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3 months 2 weeks ago

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

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Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
2 months 3 weeks ago

The serpent, the king, the tiger, the stinging wasp, the small child, the dog owned by other people, and the fool: these seven ought not to be awakened from sleep.

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4 months 1 week ago

In the world of action, we know that it is disastrous to treat animals or human beings as though they were stocks and stones. Why should we suppose this treatment to be any less mistaken in the world of ideas?

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p. 21.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The recognition of the light of reality within the darkness of abstraction is a contradiction - both the affirmation and the negation of the real at one and the same time. The new philosophy, which thinks the concrete not in an abstract but a concrete way, which acknowledges the real in its reality - that is, in a way corresponding to the being of the real as true, which elevates it into the principle and object of philosophy - is consequently the truth of the Hegelian philosophy, indeed of modern philosophy as a whole.

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Part III, Section 31
4 months 3 weeks ago

When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.

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Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, p. 678
5 months 2 weeks ago

It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.

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Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, p. 734.
4 months 1 week ago

The three qualities of space and time reciprocally affect and qualify one another in experience. Space is inane save as occupied with active volumes. Pauses are holes when they do not accentuate masses and define figures as individuals. Extension sprawls and finally benumbs if it does not interact with place so as to assume intelligible distribution. Mass is nothing fixed. It contracts and expands, asserts and yields, according to its relations to other spatial and enduring things.... these are then the common properties of the matter of arts because there are general conditions without which an experience is not possible. As we saw earlier, the basic condition is felt relationship between doing and undergoing as the organism and environment interact.

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pp. 220-21
6 months 2 weeks ago

If a man knows what it is right to do, he does not require a formal reason. And a person that has been thus trained, either possesses these first principles already, or can easily acquire them.

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4 months 1 week ago

Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.

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4 months 3 weeks ago

Animals and plants are living effects of Nature; this Nature ... is none other than God in things... Diverse living things represent diverse divinities and diverse powers, which, besides the absolute being they possess, obtain the being communicated to all things according to their capacity and measure. Whence all of God is in all things (although not totally, but in some more abundantly and in others less) ... Think thus, of the sun in the crocus, in the narcissus, in the heliotrope, in the rooster, in the lion.... To the extent that one communicates with Nature, so one ascends to Divinity through Nature.

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As translated by Arthur Imerti
5 months 2 weeks ago

They are in bad faith - they are afraid - and fear, bad faith have an aroma that the gods find delicious. Yes, the gods like that, the pitiful souls.

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Act 1
4 months 2 weeks ago

Honour is the mysticism of legality.

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Aphorism 77, of Ideas as translated in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (1996) edited by Frederick C. Beiser, p. 131
5 months 2 weeks ago

We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.

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"The Sovereignty of Ethics", in The North America Review, no. 262 (May-June 1878) p. 407
5 months 2 weeks ago

What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.

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Introduction, p. 37.
4 months 3 weeks ago

You may set the Negro free, but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the European. Nor is this all we scarcely acknowledge the common features of humanity in this stranger whom slavery has brought among us. His physiognomy is to our eyes hideous, his understanding weak, his tastes low; and we are almost inclined to look upon him as a being intermediate between man and the brutes.

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Chapter XVIII.
4 months 2 weeks ago

The Whigs of this day have before them, in this Appeal, their constitutional ancestors: They have the doctors of the modern school. They will choose for themselves. The author of the Reflections has chosen for himself. If a new order is coming on, and all the political opinions must pass away as dreams, which our ancestors have worshipped as revelations, I say for him, that he would rather be the last (as certainly he is the least) of that race of men, than the first and greatest of those who have coined to themselves Whig principles from a French die, unknown to the impress of our fathers in the constitution.

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p. 476
4 months 1 week ago

"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

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1 month 2 weeks ago

All that happens is as usual and familiar as the rose in spring and the crop in summer.

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IV, 44
5 months 1 week ago

The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.

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(p4)
1 month 3 weeks ago

Nature loves to hide her secrets, and she does not suffer the hidden truth about the essential nature of the gods to be flung in naked words to the ears of the profane...

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Oration to the Cynic Heracleios
2 months 2 days ago

Nothing is hidden so much that it wouldn't be revealed through its fruit.

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2 months 1 week ago

Some economists also use the terms Fordism and pos-Fordism to mark the shift from an economy characterized by the stable-long-term employment typical of factory workers to one marked by flexible, mobile, and precarious labor relations: flexible because workers have to adapt to different tasks, mobile because workers have to move frequently between jobs, and precarious because no contracts guarantee stable, long-term employment. Whereas economic modernization, which developed Fordist labor relations, centered on the conomies of scale and larga systems of production and exchange, economic postmodernization, with its post-Fordist labor relations, develops smaller-scale, flexible systems.

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112
5 months 3 weeks 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 1 week ago

By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.

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p. 5
1 month 2 weeks ago

Many the lumps of frankincense on the same altar; one falls there early and another late, but it makes no difference.

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IV, 15
3 months 3 days ago

Most of us, shrinking from the difficulties and dangers which beset the seeker after original answers to these riddles, are contented to ignore them altogether, or to smother the investigating spirit under the featherbed of respected and respectable tradition. But, in every age, one or two restless spirits, blessed with that constructive genius, which can only build on a secure foundation, or cursed with the mere spirit of scepticism, are unable to follow in the well-worn and comfortable track of their forefathers and contemporaries, and unmindful of thorns and stumbling-blocks, strike out into paths of their own.

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Ch.2, p. 71
3 months 3 weeks ago

Our design, not respecting arts, but philosophy, and our subject, not manual, but natural powers, we consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity, levity, elastic force, the resistance of fluids, and the like forces, whether attractive or impulsive; and therefore we offer this work as mathematical principles of philosophy; for all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this - from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena...

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Preface
6 months 3 days ago

There is another form of temptation, more complex in its peril. It originates in an appetite for knowledge. From this malady of curiosity are all those strange sights exhibited in the theatre. Hence do we proceed to search out the secret powers of nature (which is beside our end), which to know profits not, and wherein men desire nothing but to know.

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X, 35
1 month 2 weeks ago

Prize that which is best in the universe; and this is that which useth everything and ordereth everything.

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V, 21
3 months 3 days ago

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

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"On the Study of Biology"
4 months 3 weeks ago

How did they meet? By chance, like everybody ... Where did they come from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Do we know where we are going?

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Prologue
6 months 1 week ago

Men all say, "We are wise"; but being driven forward and taken in a net, a trap, or a pitfall, they know not how to escape. Men all say, "We are wise"; but happening to choose the course of the Mean, they are not able to keep it for a round month.

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5 months 3 weeks ago

An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.

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1 month 2 weeks ago

Another may be more expert in casting [throwing] his opponent; but he is not more social, nor more modest, nor better disciplined to meet all that happens, nor more considerate with respect to the faults of his neighbors.

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VII, 52
5 months 2 weeks ago

A man, an adult, is precisely what [Aeneas] is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy.

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A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), Chapter 6: "Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic"
6 months 3 days ago

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

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XI, 14
4 months ago

Today, tattoos lack symbolic power. All they do is point toward the uniqueness of the bearer. The body is neither a ritual stage nor a surface of projection; rather, it is an advertising space.

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4 months 2 weeks ago

The earth with yellow pears And overgrown with roses wild Upon the pond is bent, And swans divine, With kisses drunk You drop your heads In the sublimely sobering water. But where, with winter come, am I To find, alas, the floweres, and where The sunshine And the shadow of the world? Cold the walls stand And the wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling.

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"Halves of Life"
3 months 3 days ago

The man-like Apes... have certain characters of structure and of distribution in common.

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Ch.1, p. 34
5 months 3 weeks ago

One ought to fast, watch, and labor to the extent that such activities are needed to harness the body's desires and longings; however, those who presume that they are justified by works pay no attention to the need for self-discipline but see the works themselves as the way to righteousness. They believe that if they do a great number of impressive works all will be well and righteousness will be the result. Sometimes this is pursued with such zeal that they become mentally unstable and their bodies are sapped of all strength. Such disastrous consequences demonstrate that the belief that we are justified and saved by works without faith is extremely foolish.

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p. 73
5 months 2 weeks ago

Scientists try to eliminate their false theories, they try to let them die in their stead. The believer-whether animal or man-perishes with his false beliefs.

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Epistemology Without A Knowing Subject
5 months 2 weeks ago

A man might say, with enough truth to justify a joke: "Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know." But it should be added that philosophical speculation as to what we do not yet know has shown itself a valuable preliminary to exact scientific knowledge.

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4 months 1 week ago

The historical approach, with its aim of detecting how things began and arriving from these origins at a knowledge of their nature, is certainly perfectly legitimate; but it also has its limitations. If everything were in continual flux, and nothing maintained itself fixed for all time, there would no longer be any possibility of getting to know about the world, and everything would be plunged into confusion.

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Translation J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1950) as quoted by Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) Vol. 1, p. 55.
3 months 1 day ago

I've learned from the Bhagavad Gita and other teachings of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because those are not in my hands. The context is not in your control, but your commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest commitment with a total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me always to take on the next challenge because I don't cripple myself, I don't tie myself in knots. I function like a free being. I think getting that freedom is a social duty because I think we owe it to each other not to burden each other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.

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3 months 3 weeks ago

Roughly speaking, rationality is concerned with the selection of preferred behavior alternatives in terms of some system of values, whereby the consequences of behavior can be evaluated.

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p. 84.
6 months 3 days ago

Don't hold yourselves cheap, seeing that the creator of all things and of you estimates your value so high, so dear, that he pours out for you every day the most precious blood of his only-begotten Son.

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216:3:1

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