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4 months 1 week ago
The concept of space, therefore, is a pure intuition, being a singular concept, not made up by sensations, but itself the fundamental form of all external sensation.
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4 months 1 week ago
In an age as agitated as ours, it no longer suffices just to be advertised in the newspaper. To be advertised in this way is the same thing as being consigned to oblivion. If one is to be noticed, once must as least appear on the first page under a hand that points to and, as it were, announces or advertises the advertisement.
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Søren Kierkegaard, Writing Sampler, Nichol P. 73
4 months 1 week ago
If ,­ there is a tendency in all Western democracies no longer to respect the professional politician or even the party member as such, it is no longer only because of some personal insufficiency, some fault, or some incompetence, or because of some scandal that can now be more widely known, amplified, and in fact often produced, if not premeditated by the power of the media. Rather, it is because politicians become more and more, or even solely characters in the media's representation at the very moment when the transformation of the public space, precisely by the media, causes them to lose the essential part of the power and even of the competence they were granted before by the structures of parliamentary representation, by the party apparatuses that were linked to it, and so forth. However competent they may personally be, professional politicians who conform to the old model tend today to become structurally incompetent. The same media power accuses, produces, and amplifies at the same time this incompetence of traditional politicians: on the one hand, it takes aways from them the legitimate power they held in the former political space (party, parliament, and so forth), but, on the other hand, it obliges them to become mere silhouettes, if not marionettes, on the stage of televisual rhetoric. They were thought to be actors of politics, they now often risk, as everyone knows, being no more than TV actors.
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Wear and Tears (tableu of a ageless world)
4 months 1 week ago
The astonishing resonance of his research, as well as the brilliance of his personality and richness of his thinking, have profoundly marked our epoch. In him, a powerful poetic intuition of nature's profound value, a sharp perception of creation's dynanism, and a broad vision of the world's future join together with an incontestable religious fervor. Similarly, his unremitting desire to dialogue with the science of his time and his bold optimism about the evolution of the world have given his intuitions — through the rich variety of his words and the magic of his images — considerable influence. Completely turned to the future, this synthesis, often lyrical and animated with passion for the universal, will help to restore hope to those assailed by doubts. ... What our contemporaries will undoubtedly remember, beyond the difficulties of conception and deficiencies of expression in this audacious attempt to reach a synthesis, is the testimomy of the coherent life of a man possessed by Christ in the depths of his soul. He was concerned with honoring both faith and reason, and anticipated the response to John Paul II's appeal: "Be not afraid, open, open wide to Christ the doors of the immense domains of culture, civilization, and progress."
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Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, in [http://www.traditioninaction.org/ProgressivistDoc/A_020_CasaroliTeilhard.htm "Cardinal Agostino Casaroli praises the work of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin" in L'Osservatore Romano (10 June 1981)]
4 months 1 week ago
The Pʀᴏᴛᴇᴜs-ʟᴏᴠᴇʀ woos his playful bride,To win the fair he tries a thousand forms, Basks on the sands, or gambols in the storms.A Dolphin now, his scaly sides he laves,And bears the sportive damsel on the waves;She strikes the cymbal as he moves along,And wondering Ocean listens to the song.—And now a spotted Pard the lover stalks,Plays round her steps, and guards her favour’d walks;As with white teeth he prints her hand, caress’d, And lays his velvet paw upon her breast,O’er his round face her snowy fingers strainThe silken knots, and fit the ribbon-rein.—And now a Swan, he spreads his plumy sails,And proudly glides before the fanning gales;Pleas’d on the flowery brink with graceful handShe waves her floating lover to the land;Bright shines his sinuous neck, with crimson beakHe prints fond kisses on her glowing cheek,Spreads his broad wings, elates his ebon crest,And clasps the beauty to his downy breast.
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[The Proteus-lover], The Botanic Garden (1791), Part ii, Canto iv, ll. 363-86.
4 months 1 week ago
Now precisely because Galilean science is, in the formation of its concepts, the technic of a specific Lebenswelt, it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt. It remains essentially within the basic experiential framework and within the universe of ends set by this reality.
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p. 164
4 months 1 week ago
The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men.
