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2 weeks ago

The standard that I always come back to is the health of the world, which is the same as our own personal health. We can't distinguish our health from the health of everything else. And we know enough from the ecologists now to know that health is a very complex and un-understandable complexity of relationships that makes the world whole.

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2 months 3 weeks ago

Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?... I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from their own experience.

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Letter to Mary Clarke Mohl (13 Dec 1861), published in Florence Nightingale on Women, Medicine, Midwifery and Prostitution: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (2005), Volume 8, edited by Lynn McDonald, p. 84
3 months 6 days ago

Coleridge said that every work of art must have about it something not understood to obtain its full effect.

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p. 202
1 month 3 weeks ago

Philosophy is said to have taken the 'linguistic turn' in this century. One hundred years ago, a philosopher would think in terms of mind, spirit, experience, consciousness; now the by-word is language.

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Chapter 2, Metaphysics and Metaphor, p. 26
2 months 4 weeks ago

As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing.

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5 months 4 days ago

To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.

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3 months 1 day ago

There is nothing truly real, save that which feels, suffers, pities, loves and desires, save consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

We have now completed both the spiritual and the temporal government, that is, the divine and the paternal authority and obedience. But here now we go forth from our house among our neighbors to learn how we should live with one another, every one himself toward his neighbor. Therefore God and government are not included in this commandment nor is the power to kill, which they have taken away. For God has delegated His authority to punish evil-doers to the government instead of parents, who aforetime (as we read in Moses) were required to bring their own children to judgment and sentence them to death. Therefore, what is here forbidden is forbidden to the individual in his relation to any one else, and not to the government.

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[The Large Catechism] by Martin Luther, Translated by F. Bente and W.H.T. Dau Published in: Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Ev. Lutheran Church (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921) pp. 565-773,
3 months 1 week ago

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

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Introduction
4 months 2 weeks ago

For want of the apparatus of propositional functions, many logicians have been driven to the conclusion that there are unreal objects. It is argued, e.g., by Meinong, that we can speak about "the golden mountain," "the round square," and so on; we can make true propositions of which these are the subjects; hence they must have some kind of logical being, since otherwise the propositions in which they occur would be meaningless. In such theories, it seems to me, there is a failure of that feeling for reality which ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies. Logic, I should maintain, must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can; for logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and general features.

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Ch. 16: Descriptions
4 months 2 weeks ago

Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.

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Good-bye, st. 1
1 month 1 week ago

We do not have and cannot have any means of discovering whether or not we are carried along in a uniform motion of translation.

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L'état actuel et l'avenir de la physique mathematique
2 weeks 1 day ago

Profound and incommensurable is the worth of this flowing world: God clings to it and ascends, God feeds upon it and increases.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

But plants, though they have not powers of perception, yet, as they have life, certainly approach very nearly to those things which are endowed with sentient faculties. What then is so completely insensible as stony substance? yet even in this, there appears to be a desire of union. Thus the loadstone attracts iron to it, and holds it fast in its embrace, when so attracted. Indeed, the attraction of cohesion, as a law of love, takes place throughout all inanimate nature.

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1 month 3 weeks ago

For Leopardi evil is integral to the way the world works; but when he talks of evil he does not mean any kind of malign agency of the sort that Gnostics imagined. Evil is the suffering that is built into the scheme of things. 'What hope is there when evil is ordinary?' he asks. 'I mean, in an order where evil is necessary?' These rhetorical questions show why Leopardi had no interest in projects of revolution and reform. No type of human action - least of all the harlequinade of politics - could fundamentally alter a world in which evil was ordinary.

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The Faith of Puppets: Leopardi and the Souls of Machines (p.35-6)
4 months 2 weeks ago

To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?

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Théorie des peines et des récompenses (1811); translation by Richard Smith, The Rationale of Reward, J. & H. L. Hunt, London, 1825, Bk. 3, Ch. 1

The Catholic faith, I now realized could be maintained without presumption. This was especially true after I had heard one or two parts of the Old Testament explained allegorically, whereas before this, when I had interpreted them literally, they had killed me spiritually.

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A. Outler, trans. (Dover: 2002), Book 5, Chapter 14, p. 81.
2 months 1 week ago

New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.

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(p. 47)
4 months 3 weeks ago

There are four classes of Idols which beset men's minds. To these for distinction's sake I have assigned names - calling the first class, Idols of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market-Place; the fourth, Idols of the Theater.

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Aphorism 39
4 months 2 weeks ago

The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world "God" is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word "world".

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On Pantheism as quoted in Faiths of Famous Men in Their Own Words (1900) by John Kenyon Kilbourn; also in Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays (2007), p. 40
4 months 2 weeks ago

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

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4 months 2 weeks ago

...happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds.

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Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785), Second Section.

Within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent.

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Ch.2, p. 73
4 months 2 weeks ago

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

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Ch. 1: Introductory
4 weeks 1 day ago

Octavia lost Marcellus, whom both his father-in-law and his uncle had begun to depend upon, and to place upon his shoulders the weight of the empire - a young man of keen intelligence and firm character, frugal and moderate in his desires to an extent which deserved especial admiration in one so young and so wealthy, strong to endure labour, averse to indulgence, and able to bear whatever burden his uncle might choose to lay, or I may say to pile upon his shoulders. Augustus had well chosen him as a foundation, for he would not have given way under any weight, however excessive.

