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4 months 1 week ago
I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible
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Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson, the Mind On Fire (Univ. of Calif Press 1995), p. 124
4 months 1 week ago
In spite of all humans' innate interest in the interrelatedness of all experience, long ago these world-power-structure builders learned to shunt all the bright intellectuals and the physically creative into specialist careers. The powerful reserved for themselves the far easier, because innate, comprehensive functioning. All one needs to do is to discover how self-perpetuating is this disease of specialization is to witness the inter-departmental battling for educational funds and the concomitant jealous guarding of the various specializations assigned to a department's salaried experts on each subject in any university.
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4 months 1 week ago
Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
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4 months 1 week ago
When taken as a way of modeling cognitive architecture, really does represent an approach that is quite different from that of the classical cognitive science that it seeks to replace. Classical models of the mind were derived from the structure of Turing and Von Neumann machines. They are not, of course, committed to the details of these machines as exemplified in Turing's original formulation or in typical commercial computers—only to the basic idea that the kind of computing that is relevant to understanding cognition involves operations on symbols.. In contrast, connectionists propose to design systems that can exhibit intelligent behavior without storing, retrieving, or otherwise operating on structured symbolic expressions. The style of processing carried out in such models is thus strikingly unlike what goes on when conventional machines are computing some function.
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Jerry A. Fodor, and Zenon W. Pylyshyn. "Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis." Cognition 28.1-2 (1988): 3-71.
4 months 1 week ago
Here then we may learn the fallacy of the remark... that any particular state is weak, though fertile, populous, and well cultivated, merely because it wants money. It appears that the want of money can never injure any state within itself: For men and commodities are the real strength of any community. It is the simple manner of living which here hurts the public, by confining the gold and silver to few hands, and preventing its universal diffusion and circulation. On the contrary, industry and refinements of all kinds incorporate it with the whole state, however small its quantity may be: They digest it into every vein, so to speak; and make it enter into every transaction and contract.
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Of Money (1752) as quoted in David Hume: Writings on Economics (1955, 1970) ed., Eugene Rotwein, [https://archive.org/details/writingsoneconom0000hume/page/45/mode/1up p. 45.]
4 months 1 week ago
What should a philosopher say, then, in the face of each of the hardships of life? "It was for this that I've been training myself, it was for this that I was practising."
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Book III, ch. 10, § 7.
4 months 1 week ago
After his father's death, though he was still but a youth, his aspect was so venerable, and his habits so temperate that he was honored and even reverenced by elderly men, attracting the attention of all who saw and heard him speak, creating the most profound impression. That is the reason that many plausibly asserted that he was a child of the divinity. Enjoying the privilege of such a renown, of an education so thorough from infancy, and of so impressive a natural appearance he showed that he deserved all these advantages by deserving them, by the adornment of piety and discipline, by exquisite habits, by firmness of soul, and by a body duly subjected to the mandates of reason. An inimitable quiet and serenity marked all his words and actions, soaring above all laughter, emulation, contention, or any other irregularity or eccentricity; his influence at Samos was that of some beneficent divinity. His great renown, while yet a youth, reached not only men as illustrious for their wisdom as Thales at Miletus, and Bias at Prione, but also extended to the neighboring cities. He was celebrated everywhere as the "long-haired Samian," and by the multitude was given credit for being under divine inspiration.
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Iamblichus of Chalcis in Life of Pythagoras translated by Thomas Taylor; Ch. 2: Youth, Education, Travels
4 months 1 week ago
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
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As quoted in The Beginning of the End (2004) by Peter Hershey, p. 109 | Also, as quoted in "The Relentless Rise of Science as Fun", by Jeremy Burgess, in New Scientist, Volume 143, Issues 1932-1945, originally published 1994.
4 months 1 week ago
In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.
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4 months 1 week ago
Revolutions never go backwards.
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p. 214
4 months 1 week ago
This text is oriented toward human organizations since this has been the emphasis in the practice of O.R. in business and industry.
