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Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
5 months 3 weeks ago
Such arguments ill become us, since...

Such arguments ill become us, since the time of reformation came, under Gospel light. All distinctions of nations, and privileges of one above others, are ceased; Christians are taught to account all men their neighbours; and love their neighbours as themselves; and do to all men as they would be done by; to do good to all men; and Man-stealing is ranked with enormous crimes. Is the barbarous enslaving our inoffensive neighbours, and treating them like wild beasts subdued by force, reconcilable with all these Divine precepts? Is this doing to them as we would desire they should do to us? If they could carry off and enslave some thousands of us, would we think it just?-One would almost wish they could for once; it might convince more than Reason, or the Bible.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
5 months 2 weeks ago
Don't get involved in partial problems,...

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem.

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Philosophical Maxims
Max Scheler
Max Scheler
4 months 2 weeks ago
At one time in his life...

At one time in his life the apostate radically changes his political, religious or philosophical convictions by taking up all possible means of argumentation against that which he formerly held to be true, and lives now for the sake of its negation. His new ideas and opinions consist in continuous acts of revenge on his spiritual past.

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Manfred Frings, Max Scheler (1996), p. 60
Philosophical Maxims
Aristotle
Aristotle
6 months 3 weeks ago
Now the mass of mankind are...

Now the mass of mankind are plainly... choosing a life like that of brute animals...

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Philosophical Maxims
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
4 months 1 week ago
At the deepest level, the desire...

At the deepest level, the desire for complete union with God exhibits a narcissistic structure.

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Philosophical Maxims
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo
6 months 1 week ago
But it isn't just a matter...

But it isn't just a matter of faith, but of faith and works. Each is necessary. For the demons also believe you heard the apostle and tremble (Jas 2:19); but their believing doesn't do them any good. Faith alone is not enough, unless works too are joined to it: Faith working through love (Gal 5:6), says the apostle.

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16A:11:2
Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
5 months 3 weeks ago
Revolutions are the locomotives of history....

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

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Chapter 3, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, 1850
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 3 weeks ago
The priests have so disfigured the...

The priests have so disfigured the simple religion of Jesus that no one who reads the sophistications they have engrafted on it, from the jargon of Plato, of Aristotle & other mystics, would conceive these could have been fathered on the sublime preacher of the sermon on the mount.

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Letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (13 October 1815). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11, p. 492
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 3 weeks ago
Rememberest the gods, and that they...

Rememberest the gods, and that they wish not to be flattered, but wish all reasonable beings to be made like themselves; and... rememberest that what does the work of a fig-tree is a fig-tree, and that what does the work of a dog is a dog, and that what does the work of a bee is a bee, and that what does the work of a man is a man.

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X, 8
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 2 weeks ago
History shows that the thinkers who...

History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.

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Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
1 month 3 weeks ago
And finally remember that nothing harms...

And finally remember that nothing harms him who is really a citizen, which does not harm the state; nor yet does anything harm the state which does not harm law [order]; and of these things which are called misfortunes not one harms law. What then does not harm law does not harm either state or citizen.

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X, 33
Philosophical Maxims
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre
5 months 3 weeks ago
The world is sacred because it...

The world is sacred because it gives an inkling of a meaning that escapes us.

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p. 280
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
3 months 3 weeks ago
Art is anything you can get...

Art is anything you can get away with.

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Philosophical Maxims
David Hume
David Hume
5 months 4 weeks ago
'Tis evident, that sympathy, or the...

Tis evident, that sympathy, or the communication of passions, takes place among animals, no less than among men. Fear, anger, courage and other affections are frequently communicated from one animal to another [...] And 'tis remarkable, that tho' almost all animals use in play the same member, and nearly the same action as in fighting; a lion, a tyger, a cat their paws; an ox his homs; a dog his teeth; a horse his heels: Yet they most carefully avoid harming their companion, even tho' they have nothing to fear from his resentment; which is an evident proof of the sense brutes have of each other's pain and pleasure.

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Part 2, Section 12
Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 months 1 week ago
Allow me, excellent Lucilius, to utter...

Allow me, excellent Lucilius, to utter a still bolder word: if any goods could be greater than others, I should prefer those which seem harsh to those which are mild and alluring, and should pronounce them greater. For it is more of an accomplishment to break one's way through difficulties than to keep joy within bounds.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
3 months 2 weeks ago
It may be that brain hardware...

It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 3 weeks ago
Opinion is like a pendulum and...

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

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Vol. 2 "Further Psychological Observations" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
4 months 2 weeks ago
A marvel that has nothing to...

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

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Philosophical Maxims
Allan Bloom
Allan Bloom
2 months 5 days ago
The old view was that delicacy...

The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros and that to speak about it in any other way would be to misunderstand it. What has disappeared is the risk and the hope of human connectedness embedded in eros. Ours is a language that reduces the longing for an other to the need for individual, private satisfaction and safety.

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pp. 13-14.
Philosophical Maxims
William Whewell
William Whewell
1 month 3 weeks ago
In the Ancient Period of Science,...

In the Ancient Period of Science, Technical Terms were formed in three different ways:-by appropriating common words and fixing their meaning;-by constructing terms containing a description;-by constructing terms containing reference to a theory.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
5 months 3 weeks ago
Boundless compassion for all living beings...

Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man's rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness. ... In former times the English plays used to finish with a petition for the King. The old Indian dramas close with these words: "May all living beings be delivered from pain." Tastes differ; but in my opinion there is no more beautiful prayer than this.

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Part III, Ch. VIII, 4, pp. 213-214 First line often paraphrased as: Compassion is the basis of all morality.
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
4 months 1 week ago
You cannot conduct war with equals;...

You cannot conduct war with equals; you cannot have militarism with free born men; you must have slaves, automatons, machines, obedient disciplined creatures, who will move, act, shoot and kill at the command of their superiors. That is preparedness, and nothing else.

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Philosophical Maxims
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
4 months 2 weeks ago
How did this division of the...

How did this division of the nations come about, what was its basis? The division is in accordance with all the previous history of the nationalities in question. It is the beginning of the decision on the life or death of all these nations, large and small. All the earlier history of Austria up to the present day is proof of this and 1848 confirmed it. Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality - the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. (Weltsturm). For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary.

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The Magyar Struggle in Neue Rheinische Zeitung (13 January 1849).
Philosophical Maxims
Peter Singer
Peter Singer
5 months 2 weeks ago
To protest about bullfighting in Spain,...

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.

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Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian
Philosophical Maxims
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
2 months 5 days ago
Proverbs about truth are well-loved in...

Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience: ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD. And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.

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Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
5 months 3 weeks ago
Men tend to have the beliefs...

Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God, and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case.

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In London Calling (1947), p. 18
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
2 months 3 weeks ago
The Path is not far from man...
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Main Content / General
Alan Watts
Alan Watts
2 months 5 days ago
There is obviously a place in...

There is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude for awe and astonishment at existence. That is also a basis for respect for existence. We don't have much of it in this culture, even though we call it materialistic. In this culture we call materialistic, today we are of course bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gases. This is of course not a materialistic culture because it has no respect for material. And respect is in turn based on wonder.

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Images of God
Philosophical Maxims
bell hooks
bell hooks
4 months 1 week ago
There will be no mass-based feminist...

There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 months 3 weeks ago
His imperial muse tosses the creation...

His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand to embody any capricious thought that is uppermost in her mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together by a subtle spiritual connection.

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p. 237
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 3 weeks ago
I can never join Calvin in...

I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did. The being described in his 5 points is not the God whom you and I acknowledge and adore, the Creator and benevolent governor of the world; but a daemon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin. Indeed I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to Atheism by their general dogma that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a god.

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Letter to John Adams (11 April 1823) (Scan at The Library of Congress)
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
6 months 3 weeks ago
The next thing you can learn...

The next thing you can learn from the woman who was a sinner, something she herself understood, is that with regard to finding forgiveness she is able to do nothing at all.

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Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
3 months 2 weeks ago
For his purposes (and mine), scientific...

For his purposes (and mine), scientific medicine is defined as the set of practices which submit themselves to the ordeal of being tested. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail tests. If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine. Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be a part of 'orthodox' medicine. Whether it will then become 'alternative' will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack (there are always sufficiently gullible patients).

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Foreword to Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations by John Diamond, Vintage, 2001.
Philosophical Maxims
Democritus
Democritus
5 months 2 weeks ago
'Tis well to restrain the wicked,...

'Tis well to restrain the wicked, and in any case not to join him in his wrong-doing.

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Philosophical Maxims
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
5 months 2 weeks ago
The painter is turning his eyes...

The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter's gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.

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Las Menias
Philosophical Maxims
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
4 months 3 weeks ago
If you were to destroy in...

If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.

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Book II, ch. 6 (trans. Constance Garnett) Pyotr Miusov, summarizing an argument made by Ivan at a social gathering
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 3 weeks ago
If, in my retirement to the...

If, in my retirement to the humble station of a private citizen, I am accompanied with the esteem and approbation of my fellow citizens, trophies obtained by the blood-stained steel, or the tattered flags of the tented field, will never be envied. The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

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Letter To the Republican Citizens of Washington county, Maryland
Philosophical Maxims
B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner
2 months 2 weeks ago
Society attacks early, when the individual...

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

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Walden Two (1948), p. 95
Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
6 months 3 days ago
Those who have handled sciences have...

Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.

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Aphorism 95
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
4 months 1 week ago
Perhaps there is nobody who would...

Perhaps there is nobody who would sacrifice his life for the sake of maintaining that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles, for such a truth does not demand the sacrifice of our life; but, on the other hand, there are many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their religious faith. Indeed, it is truer to say that martyrs make faith than that faith makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition of a theoretical truth, the process in which the will merely sets in motion our faculty of comprehension; faith is an act of the will - it is a movement of the soul towards a practical truth, towards a person, towards something that makes us not merely comprehend life, but that makes us live.

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
6 months 3 weeks ago
From the Christian point of view...

From the Christian point of view it stands firm that the truly Christian venturing requires probability.

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Philosophical Maxims
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
6 months 3 days ago
This misplacing hath caused a deficience,...

This misplacing hath caused a deficience, or at least a great improficience in the sciences themselves. For the handling of final causes, mixed with the rest in physical inquiries, hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physical causes, and given men the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, to the great arrest and prejudice of further discovery. For this I find done not only by Plato, who ever anchoreth upon that shore, but by Aristotle, Galen, and others which do usually likewise fall upon these flats of discoursing causes.

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Book VII, 7
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
3 months 4 weeks ago
I wish we could derive the...

I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles; for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain; but I hope the principles here laid down will afford some light either to that or some truer method of philosophy.

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Preface
Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
6 months 3 weeks ago
How could one speak properly about...

How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you God of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth; you who spared nothing but in love gave everything; you who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you.

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Philosophical Maxims
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
4 months 4 weeks ago
I cannot help fearing that men...

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

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Book Three, Chapter XXI.
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
1 month 3 weeks ago
Your favour of July 31, was...

Your favour of July 31, was duly received, and was read with peculiar pleasure. The sentiments breathed through the whole do honor to both the head and heart of the writer. Mine on the subject of slavery of negroes have long since been in possession of the public, and time has only served to give them stronger root. The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain, and should have produced not a single effort, nay I fear not much serious willingness to relieve them & ourselves from our present condition of moral & political reprobation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
4 months 1 week ago
Let us go on committing suicide...

Let us go on committing suicide by working among our people, and let them dream life just as the lake dreams the sky.

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Philosophical Maxims
Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
2 months 1 week ago
So near at hand is freedom,...

So near at hand is freedom, and is anyone still a slave?

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Philosophical Maxims
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
6 months 3 weeks ago
So it happens at times that...

So it happens at times that a person believes that he has a world-view, but that there is yet one particular phenomenon that is of such a nature that it baffles the understanding, and that he explains differently and attempts to ignore in order not to harbor the thought that this phenomenon might overthrow the whole view, or that his reflection does not possess enough courage and resolution to penetrate the phenomenon with his world-view.

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Philosophical Maxims
Willard van Orman Quine
Willard van Orman Quine
4 months 1 week ago
Nonbeing must in some sense be,...

Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.

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"On What There Is"
Philosophical Maxims
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