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3 months 1 week ago

There is probably no more abused a term in the history of philosophy than "representation," and my use of this term differs both from its use in traditional philosophy and from its use in contemporary cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.... The sense of "representation" in question is meant to be entirely exhausted by the analogy with speech acts: the sense of "represent" in which a belief represents its conditions of satisfaction is the same sense in which a statement represents its conditions of satisfaction. To say that a belief is a representation is simply to say that it has a propositional content and a psychological mode.

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P. 12.
1 month 4 days ago

On eroding, ecologically degraded, increasingly toxic landscapes, worked by failing or subsidy-dependent farmers and by the cheap labor of migrants, we have erected the tottering tower of "agribusiness," which prospers and "feeds the world" (incompletely and temporarily) by undermining its own foundations.

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5 months 1 week ago

I am sure, zeal or love for truth can never permit falsehood to be used in the defence of it.

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187
5 months 3 weeks ago

The texts about the future life fall into, since demonstrative scholars do not agree whether to take them in their apparent meaning or interpret them allegorically. Either is permissible. But it is inexcusable to deny the fact of a future life altogether.

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6 months 1 day ago

"My field," said Goethe, "is time." That is indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact, is the Absurd Man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.

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3 months 3 days ago

Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance.

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(p. 96)

That liberal world that emerged after 1945 led to one of the most spectacularly successful periods in human history. There was material progress. There was stability. There was human freedom. There was the flourishing of many human activities that can only take place in a liberal, and therefore free society...

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10:06
3 months 2 weeks ago

When television screens had only rare images of black folks, black people were more critically vigilant about these representations. Even when blackness was represented 'positiviely,' as it was in early black television shows like Julia, which focused on the life of a black nurse, the beauty standard was a reflection of white supremacist aesthetics.

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4 months 2 days ago

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish.

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Ch. 9
5 months 4 days ago

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg-or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

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Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
1 month 2 days ago

Providence has given the French nation precisely two instruments, two arms, so to speak, with which it stirs up the world - the French language and the spirit of proselytism that forms the essence of the nation's character.

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Chapter II, p. 20
2 months 4 weeks ago

The university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. ... But by consenting to play an active or "positive," a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society's "problems." Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes. ... Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U.S.A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people "inside" are identical in their appetites and motives with the people "outside" the university.

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p. 18
1 month 2 weeks ago

Who can be forced has not learned how to die.

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line 426; (Megara). Alternate translation: Who can be compelled does not know how to die.
3 months 3 weeks ago

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.'

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p. xi
4 months 5 days ago

Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense.

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Pt. II, Ch. 16 : The Rights of Women
4 months 1 week ago

We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life.

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Section 12
1 month 3 weeks ago

But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;-all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own.

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5 months 1 week ago

I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine's organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels.

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Descartes, Rene, L'Homme (The Treatise on Man) (1662) p. 108
5 months 4 days ago

The Guide sang: The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, And fools crying, Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun! The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run Faster for ever. The old age is done, We have new lights and see without the sun. (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

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Pilgrim's Regress 186-187
5 months 1 week ago

Love truth, but pardon error.

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1738
3 weeks 4 days ago

If A is success in life, then A = x + y + z. Work is x, play is y and z is keeping your mouth shut.

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Said to Samuel J Woolf, Berlin, Summer 1929. Cited with additional notes in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice and Freeman Dyson, Princeton UP (2010) p 230
2 months 1 day ago

To speak frankly, the family bond in the civilizee regime' causes fathers to desire the death of their children and children to desire the death of their fathers.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not.

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12:40
5 months 3 days ago

I do not believe in what is often called... 'exact terminology'... [or] in definitions... [they] do not... add to exactness... I especially dislike pretentious terminology and... pseudo-exactness concerned with it.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

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Vol. I, ch. 3
5 months 6 days ago

The rules of logic are to mathematics what those of structure are to architecture.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

Most men and women, by birth or nature, lack the means to advance in wealth and power, but all have the ability to advance in knowledge.

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As quoted in The Golden Ratio (2002) by Mario Livio
2 months 2 weeks ago

The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet.

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On the terminator gene, from the book "Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply" (2001), p.83
3 months 3 weeks ago

Not by way of reason, but only by way of love and suffering, do we come to the living God, the human God. Reason rather separates us from Him. We cannot first know Him in order that afterward we may love Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering after Him, before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God, and this love has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to seek to confine Him within the limits of our mind - that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we attempt to define Him, there rises up before us - Nothingness.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Neither art nor wisdom may be attained without learning.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

To the wild deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, preternatural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;-that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain.

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5 months 1 week ago

For instance, if you have by a lie hindered a man who is even now planning a murder, you are legally responsible for all the consequences. But if you have strictly adhered to the truth, public justice can find no fault with you, be the unforeseen consequence what it may. It is possible that whilst you have honestly answered Yes to the murderer's question, whether his intended victim is in the house, the latter may have gone out unobserved, and so not have come in the way of the murderer, and the deed therefore have not been done; whereas, if you lied and said he was not in the house, and he had really gone out (though unknown to you) so that the murderer met him as he went, and executed his purpose on him, then you might with justice be accused as the cause of his death. For, if you had spoken the truth as well as you knew it, perhaps the murderer while seeking for his enemy in the house might have been caught by neighbours coming up and the deed been prevented.

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1 month 2 days ago

How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them.

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(Hays translation) XI, 18
5 months 5 days ago

The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner "state" in which the thinking comes to pass.

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Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
3 months 3 weeks ago

It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy;

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"The Irony of Liberalism"
5 months 1 week ago

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

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Chapter X, Part II, p. 152.
5 months 3 days ago

I have assumed throughout that the persons in the original position are rational.

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Chapter III, Section 25, pg. 142
3 months 2 weeks ago

Corruption of politics has nothing to do with the morals, or the laxity of morals, of various political personalities. Its cause is altogether a material one. Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottos of which are: "To take is more blessed than to give"; "buy cheap and sell dear"; "one soiled hand washes the other." There is no hope even that woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics.

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1 month 5 days ago

I have stated that the constitutions of our several States vary more or less in some particulars. But there are certain principles in which all agree, and which all cherish as vitally essential to the protection of the life, liberty, property, and safety of the citizen:

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1 month 3 weeks ago

The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

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Bk. III, ch. 3.
4 months 2 weeks ago

As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.

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Attribution to Pythagoras by Ovid, as quoted in The Extended Circle: A Dictionary of Humane Thought (1985) by Jon Wynne-Tyson, p. 260; also in Vegetarian Times, No. 168 (August 1991), p. 4
3 months 4 days ago

Condemn me if you choose - I do that myself, - but condemn me, and not the path which I am following, and which I point out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is.

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"Letter to N.N.," quoted by Havelock Ellis in "The New Spirit" (1892) p. 226
3 months 1 day ago

It's almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic.

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2008 comment quoted in "Fury over Richard Dawkins's burka jibe as atheist tells of his 'visceral revulsion' at Muslim dress", Daily Mail
5 months 4 days ago

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

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Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
3 months 1 day ago

It's obvious that in an intelligent educated audience such as this university, I stress this university. Who saw fit to give them accreditation? 

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At Randolph-Macon Woman's College, (23 October 2006) Broadcasted by C-SPAN2

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