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p. 7
4 months 1 week ago
Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.
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p. 50
4 months 1 week ago
There is an inconvenience which attends all abstruse reasoning. That it may silence, without convincing an antagonist, and requires the same intense study to make us sensible of its force, that was at first requisite for its invention. When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and 'tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attain'd with difficulty.
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Part 1, Section 1
4 months 1 week ago
The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skilful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.
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This quote is frequently attributed to Epictetus, e.g. by Brigid Delaney, [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/18/remaining-calm-in-adversity-what-stoicism-can-teach-us-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic How not to panic during the coronavirus
4 months 1 week ago
But this marvellous man in some way, whether from the knowlege he received, or from his own proper discoveries, has secured to his species benefits of a more permanent nature, and which shall outlive the revolutions of ages, and the instability of political institutions. He was a profound geometrician. The two theorems, that the internal angles of every right-line triangle are equal to two right angles, and that the square of the hypothenuse of every right angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, are ascribed to him. In memory of the latter of these discoveries he is said to have offered a public sacrifice to the Gods; and the theorem is still known by the name of the Pythagorean theorem.
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4 months 1 week ago
The Semites did not understand the variety, the plurality, the genders in God: the word goddess in Hebrew is the most horrible barbarism.
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quoted in Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.88
4 months 1 week ago
205. If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.
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4 months 1 week ago
In the Art of Peace we never attack. An attack is proof that one is out of control. Never run away from any kind of challenge, but do not try to suppress or control an opponent unnaturally. Let attackers come any way they like and then blend with them. Never chase after opponents. Redirect each attack and get firmly behind it.
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4 months 1 week ago
Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists...Emerson supported territorial expansion at any cost but would have preferred it take place without war.
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014)
4 months 1 week ago
Knowledge is a potential for a certain type of action, by which we mean that the action would occur if certain tests were run. For example, a library plus its user has knowledge if a certain type of response will be evoked under a given set of stipulations.
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p. 11
4 months 1 week ago
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
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Ch. 4
4 months 1 week ago
The heroes in paganism correspond exactly to the saints in popery, and holy dervises in MAHOMETANISM. The place of, HERCULES, THESEUS, HECTOR, ROMULUS, is now supplied by DOMINIC, FRANCIS, ANTHONY, and BENEDICT. Instead of the destruction of monsters, the subduing of tyrants, the defence of our native country; whippings and fastings, cowardice and humility, abject submission and slavish obedience, are become the means of obtaining celestial honours among mankind.
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Part X - With regard to courage or abasement
4 months 1 week ago
The Neo-Pythagoreans treated all the divisions of philosophy. In Metaphysics they held that the Unit and the (indeterminate) Two are the basis of all things. the Unit being the form, and the Two the matter. ...The Unit being the prior principle may be identified with Deity, and, as such, was thought of either as the former [creator] of indefinite matter into individual things, or, as in Neo-Platonism, as the transcendent origin of the derivative Unit and Two. Another mode of conception was to identify the numbers with the Platonic Ideas and then to think of the Unit as comprehending them in the same manner as the mind comprehends its thoughts and gives them form. In Logic the Neo-Pythagoreans were for the most part imitators of Aristotle. Their Physics was Aristotelian and Stoic. Their Anthropology was Platonic. In Ethics and Politics they merely reechoed the Academy and the Lyceum with Stoic additions. In all this Neo-Pythagoreanism has little originality.
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George Johnson, [https://books.google.com/books?id=FIpNAAAAMAAJ The Arithmetical Philosophy of Nicomachus of Gersa] (1916)
4 months 1 week ago
A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.
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p. 44e
4 months 1 week ago
My forefathers were Brahmins. They spent their lives in search of God. I am spending my life in search of Man.
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Educational Thinkers [https://books.google.com/books?id=O6Fp2zaQVVMC&pg=PA151&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false]
4 months 1 week ago
The first application of this principle [of the division of labor] must have been made in a very early stage of society; for it must soon have been apparent that more comforts and conveniences could be acquired by one man restricting his occupation to the art of making bows, another to that of building houses, a third boats, and so on. This division of labor Into trades was not, however, the result of an opinion that the general riches of the community would be increased by such an arrangement: but it must have arisen from the circumstances, of each individual so employed discovering that he himself could thus make a greater profit of his labour than by pursuing more varied occupations.
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p. 170. Ch 19. "On the division of labour"
4 months 1 week ago
Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs. His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct. Nothing is so important to him as prejudices. Let us not take this word in a bad sense. It does not necessarily mean false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, opinions adopted before any examination. Now these sorts of opinions are man’s greatest need, the true elements of his happiness, and the Palladium of empires. Without them, there can be neither worship, nor morality, nor government. There must be a state religion just as there is a state policy; or, rather, religious and political dogmas must be merged and mingled together to form a complete common or national reason strong enough to repress the aberrations of individual reason, which of its nature is the mortal enemy of any association whatever because it produces only divergent opinions.
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p. 87
4 months 1 week ago
His character does not appear more extraordinary and unusual by the mixture of so much absurdity with so much penetration, than by his tempering such violent ambition, and such enraged fanaticism with so much regard to justice and humanity.
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Volume III, Chapter LXI; referring to Oliver Cromwell
4 months 1 week ago
The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within.
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p. 91e
4 months 1 week ago
When devotion to men with an urge for new social organization replaces devotion to men with theological illumination and a way of life pleasing to God, then the actions of the innovator and his formulations are often gauged by their significance for human happiness. Behaviour is examined through the happiness it produces, which is an empirical matter; transcendence is overcome.
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p. 327-328
4 months 1 week ago
The earlier views, those of Hobbes or Locke for instance, saw language as an instrument, and understood meaning in terms of designation. Discovering the meaning of words is finding what ideas or things they stood for. ... By contrast, a hermeneutical view requires a very different conception. If we are partly constituted by our self-understanding, and this in turn can be very different according to the various languages which articulate for us a background of distinctions of worth, then language does not only serve to depict ourselves and the world, it also helps constitute our lives. Certain ways of being, of feeling, of relating to each other are only possible given certain linguistic resources.
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Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: 1985), pp. 9-10
4 months 1 week ago
Providence has already begun the punishment of the guilty; more than sixty regicides, the most guilty among them, have already died a violent death.
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Chapter X, p. 97
4 months 1 week ago
It is...in his analysis of the circumstances which determined the evolution of the chief legal institutions, in which he shows why a complex civilisation could grow up only where certain types of legal institutions developed, that he makes some of his most important contributions to jurisprudence. In the discussion of these problems his economic and his legal and political theory are intimately connected. Hume is indeed one of the few social theorists who are clearly aware of the connection between the rules men obey and the order which is formed as a result... What he undertakes is to show that certain characteristics of modern society which we prize are dependent on conditions which were not created in order to bring about these results, yet are nevertheless their indispensable presuppositions. They are institutions "advantageous to the public though...not intended for that purpose by the inventors". Hume shows, in effect, that an orderly society can develop only if men learn to obey certain rules of conduct.
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Friedrich Hayek, 'The Legal and Political Philosophy of David Hume' (18 July 1963), in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1967), pp. 111-112
4 months 1 week ago
When a revolutionary situation arises in a country, before the spirit of revolt is sufficiently awakened in the masses to express itself in violent demonstrations in the streets or by rebellions and uprisings, it is through action that minorities succeed in awakening that feeling of independence and that spirit of audacity without which no revolution can come to a head. Men of courage, not satisfied with words, but ever searching for the means to transform them into action, — men of integrity for whom the act is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile, and death are preferable to a life contrary to their principles, — intrepid souls who know that it is necessary to dare in order to succeed, — these are the lonely sentinels who enter the battle long before the masses are sufficiently roused to raise openly the banner of insurrection and to march, arms in hand, to the conquest of their rights.
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4 months 1 week ago
Muggeridge: ‘Positivism will deprive man, not only of all objects of religious reverence, but of all objects of the reverence which great philosophers have always, and rightly, received.’ True, Malcolm, except for the 'and rightly' part. In fact the reverence which has been and is accorded, by pre-Positivist man, to such two-legged plagues as Plato, Kant, and Hegel, is merely insane.
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[https://https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies], 1991. Page 201
4 months 1 week ago
The Christian woman is therefore a supernatural model like the angel. […] At the sight of these figures, however beautiful one can imagine them, no profane thought would dare arise in the heart of a man of taste. One owes them a certain intellectual admiration as pure as their models. Even in their clothing there is something that is not terrestrial. One must see there elegance without elaboration, poverty without ugliness, and, if the subject demands it, pomp without magnificence. They are beautiful like temples.
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p. 288
4 months 1 week ago
What is it, in your opinion, to be a great nobleman? It is to be master of several objects that men covet, and thus to be able to satisfy the wants and the desires of many. It is these wants and these desires that attract them towards you, and that make them submit to you: were it not for these, they would not even look at you; but they hope, by these services... to obtain from you some part of the good which they desire, and of which they see that you have the disposal.
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4 months 1 week ago
Surely it is a great thing to increase the numerous host of fixed stars previously visible to the unaided vision, adding countless more which have never before been seen, exposing these plainly to the eye in numbers ten times exceeding the old and familiar stars.
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Translation by Stillman Drake in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957)
4 months 1 week ago
To begin with, if man, since his origin, has always lived in societies, the State is but one of the forms of social life, quite recent as far as regards European societies. Men lived thousands of years before the first States were constituted; Greece and Rome existed for centuries before the Macedonian and Roman Empires were built up, and for us modern Europeans the centralized States date but from the sixteenth century. It was only then, after the defeat of the free mediæval Communes had been completed that the mutual insurance company between military, judicial, landlord, and capitalist authority which we call "State," could be fully established.
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4 months 1 week ago
He declared that he knew nothing, except the fact of his ignorance.
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Socrates, 16.
4 months 1 week ago
Five [of the above] rules are of absolute necessity, and cannot be dispensed with without essential defect and often without error.
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4 months 1 week ago
I mentally conceive of some moveable [sphere] projected on a horizontal plane, all impediments being put aside. Now it is evident... that equable motion on this plane would be perpetual if the plane were of infinite extent, but if we assume it to be ended, and [situated] on high, the movable, driven to the end of this plane and going on further, adds on to its previous equable and indelible motion, that downward tendency which it has from its heaviness. Thus, there emerges a certain motion, compounded...
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Author, Day Four, On the Motion of Projectiles, Stillman Drake translation (1974) p. 268
4 months 1 week ago
We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed
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Macquarrie & Robinson translation
4 months 1 week ago
The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all.
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Ch. 1 : Our Riches, p. 61
4 months 1 week ago
He was once asked what a friend is, and his answer was, "One soul abiding in two bodies."
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Aristotle, 9.
4 months 1 week ago
A good prescription is still more profitable than an .
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(c. 1734) in a successful argument to persuade his father that a medical education was preferred. As quoted by , History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Importance Tr. Ernest Chester Thomas (1882) 2nd edition, Vol. 2, [https://books.google.com/
4 months 1 week ago
May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure to give his results to the world.
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4 months 1 week ago
We think of beauty as being most worthy of reverence. But what is most worthy of reverence lights up only where the magnificent strength to revere is alive. To revere is not a thing for the petty and lowly, the incapacitated and underdeveloped. It is a matter of tremendous passion; only what flows from such passion is in the grand style.
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p. 125
4 months 1 week ago
We thus see that the over-population fallacy does not stand the very first attempt at submitting it to a closer examination.
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4 months 1 week ago
Pythagoras used to say that he had received as a gift from Mercury the perpetual transmigration of his soul, so that it was constantly transmigrating and passing into all sorts of plants or animals.
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Pythagoras, 4.

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