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Fifth Thesis
4 months 1 week ago
I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province; and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries; the best state of that province. This, whether it be curiosity, or vain glory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably) philanthropia, is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed. And I do easily see, that place of any reasonable countenance doth bring commandment of more wits than of a man's own; which is the thing I greatly affect.
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Letter to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (ca. 1593), published in The Works of Francis Bacon: Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England, 14 Vols. (1870), James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, Douglas D. Heath, editors, Vol. V
4 months 1 week ago
There are three successive states of morality answering to the three principal stages of human life; the personal, the domestic, and the social stage.
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p. 104
4 months 1 week ago
Forgetting when God does it in relation to sin, is the opposite of creating, since to create is to bring forth from nothing and to forget is to take back into nothing. What is hidden from my eyes, that I have never seen; but what is hidden behind my back, that I have seen. The one who loves forgives in this way; he forgives, he forgets, he blots out the sin, in love he turns toward the one he forgives; but when he turns toward him, he of course, cannot see what is lying behind his back.
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p. 296
4 months 1 week ago
The usage of the words “public" and “public sphere” betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam. Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment.
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p. 1 as cited in: Gandy, M (1997) "Ecology, modernity and the intellectual legacy of the Frankfurt School". In: Light, A and Smith, JM, (eds.) Space, Place and Environmental Ethics. p. 240
4 months 1 week ago
The depth of darkness into which you can descend, and still live, is an exact measure, I believe, of the height to which you can aspire to reach.
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Alan McGlashan, as cited in The Night of the New Moon by Laurens van der Post
4 months 1 week ago
A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.
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Grey Eminence (1940)
4 months 1 week ago
There is one creed: 'neath no world-terror's wing Apples forget to grow on apple-trees.
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Ecclesiastes, st. 1. The Wild Knight, &c., 2nd ed. (1906)
4 months 1 week ago
Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.
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A 120
4 months 1 week ago
It is manifest that there is no danger at all in the proportion or quantity of knowledge, how large soever, lest it should make it swell or out-compass itself; no, but it is merely the quality of knowledge, which, be it in quantity more or less, if it be taken without the true corrective thereof, hath in it some nature of venom or malignity, and some effects of that venom, which is ventosity or swelling. This corrective spice, the mixture whereof maketh knowledge so sovereign, is charity, which the Apostle immediately addeth to the former clause; for so he saith, "Knowledge bloweth up, but charity buildeth up".
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Book I
4 months 1 week ago
Self-accusation is the possibility of justification. The tax collector accused himself. There was no one else who accused him. It was not civic justice that seized him by the chest and said, “You are a criminal”: it was not the people whom he perhaps cheated who beat him on the breast and said, “You are a cheater” – but he beat his own breast and said, "God be merciful to me, a sinner. He accused himself, that he was a sinner before God.
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Three Discourses at Friday Communion November 14, 1849 Hong translation 1997 P. 132
4 months 1 week ago
For philosophy, it is supposed by vast numbers of students and teachers of the subject, has for its goal philosophical knowledge, and indeed, even certain knowledge. It is presupposed, therefore, that there is such a thing as philosophical knowledge, and there are even men who think themselves the possessors of at least some of it.
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The Review of Metaphysics (June, 1968) [https://www.jstor.org/stable/20124689] p. 615
4 months 1 week ago
Confronted, when the weather is fine and I am in propitious emotional circumstances, with certain landscapes, certain works of art, certain human beings, I know, for the time being, that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. On other occasions, skies and destiny being inclement, I am no less immediately certain of the malignant impersonality of an uncaring universe. Every human being has had similar experiences. This being so, the sensible thing to do would be to accept the facts and frame a metaphysic to fit them. But with that talent for doing the wrong thing, that genius for perversity, so characteristically human, men have preferred, especially in recent times, to take another course. They have either denied the existence of these psychological facts; or if they have admitted them, have done so only to condemn as evil all such experiences as cannot be reconciled in a logical system with whatever particular class of experiences they have chosen, arbitrarily, to regard as "true" and morally valuable. Every man tries to pretend that he is consistently one kind of person and does his best consistently to worship one kind of God. And this despite the fact that he experiences diversity and actually feels himself in contact with a variety of divinities.
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“One and Many,” pp. 3–4
4 months 1 week ago
Neither reason nor faith will ever die; for men would die if deprived of either. The wildest mystic uses his reason at some stage; if it be only by reasoning against reason. The most incisive sceptic has dogmas of his own; though when he is a very incisive sceptic, he has often forgotten what they are. Faith and reason are in this sense co-eternal; but as the words are popularly used, as loose labels for particular periods, the one is now almost as remote as the other. What was called the Age of Reason has vanished as completely as what are called the Ages of Faith.
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[http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/anti_religious_thought.txt Anti-Religious Thought In The Eighteenth Century]; first published in "An Outline of Christianity: The Story of our Civilization", Vol. IV, Christianity and Modern Thought (1926)
4 months 1 week ago
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
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The Black Prince (1973); 2003, p. 10.
4 months 1 week ago
The Palestinians living among us have, for the most part, earned a not unfounded reputation for being cheaters, because of their spirit of usury since their exile. Certainly, it seems strange to conceive of a nation of cheaters; but it is just as odd to think of a nation of merchants, the great majority of whom, bound by an ancient superstition that is recognized by the State they live in, seek no civil dignity and try to make up for this loss by the advantage of duping the people among whom they find refuge, and even one another. The situation could not be otherwise, given a whole nation of merchants, as non-productive members of society (for example, the Jews in Poland).
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[https://books.google.ca/books?id=nRArBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA77 page 77 of 6 December 2012 publication by Springer Science & Business Media], translation by Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974) | [https://books.google.ca/books?id=4EmqLCWUFvEC&pg=PA23
4 months 1 week ago
There are four classes of Idols which beset men's minds. To these for distinction's sake I have assigned names — calling the first class, Idols of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market-Place; the fourth, Idols of the Theater.
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Aphorism 39
4 months 1 week ago
When you are reading God's Word, it is not the obscure passages that bind you but what you understand, and with that you comply at once. If you understood only one single passage in all of Holy Scripture, well, then you must do that first of all, but you do not first have to sit down and ponder the obscure passages.
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Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 29
4 months 1 week ago
There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world.
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The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine
4 months 1 week ago
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]
4 months 1 week ago
The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.
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"A Defence of Baby-Worship"
4 months 1 week ago
A person who already displays … cruelty to animals is also no less hardened towards men. We can already know the human heart, even in regard to animals.
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Part II, p. 212
4 months 1 week ago
Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things — old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
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No. 97
4 months 1 week ago
It was in Nazi-occupied Austria that autism was coined as a diagnosis. While the term had been coined by the eugenicist and psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler in 1911, Bleuler only meant it to refer to a temporary symptom of schizophrenia. It was only under Nazi rule, in the work of Hans Asperger in the 1930s and 1940s that those who came to be called autistic were singled out as having a unique way of being. During a war where men were expected to express a 'soldier mentality' and to be part of the group, boys who failed to fit this economic requirement were singled out as pathological (it was mostly boys who got the diagnosis) and were baptized with a new name: autism. Those women who were diagnosed were also singled out if they had intellectual disabilities, since they were not seen as fit to reproduce.
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p. 62
4 months 1 week ago
And, oddly enough, even at times when the current style permitted a treatment of the less epileptic aspects of religion, no fully adequate rendering of the contemplative life was ever achieved in the plasdc arts of Christendom. The peace that passes all understanding was often sung and spoken; it was hardly ever painted or carved. Thus, in the writings of St. Bernard, of Albertus Magnus, of Eckhart and Tauler and Ruysbroeck one may find passages that express very clearly the nature and significance of mystical contemplation. But the saints who figure in medieval painting and sculpture tell us next to nothing about this anticipation of the beatific vision. There are no equivalents of those Far Eastern Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who incarnate, in stone and paint, the experience of ultimate reality.
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4 months 1 week ago
When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.
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Ch. 10 "The Great Dickens Characters"
4 months 1 week ago
[Jews are] angry and brutish people, vile and vulgar men, slaves worthy of the yoke [Talmudism] which you bear... Go, take back your books and remove yourselves from me. [ The Talmud ] taught the Jews to steal the goods of Christians, to regard them as savage beasts, to push them over the precipice... to kill them with impunity and to utter every morning the most horrible imprecations against them.
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See [https://books.google.com.br/books?id=gGR4DQAAQBAJ&pg=PT587 The Jews: A History], Second Edition, by John Efron, Steven Weitzman and Matthias Lehmann
4 months 1 week ago
I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.
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Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)
4 months 1 week ago
The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.
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4 months 1 week ago
Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.
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Chapter 3 (p. 19)
4 months 1 week ago
As for science and religion, the known and admitted facts are few and plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been, or will be.
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Michael Moon in Part II, ch. I
4 months 1 week ago
If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant’s reasoning to the grown man’s passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.
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4 months 1 week ago
Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume.
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Las Meninas
4 months 1 week ago
A free man - is a man who is free internally. As all other people, externally he or she depends on society. Internally he or she is independent. A society can become liberated externally - from oppression, but it can become free only when the majority of people are free internally.
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[http://parentingforeveryone.com/freeman/ Who Is a Free Man. What Is Freedom?]
4 months 1 week ago
Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.
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It appears in multiple anti-vaccination books, all by Trung Nguyen and a co-writer, circa 2018. In September 2021 it is echoed everywhere, including medical-journal articles (on various subjects), with no source given. Right above the Aldous Huxley "quote
4 months 1 week ago
The gallows in my garden, people say,Is new and neat and adequately tall.
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A Ballade of Suicide, st. 1
4 months 1 week ago
What is called the Law of Nations is not properly law, but a part of ethics: a set of moral rules, accepted as authoritative by civilized states. It is true that these rules neither are nor ought to be of eternal obligation, but do and must vary more or less from age to age, as the consciences of nations become more enlightened, and the exigences of political society undergo change. But the rules mostly were at their origin, and still are, an application of the maxims of honesty and humanity to the intercourse of states. They were introduced by the moral sentiments of mankind, or by their sense of the general interest, to mitigate the crimes and sufferings of a state of war, and to restrain governments and nations from unjust or dishonest conduct towards one another in time of peace. Since every country stands in numerous and various relations with the other countries of the world, and many, our own among the number, exercise actual authority over some of these, a knowledge of the established rules of international morality is essential to the duty of every nation, and therefore of every person in it who helps to make up the nation, and whose voice and feeling form a part of what is called public opinion. Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject. It depends on the habit of attending to and looking into public transactions, and on the degree of information and solid judgment respecting them that exists in the community, whether the conduct of the nation as a nation, both within itself and towards others, shall be selfish, corrupt, and tyrannical, or rational and enlightened, just and noble.
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Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews, Feb. 1st 1867 (1867) [http://books.google.com/books?id=DFNAAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA36 p. 36.]
4 months 1 week ago
Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure … There is no taste which deserves the epithet good, unless it be the taste for such employments which, to the pleasure actually produced by them, conjoin some contingent or future utility: there is no taste which deserves to be characterized as bad, unless it be a taste for some occupation which has mischievous tendency.
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Théorie des peines et des récompenses (1811); translation by Richard Smith, The Rationale of Reward, J. & H. L. Hunt, London, 1825, Bk. 3, Ch. 1
4 months 1 week ago
A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations
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Part Four, Complete and austere institutions
4 months 1 week ago
It was as though some stubborn god spent their time in an immutable and absurd balancing act between life and death, prosperity and poverty.
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p. 81
4 months 1 week ago
I judged the Poles by their enemies. And I found it was an almost unfailing truth that their enemies were the enemies of magnanimity and manhood. If a man loved slavery, if he loved usury, if he loved terrorism and all the trampled mire of materialistic politics, I have always found that he added to these affections the passion of a hatred of Poland. She could be judged in the light of that hatred; and the judgment has proved to be right.
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4 months 1 week ago
Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of the representative government, cannot exist.
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Ch. XVI: Of Nationality, As Connected with Representative Government (p. 382)
4 months 1 week ago
In the Greek conception of parrhesia... truth-having is guaranteed by the possession of... moral qualities... required... to know... and... convey such truth...
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4 months 1 week ago
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.
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Conclusion, p. 541

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