1. A critical study of the method or methods of the sciences, of the nature of scientific symbols and of the logical structure of scientific symbolic svstems. Presumably such a study should include both the empirical and the rational sciences. Whether it should also include the methods of the valuational studies (e.g., ethics, esthetics) and of the historical studies, will depend upon the working definition or science accepted by the investigator. Valuational studies are frequently characterized as "normative" or "axiological" sciences. Many of the recognized sciences (e.g., anthropology, geology) contain important historical aspects, hence there is some justification for the inclusion of the historical method in this aspect of the philosophy of science. As a study of method, the philosophy of science includes much of the traditional logic and theory of knowledge. The attempt is made to define and further clarify such terms as induction, deduction, hypothesis, data, discovery and verification. In addition, the more detailed and specialized methods of science (e.g., experimentation, measurement, classification and idealization) (q.v.) are subjected to examination. Since science is a symbolic system, the general theory of signs plays an important role in the philosophy of science.
1. For Comte Altruism meant the discipline and eradication of self-centered desire, and a life devoted to the good of others; more particularly, selfless love and devotion to Society. In brief, it involved the self-abnegating love of Catholic Christianity redirected towards Humanity conceived as an ideal unity. As thus understood, altruism involves a conscious opposition not only to egoism (whether understood as excessive or moderate self-love), but also to the formal or theological pursuit of charity and to the atomic or individualistic social philosophy of 17th-18th century liberalism, of utilitarianism, and of French Ideology.
2. The attempted clarification of the basic concepts, presuppositions and postulates of the sciences, and the revelation of the empirical, rational, or pragmatic grounds upon which they are presumed to rest. This aspect of the philosophy of science is closely related to the foregoing but includes, in addition to the logical and epistemological subject-matter, a large portion of metaphysics. Roughly, the task here is two-fold. On the one hand it involves the critical analysis of certain basic notions, such as quantity, quality, time, space, cause and law, which are used by the scientist but not subjected to examination. On the other hand it includes a similar study of certain presupposed beliefs, such as the belief in an external world, the belief in the uniformity of nature, and the belief in the rationality of natural processes.
3. A highly composite and diverse study which attempts to ascertain the limits of the special sciences, to disclose their interrelations one with another, and to examine their implications so fir as these contribute to a theory either of the universe as a whole or of some pervasive aspect of it. This aspect of the philosophy of science is the least precise and definite of the three, and employs the more speculative methods. One of the most characteristic of its problems is that of the classification of the sciences. This involves the attempt to construct a general table, or diagram, or map of the sciences which will properly integrate the sciences according to method, subject-matter, or some other principle of organization. Another characteristic problem is that of the implications of science for some general theory of the universe, e.g., idealism, materialism, positivism, mechanism, teleology, monism, or pluralism. In recent years a new type of problem has appeared which, if it is properly part of the philosophy of science at all, belongs to this aspect of the subject. This is the problem of the social relations of science. It examines such problems as the place of science in a given cultural scheme, e.g., its relations to government, business, art, religion and morality.
4. In the philosophy of nature, aggregate has various meanings: it is a mass formed into clusters (anat.); a compound or an organized mass of individuals (zool.); an agglomerate (bot.) an agglomeration of distinct minerals separable by mechanical means (geol.); or, in general, a compound mass in which the elements retain their essential individuality. -- T.G.
Abheda: (Skr. "not distinct") Identity, particularly in reference to any philosophy of monism which does not recognize the distinctness of spiritual and material, or divine and essentially human principles. -- K.F.L.
Absoluter Geist (German) Absolute spirit; used by Eduard von Hartmann in his Philosophy of the Unconscious to signify the cosmic hierarch or originant of a hierarchy. See also ABSOLUTE.
academic ::: a. --> Alt. of Academical ::: n. --> One holding the philosophy of Socrates and Plato; a Platonist.
A member of an academy, college, or university; an academician.
academical ::: a. --> Belonging to the school or philosophy of Plato; as, the Academic sect or philosophy.
Belonging to an academy or other higher institution of learning; scholarly; literary or classical, in distinction from scientific.
academy ::: n. --> A garden or grove near Athens (so named from the hero Academus), where Plato and his followers held their philosophical conferences; hence, the school of philosophy of which Plato was head.
An institution for the study of higher learning; a college or a university. Popularly, a school, or seminary of learning, holding a rank between a college and a common school.
A place of training; a school.
A society of learned men united for the advancement of the
Also called logical empiricism, rational empiricism, and neo-positivism. ::: A philosophy of science originating in the Vienna Circle in the 1920s which holds that philosophy should aspire to the same sort of rigor as science. Logical positivism asserts that philosophy should provide strict criteria for judging sentences true, false, and meaningless. Although the logical positivists held a wide range of beliefs on many matters, they all shared an interest in science and deep skepticism of the theological and metaphysical. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein, many subscribed to the correspondence theory of truth, although some, like Neurath, believed in coherentism. They believed that all knowledge should be based on logical inference from simple "protocol sentences" grounded in observable facts. Hence many supported forms of realism, materialism, philosophical naturalism, and empiricism.
amalavijNAna. (T. dri ma med pa'i rnam shes; C. amoluo shi/wugou shi; J. amarashiki/mukushiki; K. amara sik/mugu sik 阿摩羅識/無垢識). In Sanskrit, "immaculate consciousness"; a ninth level of consciousness posited in certain strands of the YOGACARA school, especially that taught by the Indian translator and exegete PARAMARTHA. The amalavijNAna represents the intrusion of TATHAGATAGARBHA (womb or embryo of buddhahood) thought into the eight-consciousnesses theory of the YOGACARA school. The amalavijNAna may have antecedents in the notion of immaculate gnosis (amalajNAna) in the RATNAGOTRAVIBHAGA and is claimed to be first mentioned in STHIRAMATI's school of YogAcAra, to which ParamArtha belonged. The term is not attested in Sanskrit materials, however, and may be of Chinese provenance. The most sustained treatment of the concept appears in the SHE LUN ZONG, an exegetical tradition of Chinese Buddhism built around ParamArtha's translation of ASAnGA's MAHAYANASAMGRAHA (She Dasheng lun). ParamArtha compares amalavijNAna to the perfected nature (PARINIsPANNA) of consciousness, thus equating amalavijNAna with the absolute reality of thusness (TATHATA) and therefore rendering it the essence of all dharmas and the primary catalyst to enlightenment. As "immaculate," the amalavijNAna emulates the emphasis in tathAgatagarbha thought on the inherent purity of the mind; but as "consciousness," amalavijNAna could also be sited within the YogAcAra philosophy of mind as a separate ninth level of consciousness, now construed as the basis of all the other consciousnesses, including the eighth ALAYAVIJNANA. See also BUDDHADHATU; FOXING.
Anglo-Catholic Philosophy: Anglo-Catholicism is the name frequently used to describe the Church of England and her sister communions, including the Episcopal Church in America. As a religious system, it may be described as the maintenance of the traditional credal, ethical and sacramental position of Catholic Christianity, with insistence on the incorporation into that general position of the new truth of philosophy, science and other fields of study and experience. Historically, the Anglo-Catholic divines (as in Hooker and the Caroline writers) took over the general Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy of the schools; their stress, however, was more on the Platonic than the Aristotelian side: "Platonism", Dr. Inge has said, "is the loving mother-nurse of Anglicanism." Statements of this position, modified by a significant agnosticism concerning areas into which reason (it is said) cannot penetrate, may be found collected in Anglicanism (edited by More and Cross). A certain empiricism has always marked Anglo-Catholic theological and philosophical speculation; this is brought out in recent writing by Taylor (Faith of a Moralist), the writers in Lux Mundi (edited by Gore) and its modern successor Essays Catholic and Critical.
Apathia: (Gr. apathla, no feeling) In Epicurean (q.v.) and Stoic (q.v.) ethics: the inner equilibrium and peace of mind, freedom from emotion, that result from contemplation, for its own sake, on the ends of life. Apeiron: (Gr. apeiron) The boundless; the indeterminate; the infinite. In the philosophy of Anaximander the apeiron is the primal indeterminate matter out of which all things come to be. The apeiron appears frequently elsewhere in early Greek philosophy, notably in the dualism of the Pythagoreans, where it is opposed to the principle of the Limit (peras), or number. -- G.R.M.
"A philosophy of change?(1) But what is change? In ordinary parlance change means passage from one condition to another and that would seem to imply passage from one status to another status. The shoot changes into a tree, passes from the status of shoot to the status of tree and there it stops; man passes from the status of young man to the status of old man and the only farther change possible to him is death or dissolution of his status. So it would seem that change is not something isolated which is the sole original and eternal reality, but it is something dependent on status, and if status were non-existent, change also could not exist. For we have to ask, when you speak of change as alone real, change of what, from what, to what? Without this ‘what" change could not be. ::: —Change is evidently the change of some form or state of existence from one condition to another condition.” Essays Divine and Human
“A philosophy of change?(1) But what is change? In ordinary parlance change means passage from one condition to another and that would seem to imply passage from one status to another status. The shoot changes into a tree, passes from the status of shoot to the status of tree and there it stops; man passes from the status of young man to the status of old man and the only farther change possible to him is death or dissolution of his status. So it would seem that change is not something isolated which is the sole original and eternal reality, but it is something dependent on status, and if status were non-existent, change also could not exist. For we have to ask, when you speak of change as alone real, change of what, from what, to what? Without this ‘what’ change could not be.
apoha. (T. gzhan sel; C. chu; J. jo; K. che 除). In Sanskrit, "exclusion"; a technical term in later Indian Buddhist philosophy of language and epistemology, which describes comprehension through the negative process of exclusion: i.e., only by excluding everything that is other than the target concept will the significance of that concept be comprehended. Buddhist apoha theory therefore posits that concepts convey meaning only to the extent that they "exclude" other meanings: e.g., the concept "chair" is understood only by the mental consciousness excluding everything else that is "not chair." Concepts thus do not denote the actual objects that they purport to reference but instead denote the mere "exclusion" of everything else that is not relevant. See also VYATIREKA.
Aristotelianism: The philosophy of Aristotle, (384-322 B.C.). Aristotle was born in the Greek colony of Stagira, in Macedon, the son of Nicomachus, the physician of King Amyntas of Macedon. In his eighteenth year Aristotle became a pupil of Plato at Athens and remained for nearly twenty years a member of the Academy. After the death of Plato he resided for some time at Atarneus, in the Troad, and at Mitylene, on the island of Lesbos, with friends of the Academy; then for several years he acted as tutor to the young Alexander of Macedon. In 335 he returned to Athens, where he spent the following twelve years as head of a school which he set up in the Lyceum. The school also came to be known as the Peripatetic, and its members Peripatetics, probably because of the peripatos, or covered walk, in which Aristotle lectured. As a result of the outburst of anti-Macedonian feeling at Athens in 323 after the death of Alexander, Aristotle retired to Chalcis, m Euboea, where he died a year later.
aristotelianism ::: --> The philosophy of Aristotle, otherwise called the Peripatetic philosophy.
As a school of Greek and Latin philosophers, Plotinism lasted until the fifth century. Porphyry, Apuleius, Jamblichus, Julian the Apostate, Themistius, Simplicius, Macrobius and Proclus are the most important representatives. Through St. Augustine, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, John Scotus Eriugena, and the Greek Fathers, Plotinian thought has been partly incorporated into Christian intellectualism. Nearly all prominent Arabian philosophers before Averroes are influenced by Plotinus, this is particularly true of Avicenna and Algazel. In the Jewish tradition Avicebron's Fons Vitae is built on the frame of the emanation theory. Master Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa continue the movement. It is spiritually related to some modern anti-intellectualistic and mystical currents of thought. Plotin, Enneades, (Greek text and French transl.) by E. Brehier, (Bude), 6 vol., Paris, 1930-40. Mackenna, S., The Enneads of Plotinus, London, 1917-1919. Heinemann, F., Plotin, Leipzig, 1921. Brehier, E., La philosophie de Plotin, Paris, 1928. Inge, W. R., The Philosophy of Plotinus, 2 vol., 2rd ed., London and N. Y., 1929.
Aufklärung: In general, this German word and its English equivalent Enlightenment denote the self-emancipation of man from mere authority, prejudice, convention and tradition, with an insistence on freer thinking about problems uncritically referred to these other agencies. According to Kant's famous definition "Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority, which is the incapacity of using one's understanding without the direction of another. This state of minority is caused when its source lies not in the lack of understanding, but in the lack of determination and courage to use it without the assistance of another" (Was ist Aufklärung? 1784). In its historical perspective, the Aufklärung refers to the cultural atmosphere and contrlbutions of the 18th century, especially in Germany, France and England [which affected also American thought with B. Franklin, T. Paine and the leaders of the Revolution]. It crystallized tendencies emphasized by the Renaissance, and quickened by modern scepticism and empiricism, and by the great scientific discoveries of the 17th century. This movement, which was represented by men of varying tendencies, gave an impetus to general learning, a more popular philosophy, empirical science, scriptural criticism, social and political thought. More especially, the word Aufklärung is applied to the German contributions to 18th century culture. In philosophy, its principal representatives are G. E. Lessing (1729-81) who believed in free speech and in a methodical criticism of religion, without being a free-thinker; H. S. Reimarus (1694-1768) who expounded a naturalistic philosophy and denied the supernatural origin of Christianity; Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) who endeavoured to mitigate prejudices and developed a popular common-sense philosophy; Chr. Wolff (1679-1754), J. A. Eberhard (1739-1809) who followed the Leibnizian rationalism and criticized unsuccessfully Kant and Fichte; and J. G. Herder (1744-1803) who was best as an interpreter of others, but whose intuitional suggestions have borne fruit in the organic correlation of the sciences, and in questions of language in relation to human nature and to national character. The works of Kant and Goethe mark the culmination of the German Enlightenment. Cf. J. G. Hibben, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1910. --T.G. Augustinianism: The thought of St. Augustine of Hippo, and of his followers. Born in 354 at Tagaste in N. Africa, A. studied rhetoric in Carthage, taught that subject there and in Rome and Milan. Attracted successively to Manicheanism, Scepticism, and Neo-Platontsm, A. eventually found intellectual and moral peace with his conversion to Christianity in his thirty-fourth year. Returning to Africa, he established numerous monasteries, became a priest in 391, Bishop of Hippo in 395. Augustine wrote much: On Free Choice, Confessions, Literal Commentary on Genesis, On the Trinity, and City of God, are his most noted works. He died in 430. St. Augustine's characteristic method, an inward empiricism which has little in common with later variants, starts from things without, proceeds within to the self, and moves upwards to God. These three poles of the Augustinian dialectic are polarized by his doctrine of moderate illuminism. An ontological illumination is required to explain the metaphysical structure of things. The truth of judgment demands a noetic illumination. A moral illumination is necessary in the order of willing; and so, too, an lllumination of art in the aesthetic order. Other illuminations which transcend the natural order do not come within the scope of philosophy; they provide the wisdoms of theology and mysticism. Every being is illuminated ontologically by number, form, unity and its derivatives, and order. A thing is what it is, in so far as it is more or less flooded by the light of these ontological constituents. Sensation is necessary in order to know material substances. There is certainly an action of the external object on the body and a corresponding passion of the body, but, as the soul is superior to the body and can suffer nothing from its inferior, sensation must be an action, not a passion, of the soul. Sensation takes place only when the observing soul, dynamically on guard throughout the body, is vitally attentive to the changes suffered by the body. However, an adequate basis for the knowledge of intellectual truth is not found in sensation alone. In order to know, for example, that a body is multiple, the idea of unity must be present already, otherwise its multiplicity could not be recognized. If numbers are not drawn in by the bodily senses which perceive only the contingent and passing, is the mind the source of the unchanging and necessary truth of numbers? The mind of man is also contingent and mutable, and cannot give what it does not possess. As ideas are not innate, nor remembered from a previous existence of the soul, they can be accounted for only by an immutable source higher than the soul. In so far as man is endowed with an intellect, he is a being naturally illuminated by God, Who may be compared to an intelligible sun. The human intellect does not create the laws of thought; it finds them and submits to them. The immediate intuition of these normative rules does not carry any content, thus any trace of ontologism is avoided. Things have forms because they have numbers, and they have being in so far as they possess form. The sufficient explanation of all formable, and hence changeable, things is an immutable and eternal form which is unrestricted in time and space. The forms or ideas of all things actually existing in the world are in the things themselves (as rationes seminales) and in the Divine Mind (as rationes aeternae). Nothing could exist without unity, for to be is no other than to be one. There is a unity proper to each level of being, a unity of the material individual and species, of the soul, and of that union of souls in the love of the same good, which union constitutes the city. Order, also, is ontologically imbibed by all beings. To tend to being is to tend to order; order secures being, disorder leads to non-being. Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal each to its own place and integrates an ensemble of parts in accordance with an end. Hence, peace is defined as the tranquillity of order. Just as things have their being from their forms, the order of parts, and their numerical relations, so too their beauty is not something superadded, but the shining out of all their intelligible co-ingredients. S. Aurelii Augustini, Opera Omnia, Migne, PL 32-47; (a critical edition of some works will be found in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vienna). Gilson, E., Introd. a l'etude de s. Augustin, (Paris, 1931) contains very good bibliography up to 1927, pp. 309-331. Pope, H., St. Augustine of Hippo, (London, 1937). Chapman, E., St. Augustine's Philos. of Beauty, (N. Y., 1939). Figgis, J. N., The Political Aspects of St. Augustine's "City of God", (London, 1921). --E.C. Authenticity: In a general sense, genuineness, truth according to its title. It involves sometimes a direct and personal characteristic (Whitehead speaks of "authentic feelings"). This word also refers to problems of fundamental criticism involving title, tradition, authorship and evidence. These problems are vital in theology, and basic in scholarship with regard to the interpretation of texts and doctrines. --T.G. Authoritarianism: That theory of knowledge which maintains that the truth of any proposition is determined by the fact of its having been asserted by a certain esteemed individual or group of individuals. Cf. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent; C. S. Peirce, "Fixation of Belief," in Chance, Love and Logic, ed. M. R. Cohen. --A.C.B. Autistic thinking: Absorption in fanciful or wishful thinking without proper control by objective or factual material; day dreaming; undisciplined imagination. --A.C.B. Automaton Theory: Theory that a living organism may be considered a mere machine. See Automatism. Automatism: (Gr. automatos, self-moving) (a) In metaphysics: Theory that animal and human organisms are automata, that is to say, are machines governed by the laws of physics and mechanics. Automatism, as propounded by Descartes, considered the lower animals to be pure automata (Letter to Henry More, 1649) and man a machine controlled by a rational soul (Treatise on Man). Pure automatism for man as well as animals is advocated by La Mettrie (Man, a Machine, 1748). During the Nineteenth century, automatism, combined with epiphenomenalism, was advanced by Hodgson, Huxley and Clifford. (Cf. W. James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, ch. V.) Behaviorism, of the extreme sort, is the most recent version of automatism (See Behaviorism). (b) In psychology: Psychological automatism is the performance of apparently purposeful actions, like automatic writing without the superintendence of the conscious mind. L. C. Rosenfield, From Beast Machine to Man Machine, N. Y., 1941. --L.W. Automatism, Conscious: The automatism of Hodgson, Huxley, and Clifford which considers man a machine to which mind or consciousness is superadded; the mind of man is, however, causally ineffectual. See Automatism; Epiphenomenalism. --L.W. Autonomy: (Gr. autonomia, independence) Freedom consisting in self-determination and independence of all external constraint. See Freedom. Kant defines autonomy of the will as subjection of the will to its own law, the categorical imperative, in contrast to heteronomy, its subjection to a law or end outside the rational will. (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, § 2.) --L.W. Autonomy of ethics: A doctrine, usually propounded by intuitionists, that ethics is not a part of, and cannot be derived from, either metaphysics or any of the natural or social sciences. See Intuitionism, Metaphysical ethics, Naturalistic ethics. --W.K.F. Autonomy of the will: (in Kant's ethics) The freedom of the rational will to legislate to itself, which constitutes the basis for the autonomy of the moral law. --P.A.S. Autonymy: In the terminology introduced by Carnap, a word (phrase, symbol, expression) is autonymous if it is used as a name for itself --for the geometric shape, sound, etc. which it exemplifies, or for the word as a historical and grammatical unit. Autonymy is thus the same as the Scholastic suppositio matertalis (q. v.), although the viewpoint is different. --A.C. Autotelic: (from Gr. autos, self, and telos, end) Said of any absorbing activity engaged in for its own sake (cf. German Selbstzweck), such as higher mathematics, chess, etc. In aesthetics, applied to creative art and play which lack any conscious reference to the accomplishment of something useful. In the view of some, it may constitute something beneficent in itself of which the person following his art impulse (q.v.) or playing is unaware, thus approaching a heterotelic (q.v.) conception. --K.F.L. Avenarius, Richard: (1843-1896) German philosopher who expressed his thought in an elaborate and novel terminology in the hope of constructing a symbolic language for philosophy, like that of mathematics --the consequence of his Spinoza studies. As the most influential apostle of pure experience, the posltivistic motive reaches in him an extreme position. Insisting on the biologic and economic function of thought, he thought the true method of science is to cure speculative excesses by a return to pure experience devoid of all assumptions. Philosophy is the scientific effort to exclude from knowledge all ideas not included in the given. Its task is to expel all extraneous elements in the given. His uncritical use of the category of the given and the nominalistic view that logical relations are created rather than discovered by thought, leads him to banish not only animism but also all of the categories, substance, causality, etc., as inventions of the mind. Explaining the evolution and devolution of the problematization and deproblematization of numerous ideas, and aiming to give the natural history of problems, Avenarius sought to show physiologically, psychologically and historically under what conditions they emerge, are challenged and are solved. He hypothesized a System C, a bodily and central nervous system upon which consciousness depends. R-values are the stimuli received from the world of objects. E-values are the statements of experience. The brain changes that continually oscillate about an ideal point of balance are termed Vitalerhaltungsmaximum. The E-values are differentiated into elements, to which the sense-perceptions or the content of experience belong, and characters, to which belongs everything which psychology describes as feelings and attitudes. Avenarius describes in symbolic form a series of states from balance to balance, termed vital series, all describing a series of changes in System C. Inequalities in the vital balance give rise to vital differences. According to his theory there are two vital series. It assumes a series of brain changes because parallel series of conscious states can be observed. The independent vital series are physical, and the dependent vital series are psychological. The two together are practically covariants. In the case of a process as a dependent vital series three stages can be noted: first, the appearance of the problem, expressed as strain, restlessness, desire, fear, doubt, pain, repentance, delusion; the second, the continued effort and struggle to solve the problem; and finally, the appearance of the solution, characterized by abating anxiety, a feeling of triumph and enjoyment. Corresponding to these three stages of the dependent series are three stages of the independent series: the appearance of the vital difference and a departure from balance in the System C, the continuance with an approximate vital difference, and lastly, the reduction of the vital difference to zero, the return to stability. By making room for dependent and independent experiences, he showed that physics regards experience as independent of the experiencing indlvidual, and psychology views experience as dependent upon the individual. He greatly influenced Mach and James (q.v.). See Avenarius, Empirio-criticism, Experience, pure. Main works: Kritik der reinen Erfahrung; Der menschliche Weltbegriff. --H.H. Averroes: (Mohammed ibn Roshd) Known to the Scholastics as The Commentator, and mentioned as the author of il gran commento by Dante (Inf. IV. 68) he was born 1126 at Cordova (Spain), studied theology, law, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy, became after having been judge in Sevilla and Cordova, physician to the khalifah Jaqub Jusuf, and charged with writing a commentary on the works of Aristotle. Al-mansur, Jusuf's successor, deprived him of his place because of accusations of unorthodoxy. He died 1198 in Morocco. Averroes is not so much an original philosopher as the author of a minute commentary on the whole works of Aristotle. His procedure was imitated later by Aquinas. In his interpretation of Aristotelian metaphysics Averroes teaches the coeternity of a universe created ex nihilo. This doctrine formed together with the notion of a numerical unity of the active intellect became one of the controversial points in the discussions between the followers of Albert-Thomas and the Latin Averroists. Averroes assumed that man possesses only a disposition for receiving the intellect coming from without; he identifies this disposition with the possible intellect which thus is not truly intellectual by nature. The notion of one intellect common to all men does away with the doctrine of personal immortality. Another doctrine which probably was emphasized more by the Latin Averroists (and by the adversaries among Averroes' contemporaries) is the famous statement about "two-fold truth", viz. that a proposition may be theologically true and philosophically false and vice versa. Averroes taught that religion expresses the (higher) philosophical truth by means of religious imagery; the "two-truth notion" came apparently into the Latin text through a misinterpretation on the part of the translators. The works of Averroes were one of the main sources of medieval Aristotelianlsm, before and even after the original texts had been translated. The interpretation the Latin Averroists found in their texts of the "Commentator" spread in spite of opposition and condemnation. See Averroism, Latin. Averroes, Opera, Venetiis, 1553. M. Horten, Die Metaphysik des Averroes, 1912. P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin, 2d ed., Louvain, 1911. --R.A. Averroism, Latin: The commentaries on Aristotle written by Averroes (Ibn Roshd) in the 12th century became known to the Western scholars in translations by Michael Scottus, Hermannus Alemannus, and others at the beginning of the 13th century. Many works of Aristotle were also known first by such translations from Arabian texts, though there existed translations from the Greek originals at the same time (Grabmann). The Averroistic interpretation of Aristotle was held to be the true one by many; but already Albert the Great pointed out several notions which he felt to be incompatible with the principles of Christian philosophy, although he relied for the rest on the "Commentator" and apparently hardly used any other text. Aquinas, basing his studies mostly on a translation from the Greek texts, procured for him by William of Moerbecke, criticized the Averroistic interpretation in many points. But the teachings of the Commentator became the foundation for a whole school of philosophers, represented first by the Faculty of Arts at Paris. The most prominent of these scholars was Siger of Brabant. The philosophy of these men was condemned on March 7th, 1277 by Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris, after a first condemnation of Aristotelianism in 1210 had gradually come to be neglected. The 219 theses condemned in 1277, however, contain also some of Aquinas which later were generally recognized an orthodox. The Averroistic propositions which aroused the criticism of the ecclesiastic authorities and which had been opposed with great energy by Albert and Thomas refer mostly to the following points: The co-eternity of the created word; the numerical identity of the intellect in all men, the so-called two-fold-truth theory stating that a proposition may be philosophically true although theologically false. Regarding the first point Thomas argued that there is no philosophical proof, either for the co-eternity or against it; creation is an article of faith. The unity of intellect was rejected as incompatible with the true notion of person and with personal immortality. It is doubtful whether Averroes himself held the two-truths theory; it was, however, taught by the Latin Averroists who, notwithstanding the opposition of the Church and the Thomistic philosophers, gained a great influence and soon dominated many universities, especially in Italy. Thomas and his followers were convinced that they interpreted Aristotle correctly and that the Averroists were wrong; one has, however, to admit that certain passages in Aristotle allow for the Averroistic interpretation, especially in regard to the theory of intellect. Lit.: P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin au XIIIe Siecle, 2d. ed. Louvain, 1911; M. Grabmann, Forschungen über die lateinischen Aristotelesübersetzungen des XIII. Jahrhunderts, Münster 1916 (Beitr. z. Gesch. Phil. d. MA. Vol. 17, H. 5-6). --R.A. Avesta: See Zendavesta. Avicehron: (or Avencebrol, Salomon ibn Gabirol) The first Jewish philosopher in Spain, born in Malaga 1020, died about 1070, poet, philosopher, and moralist. His main work, Fons vitae, became influential and was much quoted by the Scholastics. It has been preserved only in the Latin translation by Gundissalinus. His doctrine of a spiritual substance individualizing also the pure spirits or separate forms was opposed by Aquinas already in his first treatise De ente, but found favor with the medieval Augustinians also later in the 13th century. He also teaches the necessity of a mediator between God and the created world; such a mediator he finds in the Divine Will proceeding from God and creating, conserving, and moving the world. His cosmogony shows a definitely Neo-Platonic shade and assumes a series of emanations. Cl. Baeumker, Avencebrolis Fons vitae. Beitr. z. Gesch. d. Philos. d. MA. 1892-1895, Vol. I. Joh. Wittman, Die Stellung des hl. Thomas von Aquino zu Avencebrol, ibid. 1900. Vol. III. --R.A. Avicenna: (Abu Ali al Hosain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina) Born 980 in the country of Bocchara, began to write in young years, left more than 100 works, taught in Ispahan, was physician to several Persian princes, and died at Hamadan in 1037. His fame as physician survived his influence as philosopher in the Occident. His medical works were printed still in the 17th century. His philosophy is contained in 18 vols. of a comprehensive encyclopedia, following the tradition of Al Kindi and Al Farabi. Logic, Physics, Mathematics and Metaphysics form the parts of this work. His philosophy is Aristotelian with noticeable Neo-Platonic influences. His doctrine of the universal existing ante res in God, in rebus as the universal nature of the particulars, and post res in the human mind by way of abstraction became a fundamental thesis of medieval Aristotelianism. He sharply distinguished between the logical and the ontological universal, denying to the latter the true nature of form in the composite. The principle of individuation is matter, eternally existent. Latin translations attributed to Avicenna the notion that existence is an accident to essence (see e.g. Guilelmus Parisiensis, De Universo). The process adopted by Avicenna was one of paraphrasis of the Aristotelian texts with many original thoughts interspersed. His works were translated into Latin by Dominicus Gundissalinus (Gondisalvi) with the assistance of Avendeath ibn Daud. This translation started, when it became more generally known, the "revival of Aristotle" at the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century. Albert the Great and Aquinas professed, notwithstanding their critical attitude, a great admiration for Avicenna whom the Arabs used to call the "third Aristotle". But in the Orient, Avicenna's influence declined soon, overcome by the opposition of the orthodox theologians. Avicenna, Opera, Venetiis, 1495; l508; 1546. M. Horten, Das Buch der Genesung der Seele, eine philosophische Enzyklopaedie Avicenna's; XIII. Teil: Die Metaphysik. Halle a. S. 1907-1909. R. de Vaux, Notes et textes sur l'Avicennisme Latin, Bibl. Thomiste XX, Paris, 1934. --R.A. Avidya: (Skr.) Nescience; ignorance; the state of mind unaware of true reality; an equivalent of maya (q.v.); also a condition of pure awareness prior to the universal process of evolution through gradual differentiation into the elements and factors of knowledge. --K.F.L. Avyakta: (Skr.) "Unmanifest", descriptive of or standing for brahman (q.v.) in one of its or "his" aspects, symbolizing the superabundance of the creative principle, or designating the condition of the universe not yet become phenomenal (aja, unborn). --K.F.L. Awareness: Consciousness considered in its aspect of act; an act of attentive awareness such as the sensing of a color patch or the feeling of pain is distinguished from the content attended to, the sensed color patch, the felt pain. The psychologlcal theory of intentional act was advanced by F. Brentano (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte) and received its epistemological development by Meinong, Husserl, Moore, Laird and Broad. See Intentionalism. --L.W. Axiological: (Ger. axiologisch) In Husserl: Of or pertaining to value or theory of value (the latter term understood as including disvalue and value-indifference). --D.C. Axiological ethics: Any ethics which makes the theory of obligation entirely dependent on the theory of value, by making the determination of the rightness of an action wholly dependent on a consideration of the value or goodness of something, e.g. the action itself, its motive, or its consequences, actual or probable. Opposed to deontological ethics. See also teleological ethics. --W.K.F. Axiologic Realism: In metaphysics, theory that value as well as logic, qualities as well as relations, have their being and exist external to the mind and independently of it. Applicable to the philosophy of many though not all realists in the history of philosophy, from Plato to G. E. Moore, A. N. Whitehead, and N, Hartmann. --J.K.F. Axiology: (Gr. axios, of like value, worthy, and logos, account, reason, theory). Modern term for theory of value (the desired, preferred, good), investigation of its nature, criteria, and metaphysical status. Had its rise in Plato's theory of Forms or Ideas (Idea of the Good); was developed in Aristotle's Organon, Ethics, Poetics, and Metaphysics (Book Lambda). Stoics and Epicureans investigated the summum bonum. Christian philosophy (St. Thomas) built on Aristotle's identification of highest value with final cause in God as "a living being, eternal, most good." In modern thought, apart from scholasticism and the system of Spinoza (Ethica, 1677), in which values are metaphysically grounded, the various values were investigated in separate sciences, until Kant's Critiques, in which the relations of knowledge to moral, aesthetic, and religious values were examined. In Hegel's idealism, morality, art, religion, and philosophy were made the capstone of his dialectic. R. H. Lotze "sought in that which should be the ground of that which is" (Metaphysik, 1879). Nineteenth century evolutionary theory, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics subjected value experience to empirical analysis, and stress was again laid on the diversity and relativity of value phenomena rather than on their unity and metaphysical nature. F. Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-1885) and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) aroused new interest in the nature of value. F. Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (1889), identified value with love. In the twentieth century the term axiology was apparently first applied by Paul Lapie (Logique de la volonte, 1902) and E. von Hartmann (Grundriss der Axiologie, 1908). Stimulated by Ehrenfels (System der Werttheorie, 1897), Meinong (Psychologisch-ethische Untersuchungen zur Werttheorie, 1894-1899), and Simmel (Philosophie des Geldes, 1900). W. M. Urban wrote the first systematic treatment of axiology in English (Valuation, 1909), phenomenological in method under J. M. Baldwin's influence. Meanwhile H. Münsterberg wrote a neo-Fichtean system of values (The Eternal Values, 1909). Among important recent contributions are: B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (1912), a free reinterpretation of Hegelianism; W. R. Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918, 1921), defending a metaphysical theism; S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (1920), realistic and naturalistic; N. Hartmann, Ethik (1926), detailed analysis of types and laws of value; R. B. Perry's magnum opus, General Theory of Value (1926), "its meaning and basic principles construed in terms of interest"; and J. Laird, The Idea of Value (1929), noteworthy for historical exposition. A naturalistic theory has been developed by J. Dewey (Theory of Valuation, 1939), for which "not only is science itself a value . . . but it is the supreme means of the valid determination of all valuations." A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936) expounds the view of logical positivism that value is "nonsense." J. Hessen, Wertphilosophie (1937), provides an account of recent German axiology from a neo-scholastic standpoint. The problems of axiology fall into four main groups, namely, those concerning (1) the nature of value, (2) the types of value, (3) the criterion of value, and (4) the metaphysical status of value. (1) The nature of value experience. Is valuation fulfillment of desire (voluntarism: Spinoza, Ehrenfels), pleasure (hedonism: Epicurus, Bentham, Meinong), interest (Perry), preference (Martineau), pure rational will (formalism: Stoics, Kant, Royce), apprehension of tertiary qualities (Santayana), synoptic experience of the unity of personality (personalism: T. H. Green, Bowne), any experience that contributes to enhanced life (evolutionism: Nietzsche), or "the relation of things as means to the end or consequence actually reached" (pragmatism, instrumentalism: Dewey). (2) The types of value. Most axiologists distinguish between intrinsic (consummatory) values (ends), prized for their own sake, and instrumental (contributory) values (means), which are causes (whether as economic goods or as natural events) of intrinsic values. Most intrinsic values are also instrumental to further value experience; some instrumental values are neutral or even disvaluable intrinsically. Commonly recognized as intrinsic values are the (morally) good, the true, the beautiful, and the holy. Values of play, of work, of association, and of bodily well-being are also acknowledged. Some (with Montague) question whether the true is properly to be regarded as a value, since some truth is disvaluable, some neutral; but love of truth, regardless of consequences, seems to establish the value of truth. There is disagreement about whether the holy (religious value) is a unique type (Schleiermacher, Otto), or an attitude toward other values (Kant, Höffding), or a combination of the two (Hocking). There is also disagreement about whether the variety of values is irreducible (pluralism) or whether all values are rationally related in a hierarchy or system (Plato, Hegel, Sorley), in which values interpenetrate or coalesce into a total experience. (3) The criterion of value. The standard for testing values is influenced by both psychological and logical theory. Hedonists find the standard in the quantity of pleasure derived by the individual (Aristippus) or society (Bentham). Intuitionists appeal to an ultimate insight into preference (Martineau, Brentano). Some idealists recognize an objective system of rational norms or ideals as criterion (Plato, Windelband), while others lay more stress on rational wholeness and coherence (Hegel, Bosanquet, Paton) or inclusiveness (T. H. Green). Naturalists find biological survival or adjustment (Dewey) to be the standard. Despite differences, there is much in common in the results of the application of these criteria. (4) The metaphysical status of value. What is the relation of values to the facts investigated by natural science (Koehler), of Sein to Sollen (Lotze, Rickert), of human experience of value to reality independent of man (Hegel, Pringle-Pattlson, Spaulding)? There are three main answers: subjectivism (value is entirely dependent on and relative to human experience of it: so most hedonists, naturalists, positivists); logical objectivism (values are logical essences or subsistences, independent of their being known, yet with no existential status or action in reality); metaphysical objectivism (values --or norms or ideals --are integral, objective, and active constituents of the metaphysically real: so theists, absolutists, and certain realists and naturalists like S. Alexander and Wieman). --E.S.B. Axiom: See Mathematics. Axiomatic method: That method of constructing a deductive system consisting of deducing by specified rules all statements of the system save a given few from those given few, which are regarded as axioms or postulates of the system. See Mathematics. --C.A.B. Ayam atma brahma: (Skr.) "This self is brahman", famous quotation from Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 2.5.19, one of many alluding to the central theme of the Upanishads, i.e., the identity of the human and divine or cosmic. --K.F.L.
