Skip to main content

Main navigation

☰ ˟
  • Home
  • Articulation
  • Contact
  • Shop
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 day ago
Chinese script is not visual but...

Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(p. 72)
Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
1 month 5 days ago
We do not have to love...

We do not have to love one another to be obligated to build a world in which all lives are sustainable. The right to persist can only be understood as a social right, as the subjective instance of a social and global obligation we bear toward one another.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 64
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 day ago
Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed...

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
1 month 3 weeks ago
Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in...

Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 50
Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
2 months 3 weeks ago
Lamachus chid a captain for a...

Lamachus chid a captain for a fault; and when he had said he would do so no more, "Sir," said he, "in war there is no room for a second miscarriage." Said one to Iphicrates, "What are ye afraid of?" "Of all speeches," said he, "none is so dishonourable for a general as 'I should not have thought of it.'"

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
52 Iphicrates
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 4 days ago
Real life is, to most men,...

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months 4 days ago
First of all, this prince is...

First of all, this prince is an idiot, and, secondly, he is a fool--knows nothing of the world, and has no place in it.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part 4, Chapter 5
Philosophical Maxims
Publilius Syrus
Publilius Syrus
1 month 1 day ago
It is a consolation to the...

It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Maxim 995
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
3 months 1 week ago
Only charity admitteth no excess. For...

Only charity admitteth no excess. For so we see, aspiring to be like God in power, the angels transgressed and fell.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book II, xxii
Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
1 month 4 weeks ago
It is terrible to see how...

It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction ... in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
How to make our ideas clear, Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
4 months ago
The absurd is the essential concept...

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
3 months 5 days ago
It is dangerous…

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1752) Fontenelle Note: The most frequently attributed variant of this quote is: It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2 months 4 days ago
The formula 'two plus two equals...

The formula 'two plus two equals five' is not without its attractions.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part 1, Chapter 9 (tr. ?)
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
4 weeks 1 day ago
You contain a trillion copies of...

You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
2 months 3 days ago
What man calls Absolute Being, his...

What man calls Absolute Being, his God, is his own being. The power of the object over him is therefore the power of his own being. Thus, the power of the object of feeling is the power of feeling itself; the power of the object of reason is the power of reason itself; and the power of the object of will is the power of will itself.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 102
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
3 months 2 days ago
Friendship is the greatest of worldly...

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Letter to Arthur Greeves (29 December 1935) - in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963) (1979), p. 477
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
3 months 5 days ago
All men are liable to error;...

All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book IV, Ch. 20, sec. 17
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
3 months 6 days ago
Human reason is by nature architectonic....

Human reason is by nature architectonic.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
B 502
Philosophical Maxims
Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas
1 month 4 weeks ago
The theory of transparency was set...

The theory of transparency was set up in reaction to the theory of mental images, of an inner tableu which the perception of an object would leave in us. In imagination our gaze always goes outward, but imagination modifies and neutralizes the gaze: the real world appears in it as it were between parenthesis or quote marks.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 134
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 4 weeks ago
What we are destroying is nothing...

What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
§ 118
Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
1 month 3 weeks ago
Master, we saw one casting out...

Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us. But Jesus said, Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me. For he that is not against us is on our part.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Mark 9:38-40 (KJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
2 months 1 week ago
Life itself is but the shadow...

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and the light but the shadow of God.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Ch. 4
Philosophical Maxims
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
3 weeks 5 days ago
A novel is balanced between a...

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Nobel Prize lecture
Philosophical Maxims
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
2 weeks 2 days ago
We shall have to share out...

We shall have to share out the fruits of technology among the whole of mankind. The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten. After all, who is the producer? Man is a social animal, and the immediate producer has been helped to produce by the whole structure of society, beginning with his own education.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Surviving the Future (1971; Oxford UP, 1972) p. 95
Philosophical Maxims
Novalis
Novalis
2 months 1 day ago
The seat of the soul is...

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 day ago
Since Sputnik, the earth has been...

Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 months 4 weeks ago
But ordinary language is all right....

But ordinary language is all right.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 28
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
1 month 2 weeks ago
"What I believe" is a process...

"What I believe" is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect. While it may be true that Herbert Spencer's formulation of liberty is the most important on the subject, as a political basis of society, yet life is something more than formulas. In the battle for freedom, as Ibsen has so well pointed out, it is the struggle for, not so much the attainment of, liberty, that develops all that is strongest, sturdiest and finest in human character.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 day ago
Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had...

Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(p. 180)
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 2 weeks ago
In all philosophic theory there is...

In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed creativity; and [[God] is its primordial, non-temporal accident. In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed The Absolute. In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, eminent reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 2.
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
1 month 1 day ago
The stock market was created by...

The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(p. 106)
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay
3 weeks 1 day ago
At last I have attained true...

At last I have attained true glory. As I walked through Fleet Street the day before yesterday, I saw a copy of Hume at a bookseller's window with the following label: "Only 2l. 2s. Hume's History of England in eight volumes, highly valuable as an introduction to Macaulay." I laughed so convulsively that the other people who were staring at the books took me for a poor demented gentleman.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Alas for poor David! Journal entry (8 March 1849), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume II (1876), p. 253
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
3 months 3 days ago
That men do not learn very...

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"A Case of Voluntary Ignorance" in Collected Essays, 1959
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
4 months 6 days ago
One may certainly admire man as...
One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.
0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
3 months 1 week ago
No fixed capital can yield any...

No fixed capital can yield any revenue but by means of a circulating capital.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Chapter I, p. 311.
Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
3 months 1 week ago
Methinks I am like a man,...

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Part 4, Section 7
Philosophical Maxims
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
3 months 2 days ago
If a given science accidentally reached...

If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
p. 55
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
3 months 3 weeks ago
Man reaches the highest point of...

Man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows him not, inasmuch as he knows that that which is God transcends whatsoever he conceives of him.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
q. 7, art. 5, ad 14
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
3 months 4 days ago
I now saw, that a science...

I now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate. It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared, that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the method of philosophising in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing-up of effects.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
(pp. 160-161)
Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
3 months 5 days ago
Of all the ways whereby children...

Of all the ways whereby children are to be instructed, and their manners formed, the plainest, easiest, and most efficacious, is, to set before their eyes the examples of those things you would have them do, or avoid; which, when they are pointed out to them, in the practice of persons within their knowledge, with some reflections on their beauty and unbecomingness, are of more force to draw or deter their imitation, than any discourses which can be made to them.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Sec. 82
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
3 months 4 days ago
Take the question whether other people...

Take the question whether other people exist. ...It is plain that it makes for happiness to believe that they exist - for even the greatest misanthropist would not wish to be deprived of the objects of his hate. Hence the belief that other people exist is, pragmatically, a true belief. But if I am troubled by solipsism, the discovery that a belief in the existence of others is 'true' in the pragmatist's sense is not enough to allay my sense of loneliness: the perception that I should profit by rejecting solipsism is not alone sufficient to make me reject it. For what I desire is not that the belief in solipsism should be false in the pragmatic sense, but that other people should in fact exist. And with the pragmatist's meaning of truth, these two do not necessarily go together. The belief in solipsism might be false even if I were the only person or thing in the universe.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"William James's Conception of Truth" , published in Philosophical Essays, London, 1910
Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
3 months 5 days ago
In our monogamous part of the...

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Vol. 2, Ch. 27, § 370 Variant translation: To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 weeks 5 days ago
The stronghold....
0
⚖0
Main Content / General
Epicurus
Epicurus
3 months 3 weeks ago
Pleasure, or pain, is not only...

Pleasure, or pain, is not only good, or evil, in itself, but the measure of what is good or evil, in every object of desire or aversion; for the ultimate reason why we pursue one thing, and avoid another, is because we expect pleasure from the former, and apprehend pain from the latter. If we sometimes decline a present pleasure, it is not because we are averse to pleasure itself, but because we conceive, that in the present instance, it will be necessarily connected with a greater pain. In like manner, if we sometimes voluntarily submit to a present pain, it is because we judge that it is necessarily connected with a greater pleasure.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
2 months 4 days ago
A man full of warm, speculative...

A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
1 month 2 weeks ago
There is a certain kind of...

There is a certain kind of morality which is even more alien to good and evil than amorality is.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"The responsibility of writers," p. 169
Philosophical Maxims
Epictetus
Epictetus
3 months 2 weeks ago
In a word, neither death, nor...

In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Book I, ch. 11,33.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
1 month 1 week ago
But it is not to be...

But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions: since the Comets range over all parts of the heavens, in very eccentric orbits. For by that kind of motion they pass easily through the orbs of the Planets, and with great rapidity; and in their aphelions, where they move the slowest, and are detain'd the longest, they recede to the greatest distances from each other, and thence suffer the least disturbance from their mutual attractions.

0
⚖0
Philosophical Maxims
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
1 month 2 weeks ago
Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness...

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
Philosophical Maxims
David Pearce
David Pearce
1 week 5 days ago
The negative utilitarian might reply that...

The negative utilitarian might reply that this formulation of the problem is misleading. We do not live in a notional world where only a pinprick, minor pains, or even just "mild" suffering exists. In the real world, frightful horrors as well as humdrum malaise occur every day. The intensity of suffering is sometimes so dreadful that its victims are prepared to destroy themselves to bring their torment to an end. Each year, some 800,000 people across the planet kill themselves while in the grip of suicidal despair. Tens of millions of people are severely depressed or suffer chronic neuropathic pain. By way of contrast, the genteel conventions of an ethics seminar in academic philosophy, or the scholarly technicalities of a journal article, simply fail to come to terms with the enormity of what's at stake. To talk of a "pinprick" is to trivialise the NU ethical stance.

0
⚖0
▼ Source
source
"The Pinprick Argument", BLTC Research, 2005
Philosophical Maxims
  • Load More

User login

  • Create new account
  • Reset your password

Social

☰ ˟
  • Main Feed
  • Philosophical Maxims

Civic

☰ ˟
  • Propositions
  • Issue / Solution

Who's new

  • Søren Kierkegaard
  • Jesus
  • Friedrich Nietzsche
  • VeXed
  • Slavoj Žižek

Who's online

There are currently 0 users online.

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia