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4 months 4 weeks ago

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

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"Innovation is obsolete", Evergreen review, Volume 15, Issues 86-94, Grove Press, 1971, p. 64
6 months 3 weeks ago

I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails - simply in virtue of our mental concepts - that the system is conscious.

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"Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem," Royal Institute of Philosophy annual lecture, given in London on February 18, 1998, published in Philosophy vol. 73 no. 285, July 1998, pp 337-352, Cambridge University Press, p. 337.
7 months 1 week ago

The Law continues to exist and to function. But it no longer exists for me.

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Chapter 2, Verse 19
4 months 2 weeks ago

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

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Letter to H.S. Randall, author of a Life of Thomas Jefferson
7 months 1 week ago

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

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Book II, xxii
5 months 2 weeks ago

Time begins to emit a scent when it gains duration; when it is given a narrative or deep tension; when it gains depth and breadth, even space.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

"He was a man who looked at what ought to be done, not to the reputation which is got by a man's acts."
- Marcus Aurelius

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#philosophy #quotes #CivilSimian #UniversalHumanism

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7 months 4 days ago

Want keeps pace with dignity. Destitute of the lawful means of supporting his rank, his dignity presents a motive for malversation, and his power furnishes the means.

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The Rationale of Reward, 1811
7 months 4 weeks ago

I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

The dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading. There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the "object," without risking- which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught- the addition of some new thread.

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Plato's Pharmacy
5 months 3 weeks ago

The application of scientific formulations of the principle of probability statistically determined is thus a logical corollary of the principle already stated, that the subject matter of scientific findings is relational, not individual. It is for this reason that it is safe to predict the ultimate triumph of the statistical doctrine.

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6 months 3 weeks ago

If things emerged from a spaceship which we could not be sure were machines or conscious beings, what we were wondering about would have an answer even if the things were so different from anything we were familiar with that we could never discover it. It would depend on whether there was something it was like to be them, not on whether behavioral similarities warranted our saying so. ... [W]e need ... to ask whether experience is present in [the] alien thing[s], ... whether there is something it is like to be them, and ... the answer to that question is what determines whether they are conscious.

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"Panpsychism" (1979), pp. 191-193.
3 months 4 weeks ago

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

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Ch. VI: "Some Necessary Iconoclasm", p. 168.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

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7 months 5 days ago

By this means all knowledge degenerates into probability; and this probability is greater or less, according to our experience of the veracity or deceitfulness of our understanding, and according to the simplicity or intricacy of the question.

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Part 4, Section 1
7 months 4 days ago

Beings who are so uniquely constituted must necessarily express themselves in other ways than ordinary men. It is impossible that with souls so differently modified, they should not carry over into the expression of their feelings and ideas the stamp of those modifications.

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First Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
4 months 3 weeks ago

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

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Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882).
5 months 3 weeks ago

There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright.

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5 months 1 day ago

To recognize this clearly is enough to drive a man out of his senses or to make him shoot himself. And this is just what does happen, and especially often among military men. A man need only come to himself for an instant to be impelled inevitably to such an end.

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Chapter V, Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience
3 months 1 week ago

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

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As quoted in Pearls of Wisdom: A Harvest of Quotations From All Ages (1987) by Jerome Agel and Walter D. Glanze, p. 46.
7 months 4 days ago

If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds either of advantage to himself.

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4 months 4 weeks ago

Necessity gives the law without itself acknowledging one.

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Maxim 444
2 months 3 weeks ago

As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents... I congratulate you on the great successes of your life's work.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

We should be clear that neither genuine religious nor genuine moral impulses will ever be expressed in terms that tie the two essentially together. If you view religion as necessary for ethics, you've reduced us to the ethical level of 4 year olds. "If you follow these commandments you'll go to heaven, if you don't' you'll burn in hell" is just a spectacular version of the carrots and sticks with which you raise your children.

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3 months 2 weeks ago

If historical experience could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.

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Chapter XV. The Market, § 4 The Scope and Method of Catallactics
6 months 3 weeks ago

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

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Journal entry (12 October 1916), p. 84e
7 months 3 days ago

As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.

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Vol. 2 "On Books and Writing" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
7 months 4 weeks ago

I shall have to test the theory of my father Parmenides, and contend forcibly that after a fashion not-being is and on the other hand in a sense being is not. For unless these statements are either disproved or accepted, no one who speaks about false words, or false opinion whether images or likenesses or imitations or appearances about the arts which have to do with them, can ever help being forced to contradict himself and make himself ridiculous.

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3 months 1 day ago

The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so monstrous and inconceivable, as to shock reasonable thinkers, to revolt them against the whole, and drive them rashly to pronounce its founder an impostor.

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Letter to w:Timothy Pickering, Esq., 27 February 1821
3 months 3 weeks ago

Our English careers to born genius are twofold. There is the silent or unlearned career of the Industrialisms, which are very many among us; and there is the articulate or learned career of the three professions, Medicine, Law (under which we may include Politics), and the Church. Your born genius, therefore, will first have to ask himself, Whether he can hold his tongue or cannot? True, all human talent, especially all deep talent, is a talent to do, and is intrinsically of silent nature; inaudible, like the Sphere Harmonies and Eternal Melodies, of which it is an incarnated fraction.

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As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.

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Inès, describing her path to Hell, Act 1, sc. 5
5 months 4 weeks ago

The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!

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Fragment No. 114
3 months 2 weeks ago

There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.

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7 months 2 days ago

The world is full of conflicts; and, overshadowing all minor conflicts, the titanic struggle between Communism and anti-Communism. Almost everybody who is politically conscious has strong feelings about one or more of these issues; but we want you, if you can, to set aside such feelings and consider yourselves only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire. We shall try to say no single word which should appeal to one group rather than to another. All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation...

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7 months 4 weeks ago

The greatest saving one can make in the order of thought is to accept the unintelligibility of the world and to pay attention to man.

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7 months 3 weeks ago

Sincerity becomes apparent. From being apparent, it becomes manifest. From being manifest, it becomes brilliant. Brilliant, it affects others. Affecting others, they are changed by it. Changed by it, they are transformed. It is only he who is possessed of the most complete sincerity that can exist under heaven, who can transform.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

The characteristic activity of science is not construction, but induction. The more often something has occurred in the past, the more certain that it will in all the future. Knowledge relates solely to what is and to its recurrence. New forms of being, especially those arising from the historical activity of man, lie beyond empiricist theory. Thoughts which are not simply carried over from the prevailing pattern of consciousness, but arise from the aims and resolves of the individual, in short, all historical tendencies that reach beyond what is present and recurrent, do not belong to the domain of science.

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p. 144.
5 months 3 weeks ago

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

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7 months 4 weeks ago

Can one be a saint without God?, that's the problem, in fact the only problem, I'm up against today.

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5 months 2 weeks ago

We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions - perhaps so that we could believe in them.

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Niebla [Mist]
7 months 1 day 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"
7 months 1 week ago

It is manifest that there is no danger at all in the proportion or quantity of knowledge, how large soever, lest it should make it swell or out-compass itself; no, but it is merely the quality of knowledge, which, be it in quantity more or less, if it be taken without the true corrective thereof, hath in it some nature of venom or malignity, and some effects of that venom, which is ventosity or swelling. This corrective spice, the mixture whereof maketh knowledge so sovereign, is charity, which the Apostle immediately addeth to the former clause; for so he saith, "Knowledge bloweth up, but charity buildeth up".

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Book I
6 months 3 weeks ago

You won't - I really believe - get too much out of reading it. Because you won't understand it; the content will seem strange to you. In reality, it isn't strange to you, for the point is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I'll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.

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On his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker (1919), published in Wittgenstein : Sources and Perspectives (1979) by C. Grant Luckhard

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