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3 months ago

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

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p. 7
2 months 2 weeks ago

The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.

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Sevastopol in May (1855), Ch. 16
4 months 1 week ago

I do not overlook the fact that there are irrationalists who love mankind, and that not all forms of irrationalism engender criminality. But I hold that he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens up the way for those who rule by hate. (Socrates, I believe, saw something of this when he suggested that mistrust or hatred of argument is related to mistrust or hatred of man).

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Vol. 2, Ch. 24 "Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason"
2 months 3 weeks ago

Economic man deals with the "real world" in all its complexity. Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastic simplified model... He makes his choices using a simple picture of the situation that takes into account just a few of the factors that he regards as most relevant and crucial.

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p. xxix; As cited in: Jesper Simonsen (1994) Administrative Behavior: How Organizations can be Understood in Terms of Decision Processes. Roskilde Universitet.
1 month 2 weeks ago

Heresy is a set of opinions "at variance with established or generally received principles." In this sense, heresy is the price of all originality and innovation.

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1 month 1 week ago

The so-called communism of capital, that is, its drive toward an ever more extensive socialization of labor, points ambiguously toward the communism of the multitude.

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1 month 5 days ago

Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or smoot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it.

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3 weeks 3 days ago

Unfortunately... the philosophy of Aristotle laid it down as a principle, that the celestial motions were regulated by laws proper to themselves, and bearing no affinity to those which prevail on earth. By thus drawing a broad and impassable line of separation between celestial and terrestrial mechanics, it placed the former altogether out of the pale of experimental research, while it at the same time impeded the progress of the latter by the assumption of principles respecting natural and unnatural motions, hastily adopted from the most superficial and cursory and remark, undeserving even the name of observation. Astronomy therefore continued for ages a science of mere record, in which theory had no part, except in so far as it attempted to conciliate the inequalities of the celestial motions with that assumed law of uniform circular revolution which was alone considered consistent with the perfection of the heavenly mechanism.

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Ch.3 Of Cosmical Phenomena
1 week 5 days ago

It is permitted to modern philosophy, all swollen up with Bacon's venom, to repeat to us to satiety, to disgust, to nausea, that we make God similar to man; we will reply as many times that is not quite the same thing to say that a man resembles his portrait or that his portrait resembles him.

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p. 293
2 months 2 weeks ago

One might expect that a consideration of grievability pertains only to those who are dead, but my contention is that grievability is already operative in life, and that it is a characteristic attributed to living creatures, marking their value within a differential scheme of values and bearing directly on the question of whether or not they are treated equally and in a just way. To be grievable is to be interpellated in such a way that you know your life matters; that the loss of your life would matter; that your body is treated as one that should be able to live and thrive, whose precarity should be minimized, for which provisions for flourishing should be available. The presumption of equal grievability would be not only a conviction or attitude with which another person greets you, but a principle that organizes the social organization of health, food, shelter, employment, sexual life, and civic life.

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p. 59
1 week 6 days ago

To prevent government from becoming corrupt and tyrannous, its organization and methods should be as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it should be kept as close to the people and as directly within their control as may be.

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Ch. 17 : The Functions of Government
3 months 1 week ago

I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

There has been a general trend in recent times toward a Unitarian mythology and the worship of one God. This is the tendency which it is customary to regard as spiritual progress. On what grounds? Chiefly, so far as one can see, because we in the Twentieth Century West are officially the worshippers of a single divinity. A movement whose consummation is Us must be progressive. Quod erat demonstrandum.

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"One and Many," p. 16
2 months 3 weeks ago

The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.

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"Psychoanalyse und Soziologie" (1929); published as "Psychoanalysis and Sociology" as translated by Mark Ritter, in Critical Theory and Society : A Reader (1989) edited by S. E. Bronner and D. M. Kellner
3 months 1 week ago

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

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4 months 4 days ago

Whoever cultivates the golden mean avoids both the poverty of a hovel and the envy of a palace.

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Book II, ode x, line 5
1 month 1 week ago

It always seems to me extreme rashness on the part of some when they want to make human abilities the measure of what nature can do. On the contrary, there is not a single effect in nature, even the least that exists, such that the most ingenious theorists can arrive at a complete understanding of it. This vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished, would recognize that of the infinity of other truths he understands nothing.

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Day One
2 months 2 weeks ago

You need to know enough philosophy so that the methods of logical analysis are available to you to be used as a tool. One of the most depressing things about educated people today is that so few of them, even among professional intellectuals, are able to follow the steps of a simple logical argument.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only.

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Chapter III, Part V, p. 1032 (Last Page).
4 months 2 weeks ago

A great stock, though with small profits, generally increases faster than a small stock with great profits. Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have a little, it is often easier to get more. The great difficulty is to get that little.

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Chapter IX, p. 111.
3 months 2 weeks ago

The tyranny of Mrs. Grundy is worse than any other tyranny we suffer under.

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On Manners and Fashion

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