Skip to main content
7 months 2 weeks ago

To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.

0
0
Source
source
A Course of Positive Philosophy (1832 - 1842) [Six volumes]
6 months 3 weeks ago

In spite of the universalistic spirit of the monotheistic Western religions and of the progressive political concepts that are expressed in the idea "that all men are created equal," love for mankind has not become a common experience. Love for mankind is looked upon as an achievement which, at best, follows love for an individual or as an abstract concept to be realized only in the future. But love for man cannot be separated from love for one individual. To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, in so far as it is divorced from love for man, can refer only to the superficial and to the accidental; of necessity it remains shallow.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 2
7 months 1 week ago

When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

0
0
Source
source
Nature
4 months 3 weeks ago

If you know that "I", in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn't exist. Then...it won't go to your head too badly, if you wake up and discover that you're God.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

0
0
Source
source
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon)
8 months 2 weeks ago

On the other hand, the cheapest form of pride is national pride; for the man affected therewith betrays a want of individual qualities of which he might be proud, since he would not otherwise resort to that which he shares with so many millions. The man who possesses outstanding personal qualities will rather see most clearly the faults of his own nation, for he has them constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool, who has nothing in the world whereof he could be proud, resorts finally to being proud of the very nation to which he belongs. In this he finds compensation and is now ready and thankful to defend, ... all the faults and follies peculiar to it.

0
0
Source
source
From 'Parerga and Paralipomena', Vol. 1, Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, 'What A Man Represents', pp. 360
8 months 3 days ago

Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, colour by convention; atoms and Void [alone] exist in reality.

0
0
Source
source
(trans. Freeman 1948), p. 92.
4 months 1 week ago

In order to be transmuted into knowledge, every perception is and must be ordered and organized into categories. The extent, however, to which we can organize and express our experience in such conceptual forms is, in turn, dependent upon the frames of reference which happen to be available at a given historical moment. The concepts which we have and the universe of discourse in which we move, together with the directions in which they tend to elaborate themselves, are dependent largely upon the historical-social situation of the intellectually active and responsible members of the group.

0
0
6 months 1 week ago

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.

0
0
Source
source
Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1. Cornhill Magazine,
6 months 3 weeks ago

The problem with all this--the problem I discussed in the first lecture--is that if the causes/background conditions distinction is fundamentally subjective, not descriptive of the world in itself, then current philosophical explanations of the metaphysical nature of reference are bankrupt.

0
0
Source
source
Lecture II: Realism and Reasonableness
4 months 1 week ago

For we carry our fate with us - and it carries us.

0
0
Source
source
(Hays translation) III, 4
7 months 2 weeks ago

And surely, he that hath taken the true Altitude of Things, and rightly calculated the degenerate state of this Age, is not like to envy those that shall live in the next, much less three or four hundred Years hence, when no Man can comfortably imagine what Face this World will carry.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

0
0
Source
source
"Rights", 1771
7 months 3 weeks ago

There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.

0
0
Source
source
As quoted in The Mystery of Matter‎ (1965) edited by Louise B. Young, p. 113
8 months 2 weeks ago

No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

It is the character of the British people, or at least of the higher and middle classes who pass muster for the British people, that to induce them to approve of any change, it is necessary that they should look upon it as a middle course: they think every proposal extreme and violent unless they hear of some other proposal going still farther, upon which their antipathy to extreme views may discharge itself. So it proved in the present instance; my proposal was condemned, but any scheme for Irish Land reform, short of mine, came to be thought moderate by comparison.

0
0
Source
source
(pp. 294-295)
6 months 3 weeks ago

It was Rudolf Carnap's dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.

0
0
Source
source
Hilary Putnam, in: James Conant, Urszula M. Zeglen (2012) Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism. p. 14
7 months 1 week ago

I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.

0
0
5 months 1 week ago

The possibility of democracy on a global scale is emerging today for the very first time.

0
0
Source
source
(xi)
9 months 1 week ago

Ideas are cheap. It's only what you do with them that counts.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.

0
0
Source
source
Letter XXVI
8 months 2 weeks ago

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Part 1.
6 months 2 weeks ago

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter 5
7 months 6 days ago

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

0
0
Source
source
Matthew 7:15 (KJV)
5 months 4 weeks ago

If a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that white substance almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as "chalk".

0
0
9 months 3 days ago

You [a disciple], shall I teach you about knowledge? What you know, you know, what you don't know, you don't know. This is true knowledge.

0
0
6 months 3 weeks ago

Whatever is merely positive is lifeless. Negativity is essential to vitality.

0
0
7 months 3 weeks ago

Reason not with him, that will deny the principal truths!

0
0
4 months 1 week ago

History has informed us that bodies of men, as well as individuals, are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.

0
0
5 months 4 days ago

We must now ask how changes of this sort can come about, considering first discoveries, or novelties of fact, and then inventions, or novelties of theory. That distinction between discovery and invention or between fact and theory will, however, immediately prove to be exceedingly artificial.

0
0
Source
source
p. 52
8 months 2 weeks ago

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

0
0
Source
source
Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
7 months 5 days ago

All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.

0
0
4 months 4 weeks ago

The old Romans had a custom which survived even into my lifetime. They would add to the opening words of a letter: "If you are well, it is well; I also am well." Persons like ourselves would do well to say. "If you are studying philosophy, it is well." For this is just what "being well" means. Without philosophy the mind is sickly.

0
0
5 months 4 days ago

Can there be a more horrible object in existence than an eloquent man not speaking the truth?

0
0
Source
source
Address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, (1866), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
6 months 3 weeks ago

There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism.

0
0
Source
source
p. 292
8 months 1 week ago

Nothing is yet in its true form.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

To this I answer: That force is to be opposed to nothing, but to unjust and unlawful force. Whoever makes any opposition in any other case, draws on himself a just condemnation, both from God and man...

0
0
Source
source
Second Treatise of Government, Ch. XVIII, sec. 204
5 months 2 weeks ago

An old fairy tale has it that science began with the rejection of superstition. In fact it was the rejection of rationalism that gave birth to scientific inquiry. Ancient and medieval thinkers believed the world could be understood by applying first principles. Modern science begins when observation and experiment come first, and the results are accepted even when what they show seems to be impossible.

0
0
Source
source
Foreword: Two Attempts to Cheat Death (pp. 5-6)
8 months 2 weeks ago

An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery.

0
0
Source
source
Vol. I, Ch. 15, Section 1, pg. 416.
8 months 3 weeks ago

As to the objection that these rules are common in the world, that it is necessary to define every thing and to prove every thing, and that logicians themselves have placed them among their art, I would that the thing were true and that it were so well known... But so little is this the case, that, geometricians alone excepted, who are so few in number that they are a single in a whole nation and long periods of time, we see no others that know it.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity.

0
0
Source
source
Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold, pp.42
8 months 1 week ago

"It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given." This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.

0
0
Source
source
Notes of 1919, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : The Duty of Genius (1990) by Ray Monk
6 months 1 week ago

Believe me, my friends, you are yet very deficient with regard to the best modes of training your children, or of arranging your domestic concerns.

0
0
8 months 1 week ago

We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and hospitals, for remote generations.

0
0
9 months 2 weeks ago

A son is a mirror in which the father sees himself reflected, and the father is a mirror in which the son sees himself as he will be in the future.

0
0
8 months 2 weeks ago

As soon as we have contrived to give our pupil an idea of the word "Useful," we have got an additional means of controlling him, for this word makes a great impression on him, provided that its meaning for him is a meaning relative to his own age, and provided he clearly sees its relation to his own well-being. This word makes no impression on your scholars because you have taken no pains to give it a meaning they can understand, and because other people always undertake to supply their needs so that they never require to think for themselves, and do not know what utility is. "What is the use of that?"

0
0
6 months 4 weeks ago

Being, in whose name Heidegger's philosophy increasingly concentrates itself, is for him-as a pure self-presentation to passive consciousness-just as immediate, just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts and the sensory data are for the positivists. In both philosophical movements thinking becomes a necessary evil and is broadly discredited. Thinking loses its element of independence. The autonomy of reason vanishes: the part of reason that exceeds the subordinate reflection upon and adjustment to pre-given data. With it, however, goes the conception of freedom and, potentially, the self-determination of human society.

0
0
Source
source
p. 9

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia