introduction to the Logical Investigations (translated by P.J. Bossert and C.H. Peters)
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April 2010
4 posts
3 tags
“Individual beliefs, intentions, doubts and desires owe their identities in part...”
– Donald Davidson: A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind
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“Our nature is so constituted that our intuition can never be other than...”
– Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
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“deconstruction n. not what you think: the experience of the impossible: what...”
– Nicholas Royle: ‘What is Deconstruction?’
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“If it made sense to say that time flows then it would make sense to ask how fast...”
– Huw Price: Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point. New Directions for the Physics of Time.
March 2010
30 posts
4 tags
“I believe that philosophers should continue to discuss the proper aim of social...”
– Karl Popper: Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
2 tags
“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally...”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus