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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2 months 1 week ago
The Being of the universe, at...

The Being of the universe, at first hidden and concealed, has no power which can offer resistance to the search for knowledge ; it has to lay itself open before the seeker - to set before his eyes and give for his enjoyment, its riches and its depths.

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p xii Ibid
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
3 months 1 week ago
My doubt goes like this: How...

My doubt goes like this: How could the Loving One have the heart to let human beings become so guilty that they got his murder on their consciences?

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
6 days ago
Further acquaintance with the labors of...

Further acquaintance with the labors of the Quakers and their works - with Fox, Penn, and especially the work of Dymond (published in 1827) - showed me not only that the impossibility of reconciling Christianity with force and war had been recognized long, long ago, but that this irreconcilability had been long ago proved so clearly and so indubitably that one could only wonder how this impossible reconciliation of Christian teaching with the use of force, which has been, and is still, preached in the churches, could have been maintained in spite of it.

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Chapter I, The Doctrine of Non-resistance to Evil by Force has been Professed by a Minority of Men from the Very Foundation of Christianity
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 months 1 week ago
No man can have society upon...

No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too.

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1833
Philosophical Maxims
George Berkeley
George Berkeley
1 month 1 week ago
In the pursuit of truth we...

In the pursuit of truth we must beware of being misled by terms which we do not rightly understand. That is the chief point. Almost all philosophers utter the caution; few observe it.

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Paragraph 1
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
2 months 1 week ago
Religion has two principal enemies, fanaticism...

Religion has two principal enemies, fanaticism and infidelity, or that which is called atheism. The first requires to be combated by reason and morality, the other by natural philosophy.

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A Discourse, &c. &c.
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
3 weeks 3 days ago
Yes perhaps, as the Sage says,...

Yes perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy of proving can be proven, nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which conduce to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge as the Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is another; and... perhaps there is an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 days ago
The farther men get from God,...

The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.

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Philosophical Maxims
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
2 months 2 weeks ago
It might be wiser for me...

It might be wiser for me to avoid Camarina and say nothing of theologians. They are a proud, susceptible race. They will smother me under six hundred dogmas. They will call me heretic and bring thunderbolts out of their arsenals, where they keep whole magazines of them for their enemies. Still they are Folly's servants, though they disown their mistress. They live in the third heaven, adoring their own persons and disdaining the poor crawlers upon earth. They are surrounded with a bodyguard of definitions, conclusions, corollaries, propositions explicit, and propositions implicit. ...They will tell you how the world was created. They will show you the crack where Sin crept in and corrupted mankind.

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as quoted by James Anthony Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered at Oxford 1893-4
Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
1 month 2 days ago
When all capital, all production, all...

When all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain.

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Philosophical Maxims
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2 months 1 week ago
With Leibnitz the extent to which...

With Leibnitz the extent to which thoughts advance is the extent of the universe; where comprehension ceases, the universe ceases, and God begins: so that later it was even maintained that to be comprehended was derogatory to God, because He was thus degraded into finitude. In that procedure a beginning is made from the determinate, this and that are stated to be necessary; but since in the next place the unity of these moments is not comprehended, it is transferred to God. God is therefore, as it were, the waste channel into which all contradictions flow: Leibnitz's Théodicée is just a popular summing up such as this.

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Third division, Chapter I. - The Metaphysics of the Understanding Alternate translation: "God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow."
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 6 days ago
They [Christians] believe that the living,...

They [Christians] believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else. And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not an impersonal thing nor a static thing-not even just one person-but a dynamic pulsating activity, a life, a kind of drama, almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance ... (The) pattern of this three-personal life is ... the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.

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Book IV, Chapter 4, "Good Infection"
Philosophical Maxims
Plutarch
Plutarch
1 month 3 weeks ago
A physician, after he had felt...

A physician, after he had felt the pulse of Pausanias, and considered his constitution, saying, "He ails nothing," "It is because, sir," he replied, "I use none of your physic."

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Of Pausanias the Son of Phistoanax
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 1 week ago
Men fear thought as they fear...

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

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pp. 178-179
Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
2 months 1 week ago
If one advances confidently in the...

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours ... In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

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p. 364
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 1 week ago
Fools have a habit of believing...

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.

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Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 weeks 2 days ago
Le prestige, qui constitue la force...

The prestige which constitutes three-fourths of might is first of all made up of that superb indifference which the powerful have for the weak, an indifference so contagious that it is communicated even to those who are its object.

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in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 168
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
4 weeks 1 day ago
Hegel's philosophy revolved about the universality...

Hegel's philosophy revolved about the universality of reason; it was a rational system with its every part (the subjective as well as the objective spheres) integrated into a comprehensive whole. Marx shows that capitalist society first put such a universality into practice.

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P. 286-287
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 weeks 6 days ago
Behind man lies the abyss, nothingness;...

Behind man lies the abyss, nothingness; the Outsider knows this; it is his business to sink claws of iron into life to grasp it tighter than the indifferent bourgeois, to build, to Will, in spite of the abyss.

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Chapter Seven, The Great Synthesis…
Philosophical Maxims
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke
1 month 1 week ago
A diversity of opinion upon almost...

A diversity of opinion upon almost every principle of politics, had indeed drawn a strong line of separation between them and some others. However, they were desirous not to extend the misfortune by unnecessary bitterness; they wished to prevent a difference of opinion on the commonwealth from festering into rancorous and incurable hostility. Accordingly they endeavoured that all past controversies should be forgotten; and that enough for the day should be the evil thereof. There is however a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. Men may tolerate injuries, whilst they are only personal to themselves. But it is not the first of virtues to bear with moderation the indignities that are offered to our country.

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Describing the Government's position at a previous time of deep division in British politics in fact over policy on America, Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), page 2
Philosophical Maxims
Adam Smith
Adam Smith
2 months 1 week ago
Even the free importation of foreign...

Even the free importation of foreign corn could very little affect the interest of the farmers of Great Britain. Corn is a much more bulky commodity than butcher's-meat. A pound of wheat at a penny is as dear as a pound of butcher's-meat at fourpence. The small quantity of foreign corn imported even in times of the greatest scarcity, may satisfy our farmers that they can have nothing to fear from the freest importation.

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Chapter II
Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
2 months 6 days ago
Most kings and priests have been...

Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.

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Chapter 6 (pp. 52-53)
Philosophical Maxims
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
2 months 1 week ago
Through laziness and cowardice a large...

Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
3 months 1 week ago
This is the mistake which I...
This is the mistake which I seem to make eternally, that I imagine the sufferings of others as far greater than they really are. Ever since my childhood, the proposition, my greatest dangers lie in pity, has been confirmed again and again.
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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1 month 6 days ago
Am I a free agent, or...

Am I a free agent, or am I merely the manifestation of a foreign power? Neither appear sufficiently well founded.By the most courageous resolve of my life am I reduced to this! what Power can save me from it, from myself?

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 24
Philosophical Maxims
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
4 weeks 1 day ago
The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics...

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.

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p. 64
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
2 months 6 days ago
Nothing is yet in its true...

Nothing is yet in its true form.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
3 days ago
Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy...

Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.

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Philosophical Maxims
John Locke
John Locke
2 months 1 week ago
He that will have his son...

He that will have his son have a respect for him and his orders, must himself have a great reverence for his son.

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Maxima debetur pueris reverentia [The greatest respect is owed to the children]. Sec. 71; Note: Here Locke quotes Juvenal
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
4 days ago
All media work us over completely....

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.

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(p. 26)
Philosophical Maxims
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
2 months 1 week ago
We are not so absurd as...

We are not so absurd as to propose that the teacher should not set forth his own opinions as the true ones and exert his utmost powers to exhibit their truth in the strongest light. To abstain from this would be to nourish the worst intellectual habit of all, that of not finding, and not looking for, certainty in any teacher. But the teacher himself should not be held to any creed; nor should the question be whether his own opinions are the true ones, but whether he is well instructed in those of other people, and, in enforcing his own, states the arguments for all conflicting opinions fairly.

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"Civilization," London and Westminster Review, April 1836
Philosophical Maxims
Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
2 weeks 6 days ago
Yet it must be acknowledged that...

Yet it must be acknowledged that there is a fundamental difference between the sexual impulse in men and women. Her need is for a lover, a protector, a father for her children. His desire is for mastery, conquest, to be allowed to use her body for his own satisfaction. He feels like a bee, burying itself in a flower, apparently doing nothing for the flower but taking its sweetness. If he loves her, then his desire is mixed with a kind of pity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
1 month 3 days ago
I love talking to simple people,...

I love talking to simple people, with common folk, if you like, and I still do it and still chat now as before with anyone, regardless of intellectual level. On the contrary, I like uneducated people much better and that is obviously my Rumanian heritage.

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Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 month 1 week ago
My cares and my...
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Main Content / General
Democritus
Democritus
1 month 3 weeks ago
No one deserves to live who...

No one deserves to live who has not at least one good-man-and-true for a friend.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
2 months 2 weeks ago
I will follow the good side...

I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it.

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Ch. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 1 week ago
Only in thought is man a...

Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.

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Letter to Lucy Donnely, November 25, 1902
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 4 days ago
I make no secret about being...

I make no secret about being Jewish ... I just think it's more important to be human and to have a human heritage; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Albert Camus
Albert Camus
3 months 3 days ago
Yes, there was an element of...

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

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Philosophical Maxims
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
2 months 2 weeks ago
I would have written…

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

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Provincial Letters: Letter XVI (4 December 1656)
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
2 months 5 days ago
Before we as individuals are even...

Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us. . . . We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.

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As quoted in Popper (1973) by Bryan Magee
Philosophical Maxims
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
3 weeks 2 days ago
If people were told: what makes...

If people were told: what makes carnal desire imperious in you is not its pure carnal element. It is the fact that you put into it the essential part of yourself-the need for Unity, the need for God - they wouldn't believe it. To them it seems obvious that the quality of imperious need belongs to the carnal desire as such. In the same way it seems obvious to the miser that the quality of desirability belongs to gold as such, and not to its exchange value.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
2 months 1 week ago
None but a coward dares to...

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

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Attributed to Russell in M. Kumar Dictionary of Quotations, p. 76, but actually said by Marshal Lannes, according to The London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences (1824), p. 664
Philosophical Maxims
Gottlob frege
Gottlob frege
4 weeks 1 day ago
A scientist can hardly meet with...

A scientist can hardly meet with anything more undesirable than to have the foundations give way just as the work is finished. I was put in this position by a letter from Mr. Bertrand Russell when the work was nearly through the press.

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Note in the appendix of Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Vol. 2) after Frege had received a letter of Bertrand Russell in which Russell had explained his discovery of, what is now known as, Russell's paradox.
Philosophical Maxims
Voltaire
Voltaire
2 months 1 week ago
He advanced toward me without moving...

He advanced toward me without moving his hat, or making the least inclination of his body; but there appeared more real politeness in the open, humane air of his countenance, than in drawing one leg behind the other, and carrying that in the hand which is made to be worn on the head. "Friend," said he, "I perceive thou art a stranger, if I can do thee any service thou hast only to let me know it." "Sir," I replied, bowing my body, and sliding one leg toward him, as is the custom with us, "I flatter myself that my curiosity, which you will allow to be just, will not give you any offence, and that you will do me the honor to inform me of the particulars of your religion." "The people of thy country," answered the Quaker, "are too full of their bows and their compliments; but I never yet met with one of them who had so much curiosity as thyself. Come in and let us dine first together."

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Voltaire's account of meeting the Quaker Andrew Pit
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Buber
Martin Buber
3 weeks 6 days ago
When we see a great man...

When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick. He overreaches himself, the work denies itself to him, the incarnation of the spirit no longer takes place, and to avoid the threat of senselessness he snatches after empty power. This sickness casts the genius on to the same level as those hysterical figures who, being by nature without power, slave for power, in order that they may enjoy the illusion that they are inwardly powerful, and who in this striving for power cannot let a pause intervene, since a pause would bring with it the possibility of self-reflection and self-reflection would bring collapse.

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p. 180
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
1 month 6 days ago
There is nothing enduring, permanent, either...

There is nothing enduring, permanent, either in me or out of me, nothing but everlasting change. I know of no existence, not even of my own. I know nothing and am nothing. Images - pictures - only are, pictures which wander by without anything existing past which they wander, without any corresponding reality which they might represent, without significance and without aim. I myself am one of these images, or rather a confused image of these images. All reality is transformed into a strange dream, without a world of which the dream might be, or a mind that might dream it. Contemplation is a dream; thought, the source of all existence and of all that I fancied reality, of my own existence, my own capacities, is a dream of that dream.

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Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 60
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
3 months 4 days ago
Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and...

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What does the scientist have to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity!

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Philosophical Maxims
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau
2 months 1 week ago
Visions are a feeble resource, you...

Visions are a feeble resource, you will say, against great adversity! Oh Sir, these visions may possibly have more reality than all those apparent goods about which men make so much ado, for they never bring a true feeling of happiness to the soul, and those who possess them are equally forced to project themselves into the future for want of finding enjoyments that satisfy them, in the present.

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Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Philosophical Maxims
John Searle
John Searle
1 week 2 days ago
I will argue that in the...

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

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Philosophical Maxims
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