January 2012
1 post
“…it is apparent that Galileo’s proposal amounts to a partial revision of our observation language or of our experience. An experience which partly contradicts the idea of the motion of the earth and is turned into an experience that confirms it, at least as far as ‘terrestrial things’ are concerned. This is what actually happens. But Galileo wants to persuade us that...
November 2011
2 posts
Leisure Time
“The crowd is not only the newest asylum of outlaws; it is also the latest narcotic for those abandoned. The flaneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. In this he shares the situation of the commodity. He is not aware of this special situation, but this does not diminish its effect on him and it permeates him blissfully like a narcotic that can compensate for many humiliations. The...
“You know not what you ask: can you drink of the cup I drink of?”
– Mark 10:38- KJB
October 2011
4 posts
“Are there not enough experiments, do you not think, shown by the high heavens...”
– “Dialogus Physicus”- Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life
“The vision of the laboratory as a technological device to gain strength by...”
– Bruno Latour- “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,” in Science Observed
August 2011
3 posts
3 tags
“Persons who would never have been taken seriously became famous. Harshness...”
– Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities. (via mills)
“Two times two is four has a cocky look; its stands across your path, arms akimbo, and spits.”
Dostoevsky- Notes From Underground
Playing King
“Death kicks over its traces in the midst of life, and this would not be life if it did not, and in the middle is where the homo Dei’s state is found- in the middle between kicking over the traces and reason- just as his condition is somewhere between mystical community and windy individualism. I can see all that from my column here. And in that state let him commune with himself,...
July 2011
1 post
An Orderly Friday
“We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say ‘Victoria,’ and lo! It is Victoria. No, take your books of...
June 2011
3 posts
A Despairing Evening with Shelley
Chorus of Spirits: “We’ll pass the Eyes/ Of the starry skies/ Into the hoar Deep to colonize;/ Death, chaos, and Night”
-Prometheus Unbound, Act IV, 141-144
The deeper one looks into the cracks (intentionally) placed within the armor of Prometheus Unbound’s progressive fantasy, the more melancholy and ultimately despairing the poem becomes. Shelley builds his utopia out of negatives, out of the...
The Poetry of Skepticism
“Like all mortals, Midas is foolish, incapable of appreciating highest poetry, or what Shelley elsewhere calls ‘poetic idealisms’; and for his devotion to the earth god, Midas, like all mortals and like everything else in Pan’s song, suffers a debasing metamorphosis that symbolizes the world’s inconstancy—according to Mary [Shelley]’s play, his...
May 2011
5 posts
LRB · Terry Eagleton · Lunging, Flailing,... →
“What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been...
“Scientists work from models acquired through education and through subsequent exposure to the literature often without quite knowing or needing to know what characteristics have given these models the status of community paradigms. And because they do so, they need no full set of rules. The coherence displayed by the research tradition in which they participate may not imply even the...
From Saul Kripke to Alvin Plantinga
“But it is a primitive part of our language game of sensations that, if an individual has satisfied criteria for a mastery of sensation language in general, we then respect his claim to have identified a new type of sensation even if the sensation is correlated with nothing publicly observable. Then the only ‘public criterion’ for such an avowal will be the sincere avowal...
April 2011
3 posts
“…For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can still...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke- Duino Elegies (trans. Edward Snow)
Cautionary Tales from History
“Man can only exist in the world by fashioning for himself a name and an object, but these, as Marlowe and Montaigne understood, are both fictions. No particular name or object can entirely satisfy one’s inner energy demanding to be expressed or fill so completely the potential of one’s consciousness that all longings are quelled, all intimations of unreality silenced. As we have...
“Listen, Parfyon, you asked me earlier, here is my answer: the essence of religious feeling doesn’t fit in with any reasoning, with any crimes and trespasses, or with any atheisms; there’s something else here that’s not that, and it will eternally be not that; there’s something in it that atheisms will eternally glance off, and they will eternally be talking not about...
March 2011
5 posts
1 tag
“The controversial question whether philosophy exists, or has any right to exist,...”
– Karl Popper-The Logic of Scientific Discovery
“He elaborates his theory of mind with the assistance of opaque concepts such as...”
– New Statesman - A mind of one’s own
“[Kraus’] language mysticism may be taken to imply that the perfect satire is a work in which no way changes the statements that are being satirized, but simply shows them in a light which illuminates their inherent hypocrisy.”
Allan...
February 2011
3 posts
crashinglybeautiful:
Red House Painters: All...
January 2011
4 posts
December 2010
2 posts
Niaiserie Allemande
“But let us reflect; it is high time to do so. ‘How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?’ Kant asked himself— and what really is his answer? ‘By virtue of a faculty’.— but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, venerably, and with such a display of German profundity and curlicues that people simply failed to note the...
nadir: there's a leak in the roof that needs... →
anewnadir:
While Wikileaks pretends to democratize access to government information, Assange (characteristic of most ideologues) does not entertain debate on whether the documents ought to have been leaked in the first place. What if the diplomatic communiques turned out to be conducted in good faith and in accordance to the will and aims of the U.S. constitution? As the diplomatic cables began...
November 2010
10 posts
“In the historical debate between mind and matter, mind won and silenced the...”
– Against Health - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
“The main barrier is the scientism that pervades our mentality and our culture....”
– TPM: The Philosophers’ Magazine | Hacker’s challenge
2 tags
Back to Work
“Toward the end of the nineteenth century, idleness began to wane as the predominant mode of conceptualizing resistance to labor. The reasons for this decline can be enumerated: the old Christian proscription on idleness was losing its appeal for urban workers and industrialists; the technology of the factory system required more than externally imposed discipline and direction, but rather...
Ms. Odradek: Ahab: The consuming power of thoughts →
… the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old…
“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that...
A taste for wormwood & gall by Anthony Daniels -... →
October 2010
8 posts
“For what—worse yet, whence—all science? How now? Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against—truth? And, morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O enigmatic ironist, was that perhaps...
“At the same time, however, I am reluctant to call a chimpanzee a “moral being.”...”
– Morals Without God? - NYTimes.com
If the author is willing to concede this point, I really fail to see the purpose in taking the whole of his argument seriously.
In any case, the kind of morality that necessitates God isn’t utilitarian. Christian ethics in particular has an entire stratum of...