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Bernard Williams
Bernard Williams
2 months 2 weeks ago
Deniers do not get their views...

Deniers do not get their views just from simple mistakes about language and truth. Rather, they believe that there is something to worry about in important areas of our thought and in traditional interpretations of those areas; they sense that it has something to do with truth; and (no doubt driven by the familiar desire to say something at once hugely general, deeply important, and reassuringly simple) they extend their worry to the notion of truth itself.

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p. 6
Philosophical Maxims
Confucius
Confucius
4 months 3 weeks ago
Men all say, "We are wise";...

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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Philosophical Maxims
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
4 months 3 days ago
The end cannot justify the means...

The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

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Ch. 1, p. 10 [2012 reprint]
Philosophical Maxims
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis
4 days ago
I am a mariner of Odysseus...

I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear.

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Toda Raba
Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
1 month 2 weeks ago
Being a planetary citizen does not...

Being a planetary citizen does not need space travel. It means being conscious that we are part of the universe and of the earth. The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that we have a duty to care for our common home.

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Philosophical Maxims
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
3 months 4 weeks ago
The aspects of things that are...

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

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§ 129
Philosophical Maxims
Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali
3 months 1 week ago
We attest that He is the...

We attest that He is the Willer of all things that are, the ruler of all originated phenomena; there does not come into the visible or invisible world anything meager or plenteous, small or great, good or evil, or any advantage or disadvantage, belief or unbelief, knowledge or ignorance, success or failure, increase or decrease, obedience or disobedience, except by His will. What He wills is, and what He does not, will not; there is not a glance of the eye, nor a stray thought of the heart that is not subject to His will. He is the Creator, the Restorer, the Doer of whatsoever He wills. There is none that rescinds His command, none that supplements His decrees, none that dissuades a servant from disobeying Him, except by His help and mercy, and none has power to obey Him except by His will.

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Ihyaa 'Ulum al-Deen. Beirut: Dar Ibn Hazm (2005), p. 107.
Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 1 day ago
Never let your sense of morals...

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

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Philosophical Maxims
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
2 months 3 weeks ago
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is...

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

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The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 43.
Philosophical Maxims
comfortdragon
comfortdragon
1 day ago
I think the devil...
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Main Content / General
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
4 months 2 weeks ago
Rules necessary for definitions. Not to...

Rules necessary for definitions. Not to leave any terms at all obscure or ambiguous without definition; Not to employ in definitions any but terms perfectly known or already explained.

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Philosophical Maxims
Allan Bloom
Allan Bloom
2 weeks ago
The highest activities are always essentially...

The highest activities are always essentially lonely and private, and these men had a robust sense of their independence and the ultimate self-sufficiency of the mind. In this they were just like Socrates. The only change they operated was to bring philosophy out of the closet into the open, instead of seeking protection behind a little wall like men in a storm. Of course, in so doing they made philosophy, on the one hand, more vulnerable to the public if the hopes of controlling the public are not fulfilled, and, on the other, put at risk that inner intransigence which is the necessary condition of the quest for truth. Not only the rewards but the new responsibilities might prove irresistible temptations to compromise.

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"Commerce and Culture," p. 290.
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 2 days ago
Frantic administration of panaceas to the...

Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the reflection that "this present" might be "the world's last night"; sober work for the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not.

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Philosophical Maxims
Judith Butler
Judith Butler
2 months 5 days ago
Although it is commonly supposed that...

Although it is commonly supposed that war making is the specific activity of nations, the blind rage that motivates war destroys the very social bonds that make nations possible. Of course, it can fortify the nationalism of a nation, producing a provisional coherence bolstered by war and enmity, but it also erodes the social relations that make politics possible. The power of destruction unleashed by war breaks social ties and produces anger, revenge, and distrust ("embitterment") such that it becomes unclear whether reparation is possible, undermining not only those relations that may have been built in the past, but also the future possibility of peaceful coexistence.

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p. 154
Philosophical Maxims
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
Just now
In the case of most pains...

In the case of most pains let this remark of Epicurus aid thee, that the pain is neither intolerable nor everlasting, if thou bear in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination…

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VII, 64
Philosophical Maxims
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor
1 day ago
FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY is getting to be...

FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly , the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life . Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.

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p. 1
Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 3 days ago
I know-as we all do-very little...

I know-as we all do-very little of the practice and the spoken and written doctrine of former times on the subject of non-resistance to evil. I knew what had been said on the subject by the fathers of the Church-Origen, Tertullian, and others-I knew too of the existence of some so-called sects of Mennonites, Herrnhuters, and Quakers, who do not allow a Christian the use of weapons, and do not enter military service; but I knew little of what had been done by these so-called sects toward expounding the question.

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Preface
Philosophical Maxims
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
2 months ago
I don't believe you until you...

I don't believe you until you tell me, do you really believe, for example, if they say they are Catholic, "Do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer, it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?" Mock them. Ridicule them. In public. Don't fall for the convention that we're all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits. Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt.

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Reason Rally, National Mall, Washington, DC, 2012-03-24 Richard Dawkins and his Foundation at the Reason Rally, YouTube, 7 April 2012
Philosophical Maxims
William James
William James
4 months 3 days ago
An act has no ethical quality...

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

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Ch. 9
Philosophical Maxims
Henri Poincaré
Henri Poincaré
3 weeks 6 days ago
Logic teaches…

Logic teaches us that on such and such a road we are sure of not meeting an obstacle; it does not tell us which is the road that leads to the desired end. For this, it is necessary to see the end from afar, and the faculty which teaches us to see is intuition. Without it, the geometrician would be like a writer well up in grammar but destitute of ideas.

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Part II. Ch. 2 : Mathematical Definitions and Education, p. 130
Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 4 weeks ago
I'd rather offer my life as...

I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

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Philosophical Maxims
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
3 weeks 5 days ago
Investigate what is….

Investigate what is, and not what pleases.

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Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt (The Attempt as Mediator of Object and Subject)
Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 2 weeks ago
To believe in God is to...

To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if he existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness.

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Philosophical Maxims
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
4 months 4 days ago
All that is solid melts into...

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

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Section 1, paragraph 18, lines 12-14.
Philosophical Maxims
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer
2 weeks ago
The thinking man must ... oppose...

The thinking man must ... oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. True manhood is too precious a spiritual good for us to surrender any part of it to thoughtlessness. p. 305; also in The Animal World of Albert Schweitzer (1950), p. 179 Variant : The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even the lowliest creature; to do so is to renounce our manhood and shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies.

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As quoted in Becoming Vegan : The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Plant-based Diet (2000) by Brenda Davis and Vesanto Melina, p. 261
Philosophical Maxims
John Dewey
John Dewey
2 months 3 weeks ago
Just because emotion is essential to...

Just because emotion is essential to that act of expression which produces a work of art, it is easy for inaccurate analysis to misconceive its mode of operation and conclude that the work of art has emotion for its significant content. One may cry out with joy or even weep upon seeing a friend from whom one has been long separated. The outcome is not an expressive object -- save to the onlooker. But if the emotion leads one to gather material that is affiliated to the mood which is aroused, a poem may result. In the direct outburst, an objective situation is the stimulus, the cause, of the emotion. In the poem, objective material becomes the content and matter of the emotion, not just its evocative occasion.

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pp. 71-72
Philosophical Maxims
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
2 months 1 day ago
America is 100% 18th Century. The...

America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.

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Letter to Ezra Pound
Philosophical Maxims
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
4 months 2 days ago
John - I'm trying to find...

John - I'm trying to find the Island in the West. Sensible - You refer, no doubt to some aesthetic experience.

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Pilgrim's Regress 77
Philosophical Maxims
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
4 months 4 days ago
Few people can be happy unless...

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.

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Attributed to Russell in Prochnow's Speakers Handbook of Epigrams and Witticisms (1955), p. 132
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
2 months 3 weeks ago
No man's error becomes his own...

No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.

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The Second Part, Chapter 26, p. 144
Philosophical Maxims
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
2 months 2 weeks ago
Needless to say, I am not...

Needless to say, I am not opposed to woman suffrage on the conventional ground that she is not equal to it. I see neither physical, psychological, nor mental reasons why woman should not have the equal right to vote with man. But that can not possibly blind me to the absurd notion that woman will accomplish that wherein man has failed. If she would not make things worse, she certainly could not make them better. To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers. Since woman's greatest misfortune has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil, her true salvation lies in being placed on earth; namely, in being considered human, and therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes. Are we, then, to believe that two errors will make a right? Are we to assume that the poison already inherent in politics will be decreased, if women were to enter the political arena?

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Philosophical Maxims
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
5 months 1 day ago
There was no denying that he...

There was no denying that he would always be conscious of the fact that an Earthman was an Earthman. He couldn't help that. That was the result of a childhood immersed in an atmosphere of bigotry so complete that it was almost invisible, so entire that you accepted its axioms as second nature. Then you left it and saw it for what it was when you looked back.

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Philosophical Maxims
Jesus
Jesus
2 months 3 weeks ago
Look at the birds of the...

Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

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Matthew 6:26 (NKJV)
Philosophical Maxims
Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt
2 days ago
Liberalism, with its contradictions and compromises,...

Liberalism, with its contradictions and compromises, existed for Donoso Cortés only in that short interim period in which it was possible to answer the question "Christ or Barabbas?" with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation.

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Philosophical Maxims
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
2 months 3 days ago
People understand the meaning of eating...

People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ...People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.

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Philosophical Maxims
Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva
1 month 2 weeks ago
Economic reforms based on the idea...

Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world, can only be maintained by the powerful grabbing the resources of the vulnerable. The resource grab that is essential for "growth" creates a culture of rape-the rape of the earth, of local self-reliant economies, and of women.

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On economic reforms in India and rape in India, from "Vandana Shiva: Our Violent Economy is Hurting Women " article in Yes Magazine
Philosophical Maxims
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4 months 3 days ago
It makes a great difference in...

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.

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p. 261
Philosophical Maxims
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
3 months 4 weeks ago
From our human experience and history,...

From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.

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Philosophical Maxims
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
2 months 4 weeks ago
It is the man of science,...

It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher. To an earlier age knowledge was power - merely that and nothing more; to us it is life and the summum bonum. Emancipation from the bonds of self, of one's own prepossessions, importunately sought at the hands of that rational power before which all must ultimately bow, - this is the characteristic that distinguishes all the great figures of nineteenth-century science from those of former periods.

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"The Century's Great Men in Science" in The 19th Century : A Review of Progress During the Past One Hundred Years in the Chief Departments of Human Activity (1901), published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Philosophical Maxims
José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset
2 months 3 weeks ago
He [the "specialist"] is one who,...

He [the "specialist"] is one who, out of all that has to be known in order to be a man of judgment, is only acquainted with one science, and even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is an active investigator. He even proclaims it as a virtue that he takes no cognisance of what lies outside the narrow territory specially cultivated by himself, and gives the name of "dilettantism" to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge.

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Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"
Philosophical Maxims
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
3 months 3 days ago
Only through blind Instinct, in which...

Only through blind Instinct, in which the only possible guidance of the Imperative is awanting, does the Power in Intuition remain undetermined; where it is schematised as absolute it becomes infinite; and where it is presented in a determinate form, as a principle, it becomes at least manifold. By the above-mentioned act of Intelligising, the Power liberates itself from Instinct, to direct itself towards Unity.

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Philosophical Maxims
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale
2 months 2 weeks ago
Give us back our suffering, we...

Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts - suffering rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paralysis! A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore!

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Philosophical Maxims
Will Durant
Will Durant
3 weeks 2 days ago
Philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous...

Philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science - problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 4 weeks ago
The need for novelty is the...

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

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Philosophical Maxims
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
2 months 4 weeks ago
At different degrees, everything is pathology,...

At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.

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Philosophical Maxims
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
2 months 2 weeks ago
But the truth is that my...

But the truth is that my work - I was going to say my mission - is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

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Philosophical Maxims
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
4 months 4 days ago
We do not directly go about...

We do not directly go about the execution of the purpose that thrills us, but shut our doors behind us, and ramble with prepared minds, as if the half were already done. Our resolution is taking root or hold on the earth then, as seeds first send a shoot downward, which is fed by their own albumen, ere they send one upwards to the light.

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Pearls of Thought (1881) p. 61
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
3 weeks 3 days ago
A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning...

A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.

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Philosophical Maxims
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
4 months 5 days ago
Whoever heard me assert that the...

Whoever heard me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.

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Quoted by Jorge Luis Borges in his essay "A History of Eternity"
Philosophical Maxims
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
1 month 2 weeks ago
So far from the posterior lobe,...

So far from the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus minor, being structures peculiar to and characteristic of man, as they have been over and over again asserted to be, even after the publication of the clearest demonstration of the reverse, it is precisely these structures which are the most marked cerebral characters common to man with the apes. They are among the most distinctly Simian peculiarities which the human organism exhibits.

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Ch.2, p. 119
Philosophical Maxims
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