Avesta (Avest, Pers) Apstak, Avestak (Pahlavi) Law or the basic foundation, the sacred scriptures of the Mazdeans. The language of the ancient Aryans was the language of the Vedic hymns and also of the Gathic chants of Zoroaster, these being so close that a mere phonetic change often suffices to translate a passage from one into the other. Because of this connection “the Mazdean Scriptures of the Zend-Avesta, the Vendidad and others correct and expose the later cunning shuffling of the gods in the Hindu Pantheon, and restore through Ahura the Asuras to their legitimate place in theogony” (SD 2:60-1). Zend, on the other hand, traditionally designates the Pahlavi commentary on the Avesta. The Yasnas are the principal writings of the Zoroastrians; and in their oldest portion, the Gathas, the original philosophy of Mazdeism is expressed in a spirited poetic language. The Vispered (Pahlavi) or Visperataro (Avestan) [from vispe all + ratavo warriors, spiritual teachers] is an appendix to the later Yasnas which deals with the ritualistic aspects of the Mazdean faith.
A. V. Vasihev, Space, Time, Motion, translated by H. M. Lucas and C. P. Sanger, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, London. 1924, and New York, 1924. Religion, Philosophy of: The methodic or systematic investigation of the elements of religious consciousness, the theories it has evolved and their development and historic relationships in the cultural complex. It takes account of religious practices only as illustrations of the vitality of beliefs and the inseparableness of the psychological from thought reality in faith. It is distinct from theology in that it recognizes the priority of reason over faith and the acceptance of creed, subjecting the latter to a logical analysis. As such, the history of the Philosophy of Religion is coextensive with the free enquiry into religious reality, particularly the conceptions of God, soul, immortality, sin, salvaition, the sacred (Rudolf Otto), etc., and may be said to have its roots in any society above the pre-logical, mythological, or custom-controlled level, first observed in Egypt, China, India, and Greece. Its scientific treatment is a subsidiary philosophic discipline dates from about Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der reinen Vernunft and Hegel's Philosophie der Religion, while in the history of thought based on Indian and Greek speculation, sporadic sallies were made by all great philosophers, especially those professing an idealism, and by most theologians.
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb: (1714-1762) A German thinker of the pre-Kantian period and disciple of Christian Wolff whose encyclopaedic work he tried to continue. Among his works the best known is Aesthetica in which he analyzes the problem of beauty regarded by him as recognition of perfection by means of the senses. The name of aesthetics, as the philosophy of beauty and art, was introduced by him for the first time. -- R.B.W.
Berdyayev, Nikolai Alexandrovitch: (1874-1948) Is a contemporary Russian teacher and writer on the philosophy of religion. He was born in Kiev, exiled to Vologda when twenty-five; threatened with expulsion from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1917, he became professor of philosophy at the University of Moscow. In 1922, he was expelled from the Soviet Union and he went to Berlin, where he established his Academy of Religious Philosophy. He moved his school to Paris and established a Russian review called Putj (The Way). His thought resembles that of the Christian Gnostics (see Gnosticism), and it owes a good deal to German idealism and mysticism (Boehme). He is a trenchant critic of systems as diverse as Communism and Thomistic Scholasticism. His most noted works are: Smyisl Istorii (The Meaning of History), Berlin, 1923; Novoye Srednevyekovye (transl. as The End of Our Time, N.Y., 1933), Berlin, 1924; Freedom and the Spirit, N. Y., 1935. V. J. Bourke, "The Gnosticism of N. Berdyaev", Thought, XI (1936), 409-22. -- VJ.B.
Berkeleianism: The idealistic system of philosophy of George Berkeley (1685-1753). He thought that the admission of an extramental world would lead to materialism and atheism. Hence he denied the existence of an independent world of bodies by teaching that their existence consists in perceptibility, esse is percipi. The cause of the ideas in our mind is not a material substance, but a spiritual being, God, who communicates them to us in a certain order which we call the laws of nature. Things cannot exist unless perceived by some mind. Berkeley acknowledged the existence of other spirits, or minds, besides that of God. -- J.J.R.
Bhagavad Gita: Sanskrit for Song of the Divine One. The title of a celebrated philosophic epic poem, inserted in the Mahabharata (q.v.), containing a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, which clearly indicates the relationship between morality and absolute ethical values in the Hindu philosophy of action (Karma Yoga); it is considered to be one of the most influential philosophical poems of Sanskrit literature; the exact date of origin is unknown.
Bhagavad Gita: (Skr. the song, gita, of the Blessed One) A famed philosophic epic poem, widely respected in India and elsewhere, representing Krishna embodied as a charioteer imparting to the King Arjuna, who is unwilling to fight his kinsmen in battle, comprehension of the mysteries of existence, clearly indicating the relationship between morality and absolute ethical values in a Hindu philosophy of action. -- K.F.L.
Bhasya: (Skr. speaking) Commentary. Bheda: (Skr. different, distinct) Non-identity, particularly in reference to any philosophy of dualism which recognizes the existence of two opposed principles or admits of a difference between the essentially human and the Absolute. -- K.F.L.
Bibliography: Karl Pearson, Grammar of Science, 1892. Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis, 1905. W. S. Jevons, Principles of Science, 1907. J. A. Thomson, An Introduction to Science, 1911. N. Campbell, What is Science?, 1921. C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought, 1923. A. D. Ritchie, Scientific Method, 1923. E. W. Hobson, Domain of Natural Science, 1923. A. S. Eddington, Nature of the Physical World, 1929. M. R. Cohen, Reason and Nature, 1931. A. C. Benjamin, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, 1937. W. H. Werkmeister, A Philosophy of Science, 1940.
(b) In idealistic metaphysics: positing, in the philosophy of G. Fichte is the initial act by which the Ego creates itself: "The positing of the Ego through itself is therefore, the pure activity of the Ego." (Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, Trans, by A. F. Kroeger, p. 68.) -- L.W.
Blondel, Maurice: (1861-1939) A philosopher in the French "spiritualistic" tradition of Maine de Biran and Boutroux, who in his essays L'action (1893), and Le Proces de l'Intelligence (1922), defended an activistic psychology and metaphysics. "The Philosophy of Action" is a voluntaristic and idealistic philosophy which, as regards the relation of thought to action, seeks to compromise between the extremes of intellectualism and pragmatism. In his more recent book La Pensee (1934), Blondel retains his earlier activistic philosophy combined with a stronger theological emphasis. -- L.W.
Bolzano, Bernard: (1781-1848) Austrian philosopher and mathematician. Professor of the philosophy of religion at Prague, 1805-1820, he was compelled to resign in the latter year because of his rationalistic tendencies in theology and afterwards held no academic position. His Wissenschaftslehre of 1837, while it is to be classed as a work on traditional logic, contains significant anticipations of many ideas which have since become important in symbolic logic and mathematics. In his posthumously published Paradoxien des Unendlitchen (1851) he appears as a forerunner in some respects of Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers. -- A.C.
Bowne, Borden Parker: (1847-1910) His influence was not merely confined to the theological world of his religious communion as a teacher of philosophy at Boston University. His philosophy was conspicuous for the combination of theism with an idealistic view which he termed "Personalism" (q.v.). He mainly discussed issues of philosophy which had a bearing on religion, ethics, and epistemology. Main works: Metaphysics, 1882; Philosophy of Theism, 1887; Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 1897; Personalism, 1908; Kant and Spencer, 1912. -- H.H.
Philosophy of Change: The theory that change itself is the only enduring pnnciple and therefore the fundamental reality. Applied to the views of Heraclitus, and in modern times to those of Henri Bergson. -- R.T.F.
Philosophy of Discontinuity: The theory that the principle of change is the fundamental basis of reality; that natural law is but the outward aspect of what is internally habit Being as an irreducible synthesis of possibility and action. God the Creator and Essence of things. Applied to the thought of Renouvier, Boutroux, and Lachelier. -- R.T.F.
Philosophy of Effort: The theory that in the self-consciousness of effort the person becomes one with reality. Consciousness of effort is self-consciousness. Used by Maine de Biran. -- R.T.F.
Philosophy of Mind: Philosophical theory of the nature of mind and its place in the world. See Philosophical Psychology. -- L.W.
Philosophy of Religion: An inquiry into the general subject of religion from the philosophical point of view, i.e., an inquiry employing the accepted tools of critical analysis and evaluation without a predisposition to defend or reject the claims of any particular religion. Among the specific questions considered are the nature, function and value of religion; the validity of the claims of religious knowledge; the relation of religion and ethics; the character of ideal religion; the nature of evil; the problem of theodicy; revealed versus natural religion; the problem of the human spirit (soul) and its destiny; the relation of the human to the divine as to the freedom and responsibility of the individual and the character (if any) of a divine purpose; evaluation of the claims of prophecy, mystic intuitions, special revelations, inspired utterances; the value of prayers of petition; the human hope of immortality; evaluation of institutional forms of expressions, rituals, creeds, ceremonies, rites, missionary propaganda; the meaning of human existence, the character of value, its status in the world of reality, the existence and character of deity; the nature of belief and faith, etc.
Brahmasutras: (Skr.) An aphoristic compilation of Badarayana's, systematizing the philosophy of the Upanishads (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
Buddhism ::: The teachings of Gautama the Buddha. Buddhism today is divided into two branches, the Northern andthe Southern. The Southern still retains the teachings of the "Buddha's brain," the "eye doctrine," that isto say his outer philosophy for the general world, sometimes inadequately called the doctrine of formsand ceremonies. The Northern still retains his "heart doctrine" -- that which is hid, the inner life, theheart-blood, of the religion: the doctrine of the inner heart of the teaching.The religious philosophy of the Buddha-Sakyamuni is incomparably nearer to the ancient wisdom, theesoteric philosophy of the archaic ages, than is Christianity. Its main fault today is that teachers later thanthe Buddha himself carried its doctrines too far along merely formal or exoteric lines; yet, with all that, tothis day it remains the purest and holiest of the exoteric religions on earth, and its teachings evenexoterically are true -- once they are properly understood. They need but the esoteric key in interpretationof them. As a matter of fact, the same may be said of all the great ancient world religions. Christianity,Brahmanism, Taoism, and others all have the same esoteric wisdom behind the outward veil of theexoteric formal faith.
Budhaism or Budhism [from Sanskrit budha wisdom] The anglicized form of the term for the teachings of divine philosophy, called in India budha (esoteric wisdom). It is equivalent to the Greek term theosophia. It must be distinguished from Buddhism, the philosophy of Gautama Buddha, although this is a direct and pure derivative from budhaism.
Carlyle, Thomas: (1795-1881) Vigorous Scotch historian and essayist, apostle of work. He was a deep student of the German idealists and did much to bring them before English readers. His forceful style showed marked German characteristics. He was not in any sense a systematic philosopher but his keen mind gave wide influence to the ideas he advanced in ethics, politics and economics. His whimsical Sartor Resartus or philosophy of clothes and his searching Heroes and Hero-worship, remain his most popular works along with his French Revolution and Past and Present. He was among the Victorians who displayed some measure of distrust for democracy. -- L.E.D.
Carnap's work has been devoted especially to formal logic and its applications to problems of epistemology and the philosophy of science. His writings in formal logic include a textbook of mathematical logic and a comprehensive monograph devoted to logical syntax, a new branch of logical research to whose development Carnap has greatly contributed.
cartesianism ::: n. --> The philosophy of Descartes.
Cartesianism: The philosophy of the French thinker, Rene Descartes (Cartesius) 1596-1650. After completing his formal education at the Jesuit College at La Fleche, he spent the years 1612-1621 in travel and military service. The reminder of his life was devoted to study and writing. He died in Sweden, where he had gone in 1649 to tutor Queen Christina. His principal works are: Discours de la methode, (preface to his Geometric, Meteores, Dieptrique) Meditationes de prima philosophia, Principia philosophiae, Passions de l'ame, Regulae ad directionem ingenii, Le monde. Descartes is justly regarded as one of the founders of modern epistemology. Dissatisfied with the lack of agreement among philosophers, he decided that philosophy needed a new method, that of mathematics. He began by resolving to doubt everything which could not pass the test of his criterion of truth, viz. the clearness and distinctness of ideas. Anything which could pass this test was to be readmitted as self-evident. From self-evident truths, he deduced other truths which logically follow from them. Three kinds of ideas were distinguished: innate, by which he seems to mean little more than the mental power to think things or thoughts; adventitious, which come to him from without; factitious, produced within his own mind. He found most difficulty with the second type of ideas. The first reality discovered through his method is the thinking self. Though he might doubt nearly all else, Descartes could not reasonably doubt that he, who was thinking, existed as a res cogitans. This is the intuition enunciated in the famous aphorism: I think, therefore I am, Cogito ergo sum. This is not offered by Descartes as a compressed syllogism, but as an immediate intuition of his own thinking mind. Another reality, whose existence was obvious to Descartes, was God, the Supreme Being. Though he offered several proofs of the Divine Existence, he was convinced that he knew this also by an innate idea, and so, clearly and distinctly. But he did not find any clear ideas of an extra-mental, bodily world. He suspected its existence, but logical demonstration was needed to establish this truth. His adventitious ideas carry the vague suggestion that they are caused by bodies in an external world. By arguing that God would be a deceiver, in allowing him to think that bodies exist if they do not, he eventually convinced himself of the reality of bodies, his own and others. There are, then, three kinds of substance according to Descartes: Created spirits, i.e. the finite soul-substance of each man: these are immaterial agencies capable of performing spiritual operations, loosely united with bodies, but not extended since thought is their very essence. Uncreated Spirit, i.e. God, confined neither to space nor time, All-Good and All-Powerful, though his Existence can be known clearly, his Nature cannot be known adequately by men on earth, He is the God of Christianity, Creator, Providence and Final Cause of the universe. Bodies, i.e. created, physical substances existing independently of human thought and having as their chief attribute, extension. Cartesian physics regards bodies as the result of the introduction of "vortices", i.e. whorls of motion, into extension. Divisibility, figurability and mobility, are the notes of extension, which appears to be little more thin what Descartes' Scholastic teachers called geometrical space. God is the First Cause of all motion in the physical universe, which is conceived as a mechanical system operated by its Maker. Even the bodies of animals are automata. Sensation is the critical problem in Cartesian psychology; it is viewed by Descartes as a function of the soul, but he was never able to find a satisfactory explanation of the apparent fact that the soul is moved by the body when sensation occurs. The theory of animal spirits provided Descartes with a sort of bridge between mind and matter, since these spirits are supposed to be very subtle matter, halfway, as it were, between thought and extension in their nature. However, this theory of sensation is the weakest link in the Cartesian explanation of cognition. Intellectual error is accounted for by Descartes in his theory of assent, which makes judgment an act of free will. Where the will over-reaches the intellect, judgment may be false. That the will is absolutely free in man, capable even of choosing what is presented by the intellect as the less desirable of two alternatives, is probably a vestige of Scotism retained from his college course in Scholasticism. Common-sense and moderation are the keynotes of Descartes' famous rules for the regulation of his own conduct during his nine years of methodic doubt, and this ethical attitude continued throughout his life. He believed that man is responsible ultimately to God for the courses of action that he may choose. He admitted that conflicts may occur between human passions and human reason. A virtuous life is made possible by the knowledge of what is right and the consequent control of the lower tendencies of human nature. Six primary passions are described by Descartes wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sorrow. These are passive states of consciousness, partly caused by the body, acting through the animal spirits, and partly caused by the soul. Under rational control, they enable the soul to will what is good for the body. Descartes' terminology suggests that there are psychological faculties, but he insists that these powers are not really distinct from the soul itself, which is man's sole psychic agency. Descartes was a practical Catholic all his life and he tried to develop proofs of the existence of God, an explanation of the Eucharist, of the nature of religious faith, and of the operation of Divine Providence, using his philosophy as the basis for a new theology. This attempted theology has not found favor with Catholic theologians in general.
Cassirer, Ernst: (1874-) Has been chiefly interested in developing the position of the neo-Kantian Philosophy of the Marburg School as it relates to scientific knowledge. Looking at the history of modern philosophy as a progressive formulation of this position, he has sought to extend it by detailed analyses of contemporary scientific developments. Of note are Cassirer's investigations in mathematics, his early consideration of chemical knowledge, and his treatment of Einstein's relativity theory. Main works: Das Erkenntntsprobleme, 3 vols. (1906); Substanz-u-Funktionsbegriff, 1910 (tr. Substance and Function); Philosophie der Symbolischen Forme (1923); Phanom. der Erkenntnis, 1929; Descartes; Leibniz. -- C.K.D.
Catuḥstava. (T. Bstod pa bzhi). In Sanskrit, "Four Songs of Praise"; a set of four devotional hymns attributed to the Indian monk NAGARJUNA, the founder of the MADHYAMAKA school of MAHAYANA philosophy. More than four such hymns have survived, so it is uncertain which were the original four. The four hymns now included in this set are entitled LOKATĪTASTAVA ("Hymn to He Who Transcends the World"), NIRAUPAMYASTAVA ("Hymn to He Who Is Unequaled"), ACINTYASTAVA ("Hymn to the Inconceivable"), and PARAMARTHASTAVA ("Hymn to the Ultimate"). These verses are addressed to the Buddha himself, in honor of his virtues and various aspects of his enlightenment. The author praises the Buddha for his supreme insight, his compassion, and his efforts to awaken all beings. The hymns also contain many important aspects of the philosophy of the Madhyamaka school. For example, verses five through ten of the LokAtītastava are used to explain the interdependence, and therefore inessential nature, of each of the five aggregates (SKANDHA).
Change, Philosophy of: (a) Any philosophical doctrine dealing with the subject of change, e.g., Aristotle's philosophy of change, (b) any philosophy which makes change an essential or pervasive character of reality, e.g., the philosophies of Heraclitus and Bergson. -- W.K.F.
Ch’ang sheng: In the philosophy of Lao Tzu, everlasting existence, such as that of Heaven and Earth, because of their “not existing for themselves.” In Taoist religious terminology: 1) Long life, as a result of the nourishment of the soul and rich accumulation of virtue. 2) Immortality, to be achieved through internal alchemy and external alchemy (lien tan).
Chu Hsi: (Chu Hui-an, Chu Yiian-hui, Chu Chung-hui, 1130-1200) Early distinguished himself as a patriot-scholar, having repeatedly petitioned the emperor to practice the principles of "investigation of things" and "extension of knowledge" and not to make peace with the invading enemy. But he preferred a life of peace and poverty, accepted a number of government appointments with a great deal of reluctance. His lectures at the White Deer Grotto attracted all prominent scholars of the time. The works of this leader of Neo-Confucianism (li hsueh) include the Chu Tzu Ch'uan-shu ("Complete Works," really Selected Works, partial English transl. by J. P. Bruce: The Philosophy of Human Nature by Chu Hsi) of 66 Chinese chuans in 25 volumes and the Yu Lei (Sayings Arranged by Topics) of 140 chuans in 40 volumes. -- W.T.C.
Citta: (Skr.) In the philosophy of the Yogasutras (q.v.) the phenomenal form of mind as the first creation of prakrti (q.v.) which is differentiated into mental states (vrttis), such as true and false knowledge, imagination, memory, sleep. These states being of the active, need restraining (citta-vrtti nirodha; cf. Yoga) in order to have the true and abiding nature of self (purusa) come into its own. -- K.F.L.
Cohen, Morris Raphael: (1880-) Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of the College of the City of New York. His contributions have been many in the fields of social, political and legal philosophy. He describes his view in general as realistic rationalism, a view that emphasizes the importance of intellect or reason as applied to what is, rather than in vacuo. He has found the principle of polarity a fruitful means of resolving antinomies. His best known works are Reason and Nature and Law and the Social Order. -- L.E.D.
Collective and Distributive Properties: A general term is taken in its collective sense when what is predicated of its applies to its designation as a whole, rather than to each of the individual members belonging to it; the distributive properties are those that apply only in the latter way. Colligation: (Lat. con + ligare, to bind) The assimilation of a number of separately observed facts to a unified conception or formula. The term was introduced by Whewcll who gives the eximple of the idea of an eliptical orbit which "unifies all observations made on the positions of a planet" (see Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, I Aphorism 1). J. S. Mill appropriates the term and carefully differentiates it from induction: whereas colligation is a simple "description" of observed facts, induction is an extension to the unknown and to the future. See Logic, III, ii, § 4. -- L.W.
consciousness: is regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. It is a subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science.
Cosmology: A branch of philosophy which treats of the origin and structure of the universe. It is to be contrasted with ontology or metaphysics, the study of the most general features of reality, natural and supernatural, and with the philosophy of nature, which investigates the basic laws, processes and divisions of the objects in nature. It is perhaps impossible to draw or maintain a sharp distinction between these different subjects, and treatises which profess to deal with one of them usually contain considerable material on the others. Encyclopedia, section 35), are the contingency, necessity, eternity, limitations and formal laws of the world, the freedom of man and the origin of evil. Most philosophers would add to the foregoing the question of the nature and interrelationship of space and time, and would perhaps exclude the question of the nature of freedom and the origin of evil as outside the province of cosmology. The method of investigation has usually been to accept the principles of science or the results of metaphysics and develop the consequences. The test of a cosmology most often used is perhaps that of exhibiting the degree of accordance it has with respect to both empirical fact and metaphysical truth. The value of a cosmology seems to consist primarily in its capacity to provide an ultimate frame for occurrences in nature, and to offer a demonstration of where the limits of the spatio-temporal world are, and how they might be transcended.
Crescas, Don Hasdai: (1340-1410) Jewish philosopher and theologian. He was the first European thinker to criticize Aristotelian cosmology and establish the probability of the existence of an infinite magnitude and of infinite space, thus paving the way for the modern conception of the universe. He also took exception to the entire trend of the philosophy of Maimonides, namely its extreme rationalism, and endeavored to inject the emotional element into religious contemplation, and make love an attribute of God and the source of His creative activity. He also expressed original views on the problems of freedom and creation. He undoubtedly exerted influence on Spinoza who quotes him by name in the formulation of some of his theories. See Jewish Philosophy. Cf. H. A. Wolfson, Crescas' Critique of Aristotle, 1929. -- M.W.
(c) The traditional problem of the origin of knowledge, viz. By what faculty or faculties of mind is knowledge attainable? It gave rise to the principal cleavage in modern epistemology between rationalism and empiricism (q.v.) though both occur in any thinker. The rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) rely primarily -- though not exclusively -- on reason as the source of genuine knowledge, and the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley and Hume) rely mainly on experience. A broadly conceived empiricism such as Locke's which acknowledges the authenticity of knowledge derived both from the inner sense (see Reflection; Introspection), and the outer senses, contrasts with that type of sensationalism (q.v.) which is empiricism restricted to the outer senses. Various attempts, the most notable of which is the critical philosophy of Kant, have been made to reconcile rationalism and empiricism by assigning to reason and experience their respective roles in the constitution of knowledge. Few historical or contemporary epistemologists would subscribe either to a rationalism or an empiricism of an exclusive and extreme sort.
cynicism ::: Originally the philosophy of a group of ancient Greeks called the Cynics, founded by Antisthenes. Nowadays the word generally refers to the opinions of those inclined to disbelieve in human sincerity, in virtue, or in altruism: individuals who maintain that only self-interest motivates human behavior. A modern cynic typically has a highly contemptuous attitude towards social norms, especially those that serve more of a ritualistic purpose than a practical one, and will tend to dismiss a substantial proportion of popular beliefs, conventional morality, and accepted wisdom as obsolete or irrelevant nonsense.
Cyrenaics: A school of Greek Philosophy founded by Aristippus of Cyrene. The teachings of this school are known as the philosophy of Hedonism, or the doctrine of enjoyment for its own sake. For the Cyrenaics the virtuous or the good life is that which yields the greatest amount of contentment or pleasure derived from the satisfaction of desire. Education and intelligence are necessary so as to guide one to proper enjoyment, that is to such satisfaction of desire as yields most pleasure and is least likely to cause one pain. It also aids one in being master of pleasure and not its slave. -- M.F.
Demiurge: (Gr. demiourgos) Artisan, craftsman, the term used by Plato in the Timaeus to designate the intermediary maker of the world. -- G.R.M Democritus of Abdera: (c 460-360 B.C.) Developed the first important materialist philosophy of nature, unless we are to count that of Leukippus. His influence was transmitted by Lucretius' poem till the centuries of the Renaissance when scholars' attention began to turn toward the study of nature. He taught that all substance consists of atoms, that is, of indivisible and imperceptibly small particles. The variety of atomic forms corresponds to, and accounts for, the variety of material qualities) the finest, smoothest, and most agile atoms constitute the substance of mind. Human perception is explained by him as an emanation of tiny copies of sensible things (eidola). which, through their impact upon the atoms of mind, leave impressions responsible for facts of memory. Diels, Fragm der Vorsokr, 4a; F. A. Lange, Gesch. der Materialismus, bd. I. -- R.B.W.
Dewey, John: (1859-) Leading American philosopher. The spirit of democracy and an abiding faith in the efficacy of human intelligence run through the many pages he has presented in the diverse fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, psychology, aesthetics, religion, ethics, politics and education, in all of which he has spoken with authority. Progressive education owes its impetus to his guidance and its tenets largely to his formulation. He is the chief exponent of that branch of pragmatism known as instrumentalism. Among his main works are Psychology, 1886; Outline of Ethics, 1891; Studies in Logical Theory, 1903; Ethics (Dewey and Tufts), 1908; How We Think, 1910; Influence of Darwin on German Philosophy, 1910; Democracy and Education, 1916; Essays in Experimental Logic, 1916; Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920; Human Nature and Conduct, 1922; Experience and Nature, 1925; The Quest for Certainty, 1929; Art as Experience, 1933; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1939. Cf. J. Ratner, The Philosophy of John Dewey, 1940, M. H. Thomas, A Bibliography of John Dewey, 1882-1939, The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, 1940). Dharma: (Skr.) Right, virtue, duty, usage, law, social as well as cosmic. -- K.F.L.
Driesch, Hans Adolf Eduard: (1867-1940) An experimental biologist turned philosopher, he as a rationalist became the most prominent defender of a renovated vitalism. He excludes the physical-chemical level of reality from his vitalism. He asserts that every organism has its own entelechy. For what he terms phylogenetic development, a more inclusive vitalism of the whole evolutionary process, he postulates a super-personal phylogenetic entelechy. He offers an a priori justification of his vitalistic theory, and treats incisively the logic of the psychological. Main works: Philosophy of the Organism; Ordnungslehre, 1912; Wirklichkeitslehre, 1917; Alltagsrätsel des Seelenlebens, 1938; "Kausalität und Vitalismus" in Jahrbuch der Schopenhauer Gesellschaft, XVI, 1939.
Dynamism: (Gr. dynamis, power) A term applied to a philosophical system which, in contrast to philosophy of mechanism (q.v.), adopts force rather than mass or motion as its basic explanatory concept. In this sense the Leibnizian philosophy is dynamism in contrast to the mechanism of Descartes' physics. -- L.W.
E. L. Thorndike, Human Nature and the Social Order. See Freud, Gestalt, Introspection, Mind, Subconscious. Psychology of Religion: A scientific, descriptive study of mental life and behavior with special reference to religious activities. The aim of this study is not to criticize or evaluate religion (see Philosophy of Religion) but to describe its forms as they reflect the mental processes of men. As an extended chapter in the field of general psychology, psychology of religion reflects the various types of psychology now current. As a scientific study this subject began its fruitful career at the beginning of this century, making illuminating disclosures on the nature of conversion, varieties of religious experience, the origin and character of beliefs in God and immortality, the techniques of mystics, types of worship, etc. Due to the confused state of psychology-in-general and especially to the recent vogue of behaviorism this subject has fallen somewhat into an eclipse -- at least for the present. Cf. Wm. James: Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902. -- V.F.
Enlightenment: When Kant, carried by the cultural enthusiasm of his time, explained "enlightenment" as man's coming of age from the state of infancy which rendered him incapable of using his reason without the aid of others, he gave only the subjective meaning of the term. Objectively, enlightenment is a cultural period distinguished by the fervent efforts of leading personalities to make reason the absolute ruler of human life, and to shed the light of knowledge upon the mind and conscience of any individual. Such attempts are not confined to a particular time, or nation, as history teaches; but the term is generally applied to the European enlightenment stretching from the early 17th to the beginning of the 19th century, especially fostered by English, Dutch, French, and German philosophers. It took its start in England from the empiricism of F. Bacon, Th. Hobbes, J. Locke, it found a religious version in the naturalism of Edw. H. Cherbury, J. Toland, M. Tindal, H. Bolingbroke, and the host of "freethinkers", while the Earl of Shaftesbury imparted to it a moral on the "light of reason". Not so constructive but radical in their sarcastic criticism of the past were the French enlighteners, showing that their philosophy got its momentum from the moral corruption at the royal court and abuse of kinglv power in France. Descartes' doctrine of the "clear and perspicuous ideas," Spinoza's critical attitude towards religion, and Leibniz-Wolff's "reasonable thinking" prepared the philosophy of P. Bayle, Ch. Montesquieu, F. M. Voltaire, and J. J. Rousseau. The French positive contribution to the subject was the "Encyclopedie ou Dictionaire raisonne des sciences, arts et metiers", 1751-72, in 28 volumes, edited by Diderot, D'Alembert, Helvetius, Holbach, J. L. Lagrane, etc. What, in England and France, remained on the stage of mere ideas and utopic dreams became reality in the new commonwealth of the U.S.A. The "fathers of the constitution" were enlightened, outstanding among them B. Franklin, Th. Jefferson, J. Adams, A. Hamilton, and Th. Paine their foremost literary propagandist.
Epicureanism ::: While often considered to be the philosophy of pleasure seeking, in fact refers to a middle-path philosophy defining happiness as success in avoiding pain, in the form of both mental worry and physical discomfort, in order to produce a state of tranquility.
epiphenomenalism ::: The view in philosophy of mind according to which physical events have mental effects, but mental events have no effects of any kind. In other words, the causal relations go only one way, from physical to mental. In recent times it is usually considered a type of dualism, because it postulates physical events but also non-physical mental events; but historically it has sometimes been thought a kind of monism, because of its sharp divergence from substance dualism.
esthetics ::: n. --> The theory or philosophy of taste; the science of the beautiful in nature and art; esp. that which treats of the expression and embodiment of beauty by art.
Same as Aesthete, Aesthetic, Aesthetical, Aesthetics, etc.
Ethical formalism: (Kantian) Despite the historical over-shadowing of Kant's ethical position by the influence of The Critique of Pure Reason upon the philosophy of the past century and a half, Kant's own (declared) major interest, almost from the very beginning, was in moral philosophy. Even the Critique of Pure Reason itself was written only in order to clear the ground for dealing adequately with the field of ethics in the Grundlegung zur Metapkysik der Sttten (1785), in the Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft (1788), and in the Metaphysik der Sitten (1797). By the end of the seventeen-sixties Kant was ready to discard every prior ethical theory, from the earlv Greeks to Baumgarten, Rousseau, and the British moralists, finding, all of them, despite the wide divergencies among them, equally dogmatic and unacceptable. Each of the older theories he found covertly to rely upon some dogmatic criterion or other, be it a substantive "principle," an intuition, or an equally substantive "sense." Every such ethical theory fails to deal with ethical issues as genuinely problematic, since it is amenable to some "demonstrative" preconceived criterion.
Ethics In theosophy, a philosophy of moral conduct based on the inner structure and operations of the universe itself, not a mere code of conventional behavior. The grounds alleged for moral conduct depend on one’s view of man and the universe. Theosophy distinguishes between a person’s real self and the illusive personal masks which are mistaken for that self. As with Kant, a sharp distinction is drawn between wish and inclination on the one hand, and the sense of moral obligation on the other; this latter is regarded as supervening upon the drama of self-interest and imposing a higher law.
E. von Hartmann, Philos. des Unbewussten, 3 vol. 1869 (Eng. tr. Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1931); Die Religion des Geistes, 1882; Aesthetik, 1886; Kategorienlehre, 1897; Geschichte der Metaphysik, 1900; Das Problem des Lebens, 1906; System der Philosophie in Grundriss, 1906-10. -- K.F.L.
Feuerbach. Ludwig Andreas: (1804-1872) Was one of the earliest thinkers manifesting the trend toward the German materialism of the 19th century. Like so many other thinkers of that period, he started with the acceptance of Hegel's objective idealism, but soon he attempted to resolve the opposition of spiritualism and materialism. His main contributions lay in the field of the philosophy of religion interpreted by him as "the dream of the human spirit" essentially an earthly dream. He publicly acknowledged his utter disbelief in immortality, which act did not fail to provoke the ire of the authorities and terminated his academic career.
formalism ::: 1. A certain school in the philosophy of mathematics, stressing axiomatic proofs through theorems specifically associated with David Hilbert. ::: 2. A school of thought in law and jurisprudence that emphasises the fairness of process over substantive outcomes. See Legal formalism. ::: 3. In economic anthropology, the theoretical perspective that the principles of neoclassical economics can be applied to humans' understanding of all human societies. ::: 4. A certain rigorous mathematical method: see formal system. ::: 5. A set of notations and rules for manipulating them that yield results in agreement with experiment or other techniques of calculation. These rules and notations may or may not have a corresponding mathematical semantics. In the case no mathematical semantics exists, the calculations are often said to be purely formal. See for example scientific formalism. ::: 6. A style of literary and artistic criticism that focuses on artistic or literary techniques in themselves, in separation from the work's social and historical context. See formalism (art), formalism (literature). ::: 7. A style of film criticism that focuses on the technical aspects of filmmaking (e.g., lighting, sets, costumes, etc.). The term may also refer to an avant-garde experimental film movement, often seen as odd or extremist, that was concerned with the beauty of the actual physical form of film (i.e., the celluloid itself).
Funke: German for spark. In the philosophy of J. G. Fichte, the divine spark, the life that stirs and wells up within the individual.
God: In metaphysical thinking a name for the highest, ultimate being, assumed by theology on the basis of authority, revelation, or the evidence of faith as absolutely necessary, but demonstrated as such by a number of philosophical systems, notably idealistic, monistic and dualistic ones. Proofs of the existence of God fall apart into those that are based on facts of experience (desire or need for perfection, dependence, love, salvation, etc.), facts of religious history (consensus gentium, etc.)), postulates of morality (belief in ultimate justice, instinct for an absolute good, conscience, the categorical imperative, sense of duty, need of an objective foundation of morality, etc.)), postulates of reason (cosmological, physico-theological, teleological, and ontological arguments), and the inconceivableness of the opposite. As to the nature of God, the great variety of opinions are best characterized by their several conceptions of the attributes of God which are either of a non-personal (pantheistic, etc.) or personal (theistic, etc.) kind, representing concepts known from experience raised to a superlative degree ("omniscient", "eternal", etc.). The reality, God, may be conceived as absolute or as relative to human values, as being an all-inclusive one, a duality, or a plurality. Concepts of God calling for unquestioning faith, belief in miracles, and worship or representing biographical and descriptive sketches of God and his creation, are rather theological than metaphysical, philosophers, on the whole, utilizing the idea of God or its linguistic equivalents in other languages, despite popular and church implications, in order not to lose the feeling-contact with the rather abstract world-ground. See Religion, Philosophy of. -- K.F.L.
Hamann, Johann Georg: (1730-1788) Kant's extreme pietist friend, and, like him, a native of Königsberg, he saw in the critical philosophy of Kant an unsuccessful attempt to make reason independent of all tradition, belief and experience. -- H.H.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Born at Stuttgart in 1770 and died at Berlin in 1831. He studied theology, philosophy and the classics at Tübingen, 1788-93, occupied the conventional position of tutor in Switzerland and Frankfort on the Main, 1794-1800, and went to Jena as Privatdocent in philosophy in 1801. He was promoted to a professorship at Jena in 1805, but was driven from the city the next year by the incursion of the French under Napoleon. He then went to Bamberg, where he remained two years as editor of a newspaper. The next eight years he spent as director of the Gymnasium at Nürnberg. In 1816 he accepted a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg, from which position he was called two years later to succeed Fichte at the University of Berlin. While at Jena, he co-operated with Schelling in editing the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, to which he contributed many articles. His more important volumes were published as follows: Phänomenologie des Geistes, 1807; Wissenschaft der Logik, 1812-16; Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, 1817; Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 1820. Shortly after his death his lectures on the philosophy of religion, the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, and aesthetics were published from the collated lecture-notes of his students. His collected works in nineteen volumes were published 1832-40 by a group of his students. -- G.W.C.
Heidegger, Martin: (1889-) Trained in Husserl's radical structural analysis of pure consciousness, Heidegger shares with phenomenology the effort to methodically analyze and describe the conceptual meanings of single phenomena. He aimed at a phenomenological analysis of human existence in respect to its temporal and historical character. Concentrating on the Greek tradition, and endeavoring to open a totally different approach from that of the Greek thinkers to the problem of being, he seeks to find his way back to an inner independence of philosophy from the special sciences. Before a start can be made in the radical analysis of human existence, the road has to be cleared of the objections of philosophical tradition, science, logic and common sense. As the moderns have forgotten the truths the great thinkers discovered, have lost the ability to penetrate to the real origins, the recovery of the hard-won, original, uncorrupted insights of man into metaphysical reality, is only possible through a "destructive" analysis of the traditional philosophies. By this recovery of the hidden sources, Heidegger aims to revive the genuine philosophizing which, not withstanding appearances, has vanished from us in the Western world because of autonomous science serious disputing of the position of philosophy. As human reality is so structured that it discloses itself immediately, he writes really an idealistic philosophy of homo faber. But instead of being a rationalistic idealist reading reason into the structure of the really real, he takes a more avowedly emotional phenomenon as the center of a new solution of the Seinsfrage.
Hence in its widest sense Scholasticism embraces all the intellectual activities, artistic, philosophical and theological, carried on in the medieval schools. Any attempt to define its narrower meaning in the field of philosophy raises serious difficulties, for in this case, though the term's comprehension is lessened, it still has to cover many centuries of many-faced thought. However, it is still possible to list several characteristics sufficient to differentiate Scholastic from non-Scholastic philosophy. While ancient philosophy was the philosophy of a people and modern thought that of individuals, Scholasticism was the philosophy of a Christian society which transcended the characteristics of individuals, nations and peoples. It was the corporate product of social thought, and as such its reasoning respected authority in the forms of tradition and revealed religion. Tradition consisted primarily in the systems of Plato and Aristotle as sifted, adapted and absorbed through many centuries. It was natural that religion, which played a paramount role in the culture of the middle ages, should bring influence to bear on the medieval, rational view of life. Revelation was held to be at once a norm and an aid to reason. Since the philosophers of the period were primarily scientific theologians, their rational interests were dominated by religious preoccupations. Hence, while in general they preserved the formal distinctions between reason and faith, and maintained the relatively autonomous character of philosophy, the choice of problems and the resources of science were controlled by theology. The most constant characteristic of Scholasticism was its method. This was formed naturally by a series of historical circumstances, The need of a medium of communication, of a consistent body of technical language tooled to convey the recently revealed meanings of religion, God, man and the material universe led the early Christian thinkers to adopt the means most viable, most widely extant, and nearest at hand, viz. Greek scientific terminology. This, at first purely utilitarian, employment of Greek thought soon developed under Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Origin, and St. Augustine into the "Egyptian-spoils" theory; Greek thought and secular learning were held to be propaedeutic to Christianity on the principle: "Whatever things were rightly said among all men are the property of us Christians." (Justin, Second Apology, ch. XIII). Thus was established the first characteristic of the Scholastic method: philosophy is directly and immediately subordinate to theology. Because of this subordinate position of philosophy and because of the sacred, exclusive and total nature of revealed wisdom, the interest of early Christian thinkers was focused much more on the form of Greek thought than on its content and, it might be added, much less of this content was absorbed by early Christian thought than is generally supposed. As practical consequences of this specialized interest there followed two important factors in the formation of Scholastic philosophy: Greek logic en bloc was taken over by Christians; from the beginning of the Christian era to the end of the XII century, no provision was made in Catholic centers of learning for the formal teaching of philosophy. There was a faculty to teach logic as part of the trivium and a faculty of theology. For these two reasons, what philosophy there was during this long period of twelve centuries, was dominated first, as has been seen, by theology and, second, by logic. In this latter point is found rooted the second characteristic of the Scholastic method: its preoccupation with logic, deduction, system, and its literary form of syllogistic argumentation. The third characteristic of the Scholastic method follows directly from the previous elements already indicated. It adds, however, a property of its own gained from the fact that philosophy during the medieval period became an important instrument of pedogogy. It existed in and for the schools. This new element coupled with the domination of logic, the tradition-mindedness and social-consciousness of the medieval Christians, produced opposition of authorities for or against a given problem and, finally, disputation, where a given doctrine is syllogistically defended against the adversaries' objections. This third element of the Scholastic method is its most original characteristic and accounts more than any other single factor for the forms of the works left us from this period. These are to be found as commentaries on single or collected texts; summae, where the method is dialectical or disputational in character. The main sources of Greek thought are relatively few in number: all that was known of Plato was the Timaeus in the translation and commentary of Chalcidius. Augustine, the pseudo-Areopagite, and the Liber de Causis were the principal fonts of Neoplatonic literature. Parts of Aristotle's logical works (Categoriae and de Interpre.) and the Isagoge of Porphyry were known through the translations of Boethius. Not until 1128 did the Scholastics come to know the rest of Aristotle's logical works. The golden age of Scholasticism was heralded in the late XIIth century by the translations of the rest of his works (Physics, Ethics, Metaphysics, De Anima, etc.) from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona, John of Spain, Gundisalvi, Michael Scot, and Hermann the German, from the Greek by Robert Grosseteste, William of Moerbeke, and Henry of Brabant. At the same time the Judae-Arabian speculation of Alkindi, Alfarabi, Avencebrol, Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides together with the Neoplatonic works of Proclus were made available in translation. At this same period the Scholastic attention to logic was turned to metaphysics, even psychological and ethical problems and the long-discussed question of the universals were approached from this new angle. Philosophy at last achieved a certain degree of autonomy and slowly forced the recently founded universities to accord it a separate faculty.
Herbs The very large number of plants used as remedial agents in medicine are the natural remedies in treating disease, divine instructors having revealed to early humanity the great boon of agriculture and the medical use of plants. Echoes of the archaic wisdom appear in Vedic writings, but few can interpret the philosophy of the one Life which functions in the elements and forces of the human body, and their related action in the plants and minerals of the body of the earth.
He was the first to recognize a fundamental critical difference between the philosopher and the scientist. He found those genuine ideals in the pre-Socratic period of Greek culture which he regarded as essential standards for the deepening of individuality and real culture in the deepest sense, towards which the special and natural sciences, and professional or academic philosophers failed to contribute. Nietzsche wanted the philosopher to be prophetic, originally forward-looking in the clarification of the problem of existence. Based on a comprehensive critique of the history of Western civilization, that the highest values in religion, morals and philosophy have begun to lose their power, his philosophy gradually assumed the will to power, self-aggrandizement, as the all-embracing principle in inorganic and organic nature, in the development of the mind, in the individual and in society. More interested in developing a philosophy of life than a system of academic philosophy, his view is that only that life is worth living which develops the strength and integrity to withstand the unavoidable sufferings and misfortunes of existence without flying into an imaginary world.
Hindu Ethics: See Indian Ethics. Hindu Aesthetics: See Indian Aesthetics. Hindu Philosophy: See Indian Philosophy. Historical materialism: The social philosophy of dialectical materialism. The application of the general principles of dialectical materialism to the specific field of human history, the development of human society. One of the chief problems Marx dealt with was that of the basic causal agent in the movement of human history. He states his thesis as follows:
Historicism: The view that the history of anything is a sufficient explanation of it, that the values of anything can be accounted for through the discovery of its origins, that the nature of anything is entirely comprehended in its development, as for example, that the properties of the oak tree are entirely accounted for by an exhaustive description of its development from the acorn. The doctrine which discounts the fallaciousness of the historical fallacy. Applied by some critics to the philosophy of Hegel and Karl Marx. -- J.K.F.
History, Philosophy of: History investigates the theories concerning the development of man as a social being within the limits of psychophysical causality. Owing to this double puipose the philosophy of history has to study the principles of historiography, and, first of all, their background, their causes and underlying laws, their meaning and motivation. This can be called the metaphysics of history. Secondly, it concerns itself with the cognitive part, i.e. with historic understanding, and then it is called the logic of history. While in earlier times the philosophy of history was predominantly metaphysics, it has turned more and more to the methodology or logic of history. A complete philosophy of history, however, ought to consider the metaphysical as well as the logical problems involved.
Höffding, Harald: (1843-1931) Danish philosopher at the University of Copenhagen and brilliant author of texts in psychology, history of philosophy and the philosophy of religion. He held that the world of reality as a whole is unknowable although we may believe that conscious experience and its unity afford the best keys to unlock the metaphysical riddle. His svstem of thought is classified on the positive side as a cautious idealistic monism (his own term is "critical monism").
Hsing (erh) hsia: What is within the realm of corporeality. See Hsing (erh) shang. Hsing li hsueh: Philosophy of the Nature and Reason of man and things. See Li hsueh. -- W.T.C.
Huizinga, Johan: (1872) Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leyden, Holland. He has been a pronounced exponent of the philosophy of culture which he describes as a condition of society in which there is a harmonious balance of material and spiritual values and a harmonious ideal spurring the community's activities to a convergence of all efforts toward the attainment of that ideal. His best known work is Homo Ludens. -- L.E.D.
H. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of "As If", Eng. trans., 1924.
“If we only search for the true essence of the philosophy of both Manu and the Kabala, we will find that Vishnu is, as well as Adam Kadmon, the expression of the universe itself; and that his incarnations are but concrete and various embodiments of the manifestations of this ‘Stupendous Whole.’ ‘I am the Soul, O, Arjuna. I am the Soul which exists in the heart of all beings; and I am the beginning and the middle, and also the end of existing things,’ says Vishnu to his disciple, in the Bhagavad-Gita (ch. x)” (IU 2:277).
II. Metaphysics of History: The metaphysical interpretations of the meaning of history are either supra-mundane or intra-mundane (secular). The oldest extra-mundane, or theological, interpretation has been given by St. Augustine (Civitas Dei), Dante (Divma Commedia) and J. Milton (Paradise Lost and Regained). All historic events are seen as having a bearing upon the redemption of mankind through Christ which will find its completion at the end of this world. Owing to the secularistic tendencies of modern times the Enlightenment Period considered the final end of human history as the achievement of public welfare through the power of reason. Even the ideal of "humanity" of the classic humanists, advocated by Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Rousseau, Lord Byron, is only a variety of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and in the same line of thought we find A. Comte, H. Spencer ("human moral"), Engels and K. Marx. The German Idealism of Kant and Hegel saw in history the materialization of the "moral reign of freedom" which achieves its perfection in the "objective spirit of the State". As in the earlier systems of historical logic man lost his individuality before the forces of natural laws, so, according to Hegel, he is nothing but an instrument of the "idea" which develops itself through the three dialectic stages of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. (Example. Absolutism, Democracy, Constitutional Monarchy.) Even the great historian L. v. Ranke could not break the captivating power of the Hegelian mechanism. Ranke places every historical epoch into a relation to God and attributes to it a purpose and end for itself. Lotze and Troeltsch followed in his footsteps. Lately, the evolutionistic interpretation of H. Bergson is much discussed and disputed. His "vital impetus" accounts for the progressiveness of life, but fails to interpret the obvious setbacks and decadent civilizations. According to Kierkegaard and Spranger, merely human ideals prove to be too narrow a basis for the tendencies, accomplishments, norms, and defeats of historic life. It all points to a supra-mundane intelligence which unfolds itself in history. That does not make superfluous a natural interpretation, both views can be combined to understand history as an endless struggle between God's will and human will, or non-willing, for that matter. -- S.V.F.
ILLUSIONIST PHILOSOPHY In each world the monad consciousness apprehends reality totally differently. This is what was originally meant by the saying that all apprehension of reality is maya, or &
Indirect proof: See Reductio ad absurdum. Indiscernibles, Principle of: (Lat. indiscernibilis, indistinguishable) In the philosophy of Leibniz (Monadology, IX, Nouv. Essais, II, 22), no two monads can be exactly alike. -- V.J.B.
In Germany, the movement was initiated by G. W. Leibniz whose writings reveal another motive for the cult of pure reason, i.e. the deep disappointment with the Reformation and the bloody religious wars among Christians who were accused of having forfeited the confidence of man in revealed religion. Hence the outstanding part played by the philosophers of ''natural law", Grotius, S. Pufendorf, and Chr. Thomasius, their theme being advanced by the contributions to a "natural religion" and tolerance by Chr. Wolff, G. E. Lessing, G. Herder, and the Prussian king Frederik II. Fr. v. Schiller's lyric and dramas served as a powerful commendation of ideal freedom, liberty, justice, and humanity. A group of educators (philanthropists) designed new methods and curricula for the advancement of public education, many of them, eg. Pestalozzi, Basedow, Cooper, A. H. Francke, and Fr. A. Wolf, the father of classic humanism, having achieved international recognition. Although in general agreement with th philosophical axioms of foreign enlighteners, the German philosophy decidedly opposed the English sensism (Hume) and French scepticism, and reached its height in Kant's Critiques. The radical rationalism, however, combined with its animosity against religion, brought about strong philosophical, theological, and literal opposition (Hamann, Jacobi, Lavater) which eventually led to its defeat. The ideals of the enlightenment period, the impassioned zeal for the materialization of the ideal man in an ideal society show clearly that it was basically related to the Renaissance and its continuation. See Aufklärung. Cf. J. G. Hibben, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1910. -- S.v.F.
In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light. Even, it is by the projection of this luminous Overmind corona that the diffusion of a diminished light in the Ignorance and the throwing of that contrary shadow which swallows up in itself all light, the Inconscience, became at all possible. For Supermind transmits to Overmind all its realities, but leaves it to formulate them in a movement and according to an awareness of things which is still a vision of Truth and yet at the same time a first parent of the Ignorance. A line divides Supermind and Overmind which permits a free transmission, allows the lower Power to derive from the higher Power all it holds or sees, but automatically compels a transitional change in the passage. The integrality of the Supermind keeps always the essential truth of things, the total truth and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without being limited by them: but although it knows their oneness, can realise it in a spiritual cognition, yet its dynamic movement, even while relying on that for its security, is not directly determined by it. Overmind Energy proceeds through an illimitable capacity of separation and combination of the powers and aspects of the integral and indivisible all-comprehending Unity. It takes each Aspect or Power and gives to it an independent action in which it acquires a full separate importance and is able to work out, we might say, its own world of creation. Purusha and Prakriti, Conscious Soul and executive Force of Nature, are in the supramental harmony a two-aspected single truth, being and dynamis of the Reality; there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the other. In Overmind we have the origin of the cleavage, the trenchant distinction made by the philosophy of the Sankhyas in which they appear as two independent entities, Prakriti able to dominate Purusha and cloud its freedom and power, reducing it to a witness and recipient of her forms and actions, Purusha able to return to its separate existence and abide in a free self-sovereignty by rejection of her original overclouding material principle. So with the other aspects or powers of the Divine Reality, One and Many, Divine Personality and Divine Impersonality, and the rest; each is still an aspect and power of the one Reality, but each is empowered to act as an independent entity in the whole, arrive at the fullness of the possibilities of its separate expression and develop the dynamic consequences of that separateness. At the same time in Overmind this separateness is still founded on the basis of an implicit underlying unity; all possibilities of combination and relation between the separated Powers and Aspects, all interchanges and mutualities of their energies are freely organised and their actuality always possible.
Instrumentalism: In the philosophy of Dewey, instrumentahsm is scarcely distinguishable from experimentalism or operationahsm although it is used to characterize his earlier philosophy, and is, in its associations, more closely related to evolutionary philosophy, and nore influenced by biological, than by physical or social science.
instrumentalism ::: The idea that knowledge should be judged by its usefulness and that the truth-value of knowledge is irrelevant. Generally invoked in philosophy of science.
Integration: (Lat. integrare, to make whole) The act of making a whole out of parts. In mathematics, a limiting process which may be described in vague terms as summing up an infinite number of infinitesimals, part of the calculus. In psychology, the combination of psycho-physical elements into a complex unified organization. In cosmology, the synthetic philosophy of Spencer holds that the evolutionary process is marked by two movements: integration and differentiation. Integration consists in the development of more and more complex organizations. Inverse of: differentiation (q.v.). -- J.K.F.
internationalisation "programming" (i18n, globalisation, enabling, software enabling) The process and philosophy of making software portable to other {locales}. For successful {localisation}, products must be technically and culturally neutral. Effective internationalisation reduces the time and resources required for localisation, improving time-to-market abroad and allowing {simultaneous shipment}. In orther words, internationalisation abstracts out local details, localisation specifies those details for a particular locale. Technically this may include allowing {double-byte character sets} such as {unicode} or Japanese, local numbering, date and currency formats, and other local format conventions. It also includes the separation of {user interface} text e.g. in {dialog boxes} and {menus}. All the text used by an application may be kept in a separate file or directory, so that it can be translated all at once. User interfaces may require more screen space for text in other languages. The simplest form of internationalisation may be to make use of {operating system} calls that format time, date and currency values according to the operating system's configuration. The abbreviation i18n means "I - eighteen letters - N". (1999-06-28)
internationalisation ::: (programming) (i18n, globalisation, enabling, software enabling) The process and philosophy of making software portable to other locales.For successful localisation, products must be technically and culturally neutral. Effective internationalisation reduces the time and resources required shipment. In orther words, internationalisation abstracts out local details, localisation specifies those details for a particular locale.Technically this may include allowing double-byte character sets such as unicode or Japanese, local numbering, date and currency formats, and other local format conventions.It also includes the separation of user interface text e.g. in dialog boxes and menus. All the text used by an application may be kept in a separate file or directory, so that it can be translated all at once. User interfaces may require more screen space for text in other languages.The simplest form of internationalisation may be to make use of operating system calls that format time, date and currency values according to the operating system's configuration.The abbreviation i18n means I - eighteen letters - N. (1999-06-28)
In the field of the philosophy of religion, Platonism becomes obscure. There is little doubt that Plato paid only lip-service to the anthropomorphic polytheism of Athenian religion. Many of the attributes of the Idea of the Good are those of an eternal God. The Republic (Book II) pictures the Supreme Being as perfect, unchangeable and the author of truth. Similar rationalizations are found throughout the Laws. Another current of religious thought is to be found m the Timaeus, Politicus and Sophist. The story of the making of the universe and man by the Demiurgus is mythic and yet it is in many points a logical development of his theory of Ideas. The World-Maker does not create things from nothing, he fashions the world out of a pre-existing chaos of matter by introducing patterns taken from the sphere of Forms. This process of formation is also explained, in the Timaeus (54 ff), in terms of various mathematical figures. In an early period of the universe, God (Chronos) exercised a sort of Providential care over things in this world (Politicus, 269-275), but eventually man was left to his own devices. The tale of Er, at the end of the Republic, describes a judgment of souls after death, their separation into the good and the bad, and the assignment of various rewards and punishments. H. Stephanus et J. Serranus (ed.), Platonis Opera (Paris, 1578), has provided the standard pagination, now used in referring to the text of Plato, it is not a critical edition. J. Burnet (ed.), Platonis Opera, 5 vol. (Oxford, 1899-1907). Platon, Oeuvres completes, texte et trad., Collect. G. Bude (Paris, 1920 ff.). The Dialogues of Plato, transl. B. Jowett, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1920). W. Pater, Plato and Platonism (London, 1909). A. E. Taylor, Plato, the Man and his Work (N. Y., 1927). P. Shorey, What Plato Said (Chicago, 1933). A. Dies, Autour de Platon, 2 vol. (Paris, 1927). U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Platon, 2 vol. (Berlin, 1919). John Burnet, Platonism (Berkeley, 1928). Paul Elmer More, Platonism (Oxford, 1931). Constantm Ritter, Essence of Plato's Philosophy (London, 1933). Leon Robin, Platon (Paris, 1935). Paul Shorey, Platonism, Ancient and Modern (Berkeley, 1938). A. E. Taylor, Platontsm and Its Influence (London, 1924). F. J. E. Woodbridge, The Son of Apollo (Boston, 1929). C. Bigg, The Christian Platomsts of Alexandria (Oxford, 1913). T. Whittaker, The Neo-Platonists (Cambridge, 1918, 2nd ed ). John H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Angle-Saxon Philosophy (New York, 1931). F. J. Powicke, The Cambridge Platonists (Boston, 1927). -- V.J.B.
“In the Pantheon of the Egyptians it meant the ‘One-only-One,’ because they did not proceed in their popular or exoteric religion higher than the third manifestation which radiates from the Unknown and the Unknowable, the first unmanifested and the second logoi in the esoteric philosophy of every nation. The Nous of Anaxagoras was the Mahat of the Hindu Brahma, the first manifested Deity — ‘the Mind or Spirit self-potent’; this creative Principle being of course the primum mobile of everything in the Universe — its Soul and Ideation” (TG 234).
intuitionism ::: In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach to mathematics as the constructive mental activity of humans. That is, mathematics does not consist of analytic activities wherein deep properties of existence are revealed and applied. Instead, logic and mathematics are the application of internally consistent methods to realize more complex mental constructs.
Iolo Morganwg A Welsh stonemason of the 18th and early 19th centuries, who claimed to have copied the documents contained in the book Barddas from manuscripts he found in private libraries in Wales. These documents claim to detail the philosophy of the Druids; the teachings given make clear the meaning of numberless passages of Welsh literature from the 6th to the 15th century, and are also in accord with the esoteric doctrine of all the ancient nations.
Java Aleim (Hebrew) Yĕhovāh ’Elōhīm More commonly Jehovah Elohim. Lord God — in Genesis (ch 1) the word ’elohim is used; in chapter 2, Yehovah or Lord makes its appearance; and elsewhere the words are combined into Yehovah ’Elohim. In the esoteric philosophy of Mesopotamia, used as a term for the head of a college of priests (’Elohim) which at one time flourished in Chaldea; the possessor of the “word,” passing it on to his successor only at the moment of death. See also ELOHIM
J. L. Coolidge, A History of Geometrical Methods, New York, 1940. Mathesis universalis: Universal mathematics. One major part of Leibniz's program for logic was the development of a universal mathematics or universal calculus for manipulating, i.e. performing deductions in, the universal language (characteristica universalis). This universal language, he thought, could be constructed on the basis of a relatively few simple terms and, when constructed, would be of immense value to scientists and philosophers in reasoning as well as in communication. Leibniz's studies on the subject of a universal mathematics are the starting point in modern philosophy of the development of symbolic, mathematical logic. -- F.L.W.
Kantianism ::: The philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher born in Königsberg, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia). The terms Kantianism or Kantian can refer to contemporary positions in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics.
Kant, Immanuel: (1724-1804), born and died in Königsberg. Studied the Leibniz-Wolffian philosoohv under Martin Knutzen. Also studied and taught astronomy (see Kant-Laplace hypothesis), mechanics and theology. The influence of Newton's physics and Lockean psychology vied with his Leibnizian training. Kant's personal life was that of a methodic pedant, touched with Rousseauistic piety and Prussian rigidity. He scarcely travelled 40 miles from Königsberg in his life-time, disregarded music, had little esteem for women, and cultivated few friends apart from the Prussian officials he knew in Königsberg. In 1755, he became tutor in the family of Count Kayserling. In 1766, he was made under-librarian, and in 1770 obtained the chair of logic and metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. Heine has made classical the figure of Kant appearing for his daily walk with clock-like regularity. But his very wide reading compensated socially for his narrow range of travel, and made him an interesting coversationalist as well as a successful teacher. Kantianism: The philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804); also called variously, the critical philosophy, criticism, transcendentalism, or transcendental idealism. Its roots lay in the Enlightenment; but it sought to establish a comprehensive method and doctrine of experience which would undercut the rationalistic metaphysics of the 17th and 18th centuries. In an early "pre-critical" period, Kant's interest centered in evolutionary, scientific cosmology. He sought to describe the phenomena of Nature, organic as well as inorganic, as a whole of interconnected natural laws. In effect he elaborated and extended the natural philosophy of Newton in a metaphysical context drawn from Christian Wolff and indirectly from Leibniz.
Kuan Tzu (Chinese) The most voluminous Taoist work that has come down to our day. It treats of the ethical and political philosophy of tao with regard to the universe and man. Its authorship is assigned to Kuan tzu (also Kaun Chung or Kwan-twu, Kwan-tsze, Kwan-tse, etc.) of the 7th century BC. He is regarded as one of the three patriarchs of Tao — the other two being Lao tzu and Chuang Tzu. The work bears evidence of having been added to by other and later authors.
Kyoto school. An influential school of modern and contemporary Japanese philosophy that is closely associated with philosophers from Kyoto University; it combines East Asian and especially MAHĀYĀNA Buddhist thought, such as ZEN and JoDO SHINSHu, with modern Western and especially German philosophy and Christian thought. NISHIDA KITARo (1870-1945), Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962), and NISHITANI KEIJI (1900-1991) are usually considered to be the school's three leading figures. The name "Kyoto school" was coined in 1932 by Tosaka Jun (1900-1945), a student of Nishida and Tanabe, who used it pejoratively to denounce Nishida and Tanabe's "Japanese bourgeois philosophy." Starting in the late 1970s, Western scholars began to research the philosophical insights of the Kyoto school, and especially the cross-cultural influences with Western philosophy. During the 1990s, the political dimensions of the school have also begun to receive scholarly attention. ¶ Although the school's philosophical perspectives have developed through mutual criticism between its leading figures, the foundational philosophical stance of the Kyoto school is considered to be based on a shared notion of "absolute nothingness." "Absolute nothingness" was coined by Nishida Kitaro and derives from a putatively Zen and PURE LAND emphasis on the doctrine of emptiness (suNYATĀ), which Kyoto school philosophers advocated was indicative of a distinctive Eastern approach to philosophical inquiry. This Eastern emphasis on nothingness stood in contrast to the fundamental focus in Western philosophy on the ontological notion of "being." Nishida Kitaro posits absolute nothingness topologically as the "site" or "locale" (basho) of nonduality, which overcomes the polarities of subject and object, or noetic and noematic. Another major concept in Nishida's philosophy is "self-awareness" (jikaku), a state of mind that transcends the subject-object bifurcation, which was initially adopted from William James' (1842-1910) notion of "pure experience" (J. junsui keiken); this intuition reveals a limitless, absolute reality that has been described in the West as God or in the East as emptiness. Tanabe Hajime subsequently criticized Nishida's "site of absolute nothingness" for two reasons: first, it was a suprarational religious intuition that transgresses against philosophical reasoning; and second, despite its claims to the contrary, it ultimately fell into a metaphysics of being. Despite his criticism of what he considered to be Nishida's pseudoreligious speculations, however, Tanabe's Shin Buddhist inclinations later led him to focus not on Nishida's Zen Buddhist-oriented "intuition," but instead on the religious aspect of "faith" as the operative force behind other-power (TARIKI). Inspired by both Nishida and such Western thinkers as Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) (with whom he studied), Nishitani Keiji developed the existential and phenomenological aspects of Nishida's philosophy of absolute nothingness. Concerned with how to reach the place of absolute nothingness, given the dilemma of, on the one hand, the incessant reification and objectification by a subjective ego and, on the other hand, the nullification of reality, he argued for the necessity of overcoming "nihilism." The Kyoto school thinkers also played a central role in the development of a Japanese political ideology around the time of the Pacific War, which elevated the Japanese race mentally and spiritually above other races and justified Japanese colonial expansion. Their writings helped lay the foundation for what came to be called Nihonjinron, a nationalist discourse that advocated the uniqueness and superiority of the Japanese race; at the same time, however, Nishida also resisted tendencies toward fascism and totalitarianism in Japanese politics. Since the 1990s, Kyoto school writings have come under critical scrutiny in light of their ties to Japanese exceptionalism and pre-war Japanese nationalism. These political dimensions of Kyoto school thought are now considered as important for scholarly examination as are its contributions to cross-cultural, comparative philosophy.
Language, Philosophy of: Any philosophical investigation arising from study of concrete, actualized, languages, whether "living" or "dead". By "language" is here to be understood a system of signs (whether words or ideograms) used in regular modes of combination, in accordance with conventionally established rules, for the purpose of communication.
legal interpretivism ::: A school of thought in the philosophy of law, in which law is not considered to be a set of data or physical facts, but what lawyers aim to construct. It holds that there is no separation between law and morality although there are differences (this is the opposite of the main claim of legal positivism). According to legal interpretivism, law is not immanent in nature nor do legal values and principles exist independently and outside of the legal practice itself (this is the opposite of the main claim of natural law theory).
legal naturalism ::: A term coined by Olufemi Taiwo for a current in the social philosophy of Karl Marx that can be interpreted as one of Natural Law. Taiwo considered it the manifestation of Natural Law in a dialectical materialist context.
Legal Philosophy: Deals with the philosophic principles of law and justice. The origin is to be found in ancient philosophy. The Greek Sophists criticized existing laws and customs by questioning their validity: All human rules are artificial, created by enactment or convention, as opposed to natural law, based on nature. The theory of a law of nature was further developed by Aristotle and the Stoics. According to the Stoics the natural law is based upon the eternal law of the universe; this itself is an outgrowth of universal reason, as man's mind is an offshoot of the latter. The idea of a law of nature as being innate in man was particularly stressed and popularized by Cicero who identified it with "right reason" and already contrasted it with written law that might be unjust or even tyrannical. Through Saint Augustine these ideas were transmitted to medieval philosophy and by Thomas Aquinas built into his philosophical system. Thomas considers the eternal law the reason existing in the divine mind and controlling the universe. Natural law, innate in man participates in that eternal law. A new impetus was given to Legal Philosophy by the Renaissance. Natural Jurisprudence, properly so-called, originated in the XVII. century. Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Benedictus Spinoza, John Locke, Samuel Pufendorf were the most important representatives of that line of thought. Grotius, continuing the Scholastic tradition, particularly stressed the absoluteness of natural hw (it would exist even if God did not exist) and, following Jean Bodin, the sovereignty of the people. The idea of the social contract traced all political bodies back to a voluntary compact by which every individual gave up his right to self-government, or rather transferred it to the government, abandoning a state of nature which according to Hobbes must have been a state of perpetual war. The theory of the social compact more and more accepts the character of a "fiction" or of a regulative idea (Kant). In this sense the theory means that we ought to judge acts of government by their correspondence to the general will (Rousseau) and to the interests of the individuals who by transferring their rights to the commonwealth intended to establish their real liberty. Natural law by putting the emphasis on natural rights, takes on a revolutionary character. It played a part in shaping the bills of rights, the constitutions of the American colonies and of the Union, as well as of the French declaration of the rights of men and of citizens. Natural jurisprudence in the teachings of Christian Wolff and Thomasius undergoes a kind of petrification in the vain attempt to outline an elaborate system of natural law not only in the field of international or public law, but also in the detailed regulations of the law of property, of contract, etc. This sort of dogmatic approach towards the problems of law evoked the opposition of the Historic School (Gustav Hugo and Savigny) which stressed the natural growth of laws ind customs, originating from the mysterious "spirit of the people". On the other hand Immanuel Kant tried to overcome the old natural law by the idea of a "law of reason", meaning an a priori element in all existing or positive law. In his definition of law ("the ensemble of conditions according to which everyone's will may coexist with the will of every other in accordance with a general rule of liberty"), however, as in his legal philosophy in general, he still shares the attitude of the natural law doctrine, confusing positive law with the idea of just law. This is also true of Hegel whose panlogism seemed to lead in this very direction. Under the influence of epistemological positivism (Comte, Mill) in the later half of the nineteenth century, legal philosophy, especially in Germany, confined itself to a "general theory of law". Similarily John Austin in England considered philosophy of law concerned only with positive law, "as it necessarily is", not as it ought to be. Its main task was to analyze certain notions which pervade the science of law (Analytical Jurisprudence). In recent times the same tendency to reduce legal philosophy to logical or at least methodological tasks was further developed in attempting a pure science of law (Kelsen, Roguin). Owing to the influence of Darwinism and natural science in general the evolutionist and biological viewpoint was accepted in legal philosophy: comparative jurisprudence, sociology of law, the Freirecht movement in Germany, the study of the living law, "Realism" in American legal philosophy, all represent a tendency against rationalism. On the other hand there is a revival of older tendencies: Hegelianism, natural law -- especially in Catholic philosophy -- and Kantianism (beginning with Rudolf Stammler). From here other trends arose: the critical attitude leads to relativism (f.i. Gustav Radbruch); the antimetaphysical tendency towards positivism -- though different from epistemological positivism -- and to a pure theory of law. Different schools of recent philosophy have found their applications or repercussions in legal philosophy: Phenomenology, for example, tried to intuit the essences of legal institutions, thus coming back to a formalist position, not too far from the real meaning of analytical jurisprudence. Neo-positivism, though so far not yet explicitly applied to legal philosophy, seems to lead in the same direction. -- W.E.
legal positivism ::: A school of thought in the philosophy of law that claims that laws are made (deliberately or unintentionally) by human beings, and that there is no inherent or necessary connection between the validity of law and what is ethical or moral.
Lenin, V. I.: (Ulianov, Vladimir Ilyich) Lenin is generally regarded as the chief exponent of dialectical materialism (q.v.) after Marx and Engels. He was born April 22, 1870, in Simbirsk, Russia, and received the professional training of a lawyer. A Marxist from his student days onward, he lived many years outside of Russia as a political refugee, and read widely in the social sciences and philosophy. In the latter field his "Philosophical Note Books" (as yet untranslated into English) containing detailed critical comments on the works of many leading philosophers, ancient and modern, and in particular on Hegel, indicate his close study of texts. In 1909, Lenin published his best known philosophic work "Materialism and Empirio-Cnticism" which was directed against "a number of writers, would-be Marxists" including Bazarov, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Berman, Helfond, Yushkevich, Suvorov and Valentinov, and especially against a symposium of this group published under the title, "Studies in the Philosophy of Marxism" which in general adopted the "positivistic" position of Mach and Avenanus.
Levy-Bruhl, Lucien: (1857-1939) Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne 1899-1939, represents a sociological and anthropological approach to philosophy; his chief contribution is an anthropological study of primitive religion which emphasizes the "prelogical" or mystical character of the thinking of primitive peoples. La Mentalite primitive (1922), Eng. trans., 1923; L'Ame Primitive (1927). His other writings include: History of Modern Philosophy in France (Eng. trans., 1899); The Philosophy of Auguste Comte (1900, Eng. trans., 1903). -- L.W.
Li hsueh: The Rational Philosophy or the Reason School of the Sung dynasty (960-1279) which insisted on Reason or Law (li) as the basis of reality, including such philosophers as Chou Lien-hsi (1017-1073), Shao K'ang-chieh (1011-1077), Chang Heng-ch'u (1020-1077), Ch'eng I-ch'uan (1033-1107), Ch'eng Ming-tao (1032-1086), Chu Hsi (1130-1200), and Lu Hsiang-shan (1139-1193). It is also called Hsing-li Hsueh (Philosophy of the Nature and Reason) and Sung Hsueh (Philosophy of the Sung Dynasty). Often the term includes the idealistic philosophy of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), including Wang Yang-ming (1473-1529), sometimes called Hsin Hsueh (Philosophy of Mind). Often it also includes the philosophy of the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911), called Tao Hsueh, including such philosophers as Yen Hsi-chai (1635-1704) and Tai Tung-yuan (1723-1777). For a summary of the Rational Philosophy, see Chinese philosophy. For its philosophy of Reason (li), vital force (ch'i), the Great Ultimate (T'ai Chi), the passive and active principles (yin yang), the nature of man and things (hsing), the investigation of things to the utmost (ch'iung li), the extension of knowledge (chih chih), and its ethics of true manhood or love (jen), seriousness (ching) and sincerity (ch'eng), see articles on these topics. -- W.T.C.
logical empiricism: in philosophy of science, the assumption that it is possible to compare and evaluate theories in terms of how well they account for the evidence.
Logical meaning: See meaning, kinds of, 3. Logical Positivism: See Scientific Empiricism. Logical truth: See Meaning, kinds of, 3; and Truth, semantical. Logistic: The old use of the word logistic to mean the art of calculation, or common arithmetic, is now nearly obsolete. In Seventeenth Century English the corresponding adjective was also sometimes used to mean simply logical. Leibniz occasionally employed logistica (as also logica mathematica) as one of various alternative names for his calculus ratiocinator. The modern use of logistic (French logistique) as a synonym for symbolic logic (q. v.) dates from the International Congress of Philosophy of 1904, where it was proposed independently by Itelson, Lalande, and Couturat. The word logistic has been employed by some with special reference to the Frege-Russell doctrine that mathematics is reducible to logic, but it would seem that the better usage makes it simply a synonym of symbolic logic. -- A. C.
logicism ::: A school of thought in the philosophy of mathematics, putting forth the theory that mathematics is an extension of logic and therefore all mathematics is reducible to logic.[16] Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead championed this theory fathered by Gottlob Frege. Frege gave up on the project after Russell recognized a paradox exposing an inconsistency in naive set theory. Russell and Whitehead continued on with the project in their Principia Mathematica.[17]
Madhyamikas (Sanskrit) Mādhyamika-s Belonging to the middle way; a sect mentioned in the Vishnu-Purana, probably at first a sect of Hindu atheists. A school of the same name was founded later in Tibet and China, and as it adopted some of the esoteric principles taught by Nagarjuna, one of the great founders of the esoteric Mahayana system, it had certain elements of esoteric truth. But because of its tendency by means of thesis and antithesis to reduce everything into contrary categories, and then to deny both, it may be called a school of Nihilists for whom everything is an illusion and an error in the world of thought, in the subjective as well as in the objective universe. This school is a good example of the danger of wandering too far in mere intellectual disquisition from the fundamental bases of the esoteric philosophy, for such merely brain-mind activity will infallibly lead to a philosophy of barren negation.
Main works: Philosophy of Religion, 1901; Kierkegaard; Rousseau; History of Modern Phtlosophy. -- V.F.
Main works: Philosophy of the Present, 1932; Mind, Self, and Society, 1934; Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1936; Philosophy of the Act, 1938.
Main works: Method of Ethics 1875; Outlines of the History of Ethics (5th ed. 1902); Scope and Method of Economic Science, 1885; Lect. on Philosophy of Kant, 1905. Sign: (Lat. signum, sign) Logic has been called the science of signs. In psychology that which represents anything to the cognitive faculty. That which signifies or has significance, a symbol. Semasiology or sematology is the science of signs. See Logic, symbolic; Symbolism.
Maritain, Jacques: (1882-) Was born in Paris, educated at the Lycee Henri IV and the Sorbonne, where he studied with H. Bergson. He was converted to Catholicism in 1906. Then he studied biology with H. Driesch for two years, and the philosophy of St. Thomas with Father Clerissac. He became an ardent advocate of Thomistic philosophy, stressing its applicability to modern problems. He was a professor at the Institut Catholique (1914) and the Institute of Med. Studies, Toronto (1933), but is now lecturing in the U. S. Chief works: Philos. Bergsonienne (1914), Distinguer pour Unir (1932), Sept Lecons sur l'Etre (1934). G. B. Phelan, Jacques Maritain (N. Y., 1937). -- V.J.B.
Marxism ::: A set of philosophical, political and economic positions and movements based on the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx's philosophy of history included the notion of class struggle within dialectical materialism. Marxism was the intellectual foundation for the 20th-century political movement known as Communism, and was developed into various factions such as Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and Trotskyism, each hewing to the ideas of a particular political leader.
mentalism ::: The view, in philosophy of mind, that the mind and mental states exist as causally efficacious inner states of persons. The view should be distinguished from substance dualism, which is the view that the mind and the body (or brain) are two distinct kinds of things, which nevertheless interact (somehow) with one another. Although this dualistic view of the mind-body connection entails mentalism, mentalism does not entail dualism. Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky have been two of mentalism's most ardent recent defenders.
MENTAL LIFE BETWEEN INCARNATIONS Upon the dissolution of the emotional envelope, the individual in his mental envelope leads a life of thought that is absolutely subjective, not suspecting the impossibility of apprehending objective reality in this world. But apprehension of reality, bliss, and perfection, omniscience and omnipotence are absolute.
The independent life of the mental envelope can vary from a minute or so (in the case of the barbarian) to thousands of years. It all depends on the number of ideas the individual has collected during physical life and how vital they are. K 1.34.32f
It is significant that it is precisely those who have had a long sojourn in the mental world in between incarnations who are easy prey to the philosophy of illusion
(which says that all matter is illusion). K 5.33.16
Mimamsa: Short for Purva-Mimamsa, one of the six major systems of Indian philosophy, founded by Jaimini, rationalizing Vedic ritual and upholding the authority of the Vedas by a philosophy of the word (see vac). In metaphysics it professes belief in the reality of the phenomenal, a plurality of eternal souls, but is indifferent to a concept of God though assenting to the superhuman and eternal nature of the Vedas. There is also an elaborate epistemology supporting Vedic truths, an ethics which makes observance of Vedic ritual and practice a condition of a good and blissful life.
Mimamsi: Short for Purva-Mimamsa, one of the six major systems of Indian philosophy (q. v.), founded by Jaimini, rationalizing Vedic ritual and upholding the authority of the Vedas by a philosophy of the word (see vac). In metaphysics it professes belief in the reality of the phenomenal, a plurality of eternal souls, but is indifferent to a concept of God though assenting to the superhuman and eternal nature of the Vedas. There is also an elaborate epistemology supporting Vedic truths, an ethics which makes observance of Vedic ritual and practice a condition of a good and blissful life. -- KS.L.
Mohism ::: The philosophy of Chinese philosopher Mozi, distinguished for its principles of universal love and mutual (utilitarian) benefit.
monological ::: A descriptor of any approach where an individual conducts a “monologue” with an object and apprehends their immediate experience of that object, usually without acknowledging or recognizing cultural embeddedness and intersubjectivity. Monological approaches, in themselves, are sometimes referred to as subscribing to the “myth of the given,” “the philosophy of the subject,” “the philosophy of consciousness,” or what Integral Theory would describe as the belief that the contents of the Upper-Left quadrant are given without being intertwined in the remaining three quadrants. Monological approaches are typically associated with phenomenology, empiricism, meditation, all experiential exercises and therapies, etc.
Monosyllogism: See Polysyllogism. Montague, William Pepperell: (1873-) Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He was among the early leaders of the neo-realist group. He developed views interpreting consciousness, variation and heredity In mechanical terms. He has characterized his view as animistic materialism. Among his best known works are: The Ways of Knowing or the Methods of Philosophy, Belief Unbound, A Promethean Religion for the Modern World and his most recent, Knowledge, Nature and Value - A Philosophy of Knowledge, Nature and Value. See Neo-Realism. -- L.E.D.
M. Waxman, The Philosophy of Don Hasdai Crescas, New York, 1920;
Neo-Platonism ::: A line of development from the philosophy of Plato that emphasized the mystical dimensions of its dualistic view of reality, so that union with the ultimate One was a major goal. Influenced the development of mysticism in each of the three religious traditions.
nominalism ::: n. --> The principles or philosophy of the Nominalists.
noumenon ::: n. --> The of itself unknown and unknowable rational object, or thing in itself, which is distinguished from the phenomenon through which it is apprehended by the senses, and by which it is interpreted and understood; -- so used in the philosophy of Kant and his followers.
*Nyāyānusāra. (C. Shun zhengli lun; J. Junshoriron; K. Sun chongni non 順正理論). In Sanskrit, "Conformity with Correct Principle"; influential VAIBHĀsIKA ABHIDHARMA treatise by SAMGHABHADRA (c. fifth century CE). It is intended as a refutation of VASUBANDHU 's popular ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA and its presentation of what it purports to be the orthodox positions of the SARVĀSTIVĀDA school. The *Nyāyānusāra is both an exposition of the abhidharma philosophy of the Kashmiri Sarvāstivāda Vaibhāsikas and a critical commentary on Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosabhāsya, which advocated many positions that critiqued the Kashmiri Vaibhāsika school. The *Nyāyānusāra is roughly three times its rival text's length and sought to defend the Vaibhāsikas against Vasubandhu's portrayal of their doctrines. For this reason, XUANZANG (who translated the text into Chinese) says that the original title of the text was the *Kosakaraka (C. Jushi bao lun) or "Hailstones upon the Kosa." As but one example of its criticisms, SaMghabhadra's opening critique of Vasubandhu centers on the latter's assumption that abhidharma does not represent the teaching of the Buddha himself. To refute Vasubandhu's misinterpretations, SaMghabhadra cites scriptural passages that prove the Vaibhāsika position, drawn from scripture (SuTRA) but also from the massive ABHIDHARMAMAHĀVIBHĀsĀ compendium of abhidharma. In addition to scriptural citation, SaMghabhadra also resorts to logical argumentation (YUKTI) to refute Vasubandhu's positions, both by exposing the contradictions explicit in Vasubandhu's own presentations of doctrine and by demonstrating how Vasubandhu's positions would undermine fundamental principles of Buddhist doctrine. In addition to his challenge of Vasubandhu, SaMghabhadra also criticizes the positions of other Vaibhāsika detractors, including the Dārstāntika teacher srīlāta, and the SAUTRĀNTIKA master Sthavira; SaMghabhadra's goal is thus clearly to defend Vaibhāsika abhidharma against any and all comers. The *Nyāyānusāra is only extant in Xuanzang's eighty-roll Chinese translation (the Sanskrit title is a reconstruction); portions of the original Sanskrit text have, however, been preserved in citations from other Indian texts, such as commentaries to the Abhidharmakosabhāsya by STHIRAMATI, Purnavardhana, and YAsOMITRA.
operationalism ::: The philosophy of defining a concept as the operations that will measure the concept (variables) through specific observations.
Palingenesis: (Gr palm, again, genesis, birth) Literally, a new birth or regeneration A rebirth of ideas and events (in a philosophy of history), a new birth of individuals (in theology). -- V.F.
Parallel with these developments was the growth of Buddhism in China, a story too long to relate here. Many Buddhist doctrines, latent in India, were developed in China. The nihilism of Madhyamika (Sun-lan, c. 450-c. 1000) to the effect that reality is Void in the sense of being "devoid" of any specific character, was brought to fullness, while the idealism of Vijnaptimatravada (Yogacara, Fahsiang, 563-c. 1000), which claimed that reality in its imaginary, dependent and absolute aspects is "representation-only," was pushed to the extreme. But these philosophies failed because their extreme positions were not consonant with the Chinese Ideal of the golden mean. In the meantime, China developed her own Buddhist philosophy consistent with her general philosophical outlook. We need only mention the Hua-yen school (Avatamisaka, 508) which offered a totalistic philosophy of "all in one" and "one in all," the T'ien-t'ai school (c. 550) which believes in the identity of the Void, Transitoriness, and the Mean, and in the "immanence of 3,000 worlds in one moment of thought," and the Chin-t'u school (Pure Land, c. 500) which bases its doctrine of salvation by faith and salvation for all on the philosophy of the universality of Buddha-nature. These schools have persisted because they accepted both noumenon and phenomenon, both ens and non-ens, and this "both-and" spirit is predominantly characteristic of Chinese philosophy.
parsimony: in the philosophy of science, the principle that the simplest possible explanation should always be sought for any event.
Patanjala (Sanskrit) Pātañjala The Yoga philosophy of Patanjali, which is classed as the fourth of the six schools or darsanas of Hindu philosophy. Patanjali’s Yoga Aphorisms contains many excellent precepts and much excellent advice, although a hatha yoga work, by reason of its reference to physical processes. When carefully studied, it brings about no evil consequences, but it should not be studied apart from the other elements of Patanjali’s philosophic work.
Perry, Ralph Barton: (1876-) Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He was one of the founders of the new realist movement His classic biography of William James won the Pulitzer Prize for 1936. During the first World War he served as a major with the War Department Committee on Education and Special Training and this service has evidenced itself in his fervent advocacy of militant democracy. Among his works are Present Philosophical Tendencies, Philosophy of the Recent Past, General Theory of Value, 1926; Thought and Character of Wm. James, 2 vols., 1935; Shall Not Pertsh From the Earth, 1941. See Neo-Realism. -- L.E.D.
phenomenalism ::: In epistemology and the philosophy of perception, the view that physical objects do not exist as things in themselves but only as perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli (e.g. redness, hardness, softness, sweetness, etc.) situated in time and in space. In particular, phenomenalism reduces discussion about physical objects in the external world to discussion about "bundles of sense-data".
Philosophers have in the past been concerned with two questions covered by our definition, though attempts to organize the subject as an autonomous department of philosophy are of recent date. Enquiries into the origin of language (e.g. in Plato's Kratylos) once a favorite subject for speculation, are now out of fashion, both with philosophers and linguists. Enquiries as to the nature of language (as in Descartes, Leibniz, and many others) are, however, still central to all philosophical interest in language. Such questions as "What are the most general characters of symbolism?", "How is 'Language' to be defined?", "What is the essence of language?", "How is communication possible?", "What would be the nature of a perfect language?", are indicative of the varying modulations which this theme receives in the works of contemporaries. Current studies in the philosophy of language can be classified under five hends: Questions of method, relation to other disciplines, etc. Much discussion turns here upon the proposal to establish a science and art of symbolism, variously styled semiotic, semantics or logical syntax, The analysis of meaning. Problems arising here involve attention to those under the next heading. The formulation of general descriptive schemata. Topics of importance here include the identification and analysis of different ways in which language is used, and the definition of men crucial notions as "symbol'', "grammar", "form", "convention", "metaphor", etc. The study of fully formalized language systems or "calculi". An increasingly important and highly technical division which seeks to extend and adapt to all languages the methods first developed in "metamathematics" for the study of mathematical symbolism. Applications to problems in general philosophy. Notably the attempt made to show that necessary propositions are really verbal; or again, the study of the nature of the religious symbol. Advance here awaits more generally acceptable doctrine in the other divisions. References:
philosophy of mind: is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of themind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain.
philosophy of perception: concerns how mental processes and symbols depend on the world internal and external to the perceiver.
philosophy of science: is the study of assumptions, foundations, and implications of science.
physianthropy ::: n. --> The philosophy of human life, or the doctrine of the constitution and diseases of man, and their remedies.
physicalism ::: The metaphysical position asserting that everything that exists has one or more physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things. In contemporary philosophy, physicalism is most frequently associated with the philosophy of mind, in particular the mind-body problem, in which it holds that the mind is a physical thing in some sense. Physicalism is also called "materialism", but the term "physicalism" is preferable because it has evolved with the physical sciences to incorporate far more sophisticated notions of physicality than matter; for example, wave/particle relationships and unseen, non-material forces.
physico-philosophy ::: n. --> The philosophy of nature.
Platonic Realism: See Realism. Platonism: The philosophy of Plato marks one of the high points in the development of Greek philosophical genius Platomsm is characterised by a partial contempt for sense knowledge and empirical studies, by a high regard for mathematics and its method, by a longing for another and better world, by a frankly spiritualistic view of life, by its use of a method of discussion involving an accumulation of ever more profound insights rather than the formal logic of Aristotle, and, above all, by an unswerving faith in the capacity of the human mind to attain absolute truth and to use this truth in the rational direction of human life and affairs.
platonist ::: n. --> One who adheres to the philosophy of Plato; a follower of Plato.
pluralism ::: In the area of philosophy of the mind, distinguishes a position where one believes there to be ultimately many kinds of substances in the world, as opposed to monism and dualism. (See also cosmotheism).
Polarity, philosophy of: Philosophies that make the concept of polarity one of the systematic principles according to which opposites involve each other when applied to any significant realm of investigation. Polarity was one of the basic concepts in the philosophy of Cusanus and Schelling. Morris R. Cohen made use of the principle of polarity in scientific philosophy, in biology, in social and historical analysis, in law and in ethics. (Cf. Reason and Nature). -- H.H.
Political Philosophy: That branch of philosophy which deals with political life, especially with the essence, origin and value of the state. In ancient philosophy politics also embraced what we call ethics. The first and most important ancient works on Political Philosophy were Plato's Politeia (Republic) and Aristotle's Politics. The Politeia outlines the structure and functions of the ideal state. It became the pattern for all the Utopias (see Utopia) of later times. Aristotle, who considers man fundamentally a social creature i.e. a political animal, created the basis for modern theories of government, especially by his distinction of the different forms of government. Early Christianity had a rather negative attitude towards the state which found expression in St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei. The influence of this work, in which the earthly state was declared to be civitas diaboli, a state of the devil, was predominant throughout the Middle Ages. In the discussion of the relation between church and empire, the main topic of medieval political philosophy, certain authors foreshadowed modern political theories. Thomas Aquinas stressed the popular origin of royal power and the right of the people to restrict or abolish that power in case of abuse; William of Ockham and Marsiglio of Padua held similar views. Dante Alighieri was one of the first to recognize the intrinsic value of the state; he considered the world monarchy to be the only means whereby peace, justice and liberty could be secured. But it was not until the Renaissance that, due to the rediscovery of the individual and his rights and to the formation of territorial states, political philosophy began to play a major role. Niccolo Machiavelli and Jean Bodin laid the foundation for the new theories of the state by stressing its independence from any external power and its indivisible sovereignty. The theory of popular rights and of the right of resistance against tyranny was especially advocated by the "Monarchomachi" (Huguenots, such as Beza, Hotman, Languet, Danaeus, Catholics such as Boucher, Rossaeus, Mariana). Most of them used the theory of an original contract (see Social Contract) to justify limitations of monarchical power. Later, the idea of a Natural Law, independent from divine revelation (Hugo Grotius and his followers), served as an argument for liberal -- sometimes revolutionary -- tendencies. With the exception of Hobbes, who used the contract theory in his plea for absolutism, almost all the publicists of the 16th and 17th century built their liberal theories upon the idea of an original covenant by which individuals joined together and by mutual consent formed a state and placed a fiduciary trust in the supreme power (Roger Williams and John Locke). It was this contract which the Pilgrim Fathers translated into actual facts, after their arrival in America, in November, 1620, long before John Locke had developed his theorv. In the course of the 17th century in England the contract theory was generally substituted for the theory of the divine rights of kings. It was supported by the assumption of an original "State of Nature" in which all men enjoyed equal reciprocal rights. The most ardent defender of the social contract theory in the 18th century was J. J. Rousseau who deeply influenced the philosophy of the French revolution. In Rousseau's conception the idea of the sovereignty of the people took on a more democratic aspect than in 17th century English political philosophy which had been almost exclusively aristocratic in its spirit. This tendency found expression in his concept of the "general will" in the moulding of which each individual has his share. Immanuel Kant who made these concepts the basis of his political philosophy, recognized more clearly than Rousseau the fictitious character of the social contract and treated it as a "regulative idea", meant to serve as a criterion in the evaluation of any act of the state. For Hegel the state is an end in itself, the supreme realization of reason and morality. In marked opposition to this point of view, Marx and Engels, though strongly influenced by Hegel, visualized a society in which the state would gradually fade away. Most of the 19th century publicists, however, upheld the juristic theory of the state. To them the state was the only source of law and at the same time invested with absolute sovereignty: there are no limits to the legal omnipotence of the state except those which are self imposed. In opposition to this doctrine of unified state authority, a pluralistic theory of sovereignty has been advanced recently by certain authors, laying emphasis upon corporate personalities and professional groups (Duguit, Krabbe, Laski). Outspoken anti-stateism was advocated by anarchists such as Kropotkin, etc., by syndicalists and Guild socialists. -- W.E.
positivism ::: The philosophical position that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge. It is an approach to the philosophy of science, deriving from Enlightenment thinkers like Pierre-Simon Laplace (and many others). See also logical positivism.
posthuman, posthumanism: The stage beyond natural humanity, or the philosophy of transcending humanity, often through technological achievement.
Praajna: A name according to Vedanta Philosophy of the individual in the causal state (as in sound sleep); the Supreme Reality appears as such through the veil of an individual casual body.
Pragmatism is first and always a doctrine of meaning, and often a definition of truth as well, but as to the latter, not all pragmatists are in complete agreement. Neither Peirce nor Dewey, for example, would accept James' view that if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily for the individual, it is true. Pragmatism is also a method of interpreting ideas in terms of their consequences. James, however, apparently does not believe that this method entails his specific philosophical doctrines -- his pluralism, individualism, neutralism, indeterminism, meliorism, pragmatic theism, "crass" supernaturalism, etc. In fact, he states that pragmatism is independent of his new philosophy of "radical empiricism" and agrees with the anti-intellectualist bent of the Italian pragmatist, Papini, who sees the pragmatic method available to the atheist, the praying penitent, the investigating chemist, the metaphysician and the anti-metaphysician ("What Pragmatism Means".) On the other hand, insofar as pragmatism is practically identified with the scientific method (as is allegedly the case with Dewey) it appears that the pragmatic method might be expected to yield much the same conclusions for one philosopher as for another. In general, pragmatism as a method, does not seem to imply any final philosophical conclusions. It may imply a general direction of thought, such as empiricism. Although pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey) frequently attack older forms of empiricism, or crude empiricism, and necessarily reject truth as a simple or static correspondence of propositions with sense data, they nevertheless continue to describe themselves as empiricists, so that today pragmatism (especially in Dewey's case) is often regarded as synonymous with empiricism. See Empiricism.
Pratyabhijna: Sanskrit for recognition; particularly the rediscovery or realization that the divine and ultimate reality is within the human soul or self. One phase of the philosophy of the Trika (q.v.).
Pratyabhijna: (Skr.) "Recognition", particularly the rediscovery or realization that the divine and ultimate reality is within the human soul or self. One phase of the philosophy of the Trika (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
Principles of Man ::: The seven principles of man are a likeness or rather copy of the seven cosmic principles. They areactually the offspring or reflection of the seven cosmic principles, limited in their action in us by theworkings of the law of karma, but running in their origin back into THAT which is beyond: into THATwhich is the essence of the universe or the universal -- above, beyond, within, to the unmanifest, to theunmanifestable, to that first principle which H. P. Blavatsky enunciates as the leading thought of thewisdom-philosophy of The Secret Doctrine.These principles of man are reckoned as seven in the philosophy by which the human spiritual andpsychical economy has been publicly explained to us in the present age. In other ages these principles orparts of man were differently reckoned -- the Christian reckoned them as body, soul, and spirit,generalizing the seven under these three heads.Some of the Indian thinkers divided man into a basic fourfold entity, others into a fivefold. The Jewishphilosophy, as found in the Qabbalah which is the esoteric tradition of the Jews, teaches that man isdivided into four parts: neshamah, ruah, nefesh, and guf.Theosophists for convenience often employ in their current literature a manner of viewing man'scomposite constitution which is the dividing of his nature into a trichotomy, meaning a division intothree, being spirit, soul, and body, which in this respect is identical with the generalized Christianizedtheosophical division. Following this trichotomy, man's three parts, therefore, are: first and highest, thedivine spirit or the divine monad of him, which is rooted in the universe, which spirit is linked with theAll, being in a highly mystical sense a ray of the All; second, the intermediate part, or the spiritualmonad, which in its higher and lower aspects is the spiritual and human souls; then, third, the lowest partof man's composite constitution, the vital-astral-physical part of him, which is composed of material orquasi-material life-atoms. (See also Atman, Buddhi, Manas, Kama, Prana, Linga-sarira, Sthula-sarira)
Pyrrhonism The philosophy of Pyrrho, the Greek Skeptic (c. 365-275 BC); also a general name for philosophic doubt. Pyrrho left no writings, but lives in those of his pupil Timon. His doctrine was that we can know nothing about reality by the use of our senses or mental faculties; against every statement its opposite may be maintained with equal justice; hence it is necessary to preserve a balanced judgment, the result of which is imperturbability, a tranquil acceptance of the events of life. The moral attitude thus engendered is somewhat like that of the Epicureans and Stoics, which has often been wrongly described as a self-centered indifference, bent upon the happiness of the individual, but this is only the negative aspect of the doctrine. His teachings approximate those of the Sankhya philosophy, and of some later philosophers — as in the doctrine of maya, that all is illusion save the divine. Whether Pyrrho himself stopped short at a suspense of judgment, or whether his teachings were imperfectly handed down by his followers, may be questioned. The ardent desire for knowledge may result in that illumination by which we becomes aware of the deceptive character of our faculties and the illusory nature of the images they create; but if our skepticism is merely the result of an intellectual disillusionment, unaccompanied by any inward vision, the result is usually selfish indifference bringing about a lapse into mere sensuality.
Realism: Theory of the reality of abstract or general terms, or umversals, which are held to have an equal and sometimes a superior reality to actual physical particulars. Umversals exist before things, ante res. Opposed to nominalism (q.v.) according to which universals have a being only after things, post res. Realism means (a) in ontology that no derogation of the reality of universals is valid, the realm of essences, or possible umversals, being as real as, if not more real than, the realm of existence, or actuality; (b) in epistemology: that sense experience reports a true and uninterrupted, if limited, account of objects; that it is possible to have faithful and direct knowledge of the actual world. While realism was implicit in Egyptian religion, where truth was through deification distinguished from particular truths, and further suggested in certain aspects of Ionian philosophy, it was first explicitly set forth by Plato in his doctrine of the ideas and developed by Aristotle in his doctrine of the forms. According to Plato, the ideas have a status of possibility which makes them independent both of the mind by which they may be known and of the actual world of particulars in which they may take place. Aristotle amended this, so that his forms have a being only in things, in rebus. Realism in its Platonic version was the leading philosophy of the Christian Middle Ages until Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) officially adopted the Aristotelian version. It has been given a new impetus in recent times by Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) in America and by G. E. Moore (1873-) in England. Moore's realism has been responsible for many of his contemporaries in both English-speaking countries. Roughly speaking, the American realists, Montague, Perry, and others, in The New Realism (1912) have directed their attention to the epistemological side, while the English have constructed ontological systems. The most comprehensive realistic systems of the modern period are Process and Reality by A. N. Whitehead (1861-) and Space, Time and Deity by S. Alexander: (1859-1939). The German, Nicolai Hartmann, should also be mentioned, and there are others. -- J.K.F.
Realistic Advaita ::: There is possible a realistic as well as an illusionist Adwaita. The philosophy of The Life Divine is such a realistic Adwaita. The world is a manifestation of the Real and th
refore is itself real. The reality is the infinite and eternal Divine, infinite and eternal Being, Consciousness-Force and Bliss. This Divine by his power has created the world or rather manifested it in his own infinite Being. But here in the material world or at its basis he has hidden himself in what seem to be his opposites, Non-Being, Inconscience and Insentience. This is what we nowadays call the Inconscient which seems to have created the material universe by its inconscient Energy; but this is only an appearance, for we find in the end that all the dispositions of theworld can only have been arranged by the working of a supreme secret intelligence. The Being which is hidden in what seems to be an inconscient void emerges in the world first in Matter, then in Life, then in Mind and finally as the Spirit. The apparently inconscient Energy which creates is in fact the Consciousness-Force of the Divine and its aspect of consciousness, secret in Matter, begins to emerge in Life, finds something more of itself in Mind and finds its true self in a spiritual consciousness and finally a supramental consciousness through which we become aware of the Reality, enter into it and unite ourselves with it. This is what we call evolution which is an evolution of consciousness and an evolution of the Spirit in things and only outwardly an evolution of species. Thus also, the delight of existence emerges from the original insentience first in the contrary forms of pleasure and pain and then has to find itself in the bliss of the Spirit or as it is called in the Upanishads, the bliss of the Brahman.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 35, Page: 91-92
REALISTIC ADVAITA, There is possible a realistic as well as an Ulusionistic Advaita. The philosophy of the Life
Reichenbach's work has been devoted mainly to the philosophy of empirical science; for a brief general survey of the problems which have particularly attracted his attention, and of his conception of an adequate method for their solution, cf. his Raum. Zeit Lehre. His contributions center around (I) the problems of space and time, and (II) those of causality, induction and probability. His studies of the first group of problems include thorough analyses of the nature of geometry and of the logical structure of relativistic physics, these researches led Reichenbach to a rejection of the aprioristic theory of space and time. Reichenbach's contributions to the second group of problems pivot around his general theory of probability which is based on a statistical definition of the probability concept. In terms of this probabilistic approach, Relchenbach has carried out comprehensive analyses of methodological and epistemological problems such as those of causality and induction. He has also extended his formal probability theory into a probability logic in which probabilities play the part of truth values. -- C.G.H.
Renaissance: (Lat. re + nasci, to be born) Is a term used by historians to characterize various periods of intellectual revival, and especially that which took place in Italy and Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. The term was coined by Michelet and developed into a historical concept by J. Burckhardt (1860) who considered individualism, the revival of classical antiquity, the "discovery" of the world and of man as the main characters of that period as opposed to the Middle Ages. The meaning, the temporal limits, and even the usefulness of the concept have been disputed ever since. For the emphasis placed by various historians on the different fields of culture and on the contribution of different countries must lead to different interpretations of the whole period, and attempts to express a complicated historical phenomenon in a simple, abstract definition are apt to fail. Historians are now inclined to admit a very considerable continuity between the "Renaissance" and the Middle Ages. Yet a sweeping rejection of the whole concept is excluded, for it expresses the view of the writers of the period itself, who considered their century a revival of ancient civilization after a penod of decay. While Burckhardt had paid no attention to philosophy, others began to speak of a "philosophy of the renaissance," regarding thought of those centuries not as an accidental accompaniment of renaissance culture, but as its characteristic philosophical manifestation. As yet this view has served as a fruitful guiding principle rather than as a verified hypothesis. Renaissance thought can be defined in a negative way as the period of transition from the medieval, theological to the modern, scientific interpretation of reality. It also displays a few common features, such as an emphasis on man and on his place in the universe, the rejection of certain medieval standards and methods of science, the increased influence of some newly discovered ancient sources, and a new style and literary form in the presentation of philosophical ideas. More obvious are the differences between the various schools and traditions which cannot easily be brought to a common denominator Humimsm, Platonism, Aristotelianism, scepticism and natural philosophy, to which may be added the group of the founders of modern science (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo). -- P.O.K.
romanticism: The term refers to a movement around 1780-1840. Romanticism rejected the philosophy of the enlightenment, and instead turned to the gothic, the notion of carpe diem and above all placed importance on nature and the wilderness. Romantic poets included William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Gordon Byron.
Romero, Francisco: Born in 1891. Professor of Philosophy at the Universities of Buenos Aires, La Plata, and the National Institute for Teachers. Director of the Philosophical Library of the Losada Publishing House, and distinguished staff member of various cultural magazines and reviews in Latin America. Francisco Romero is one of the most important figures in the philosophical movement of South America. He is the immediate successor of Korn, and as such he follows on the footsteps of his master, doing pioneer work, not only striving towards an Argentinian philosophy, but also campaigning for philosophy in the nations of Latin America through a program of cultural diffusion. Among his most important writings, the following may be mentioned: Vteja y Nueva Concepcion de la Realidad, 1932; Los Problemas de la Filosofia de la Cultura, 1936; Filosofia de la Persona, 1938; Logica (In collaboration with Pucciarelli), 1936; Programa de una Filosofia, 1940; Un Filosofo de la Problematicidad, 1934; Descartes y Husserl, 1938; Contribucion al Estudio de las Relaciones de Comparacion, 1938; Teoria y Practica de la Verdad, 1939. Three characteristic notes may be observed in the philosophy of Romero Aporetics or Problematics, Philosophy of Weltanschauungen, Philosophy of the Person. The first has to do with his criterion of knowledge. Justice to all the facts of experience, over against mere system building, seems to be the watchword. The desirability and gradual imposition of Structuralism as the modern Weltanschauung, over against outworn world conceptions such as Evolution, Mechanism, Rationalism, etc., is the emphasis of the second principle of his philosophy. Personality as a mere function of transcendence, with all that transcendence implies in the realm of value and history, carries the main theme of his thought. See Latin American Philosophy. -- J.A.F.
Rule of inference: See logic, formal, §§ 1, 3, and logistic system. Russell, Bertrand A. W.: (1872-) Fellow Trinity College, Cambridge, 1895; lecturer in philosophy, University of Cambridge, 1910-1916. Author of: The Philosophy of Leibniz, 1900; The Principles of Mathematics, 1903; Principia Mathematica (in collaboration with A. N. Whitehead), 3 vols. 1910-13, (second edition, 1925-27); The Problems of Philosophy, 1912; Our Knowledge of the External World, 1914; Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 1918; The Analysis of Mind, 1921; The Analysis of Matter, 1927; An Outline of Philosophy, 1928; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, 1940. Also numerous other works on philosophy, politics and education, outrageously attacked by reactionaries.
Saguna: Sanskrit for “possessed of qualities”; predicated of the Absolute from the exoteric point of view of the worshipper, in the philosophy of Sankara. (Cf. nirguna.)
SaMghabhadra. (T. 'Dus bzang; C. Zhongxian; J. Shugen; K. Chunghyon 衆賢) (c. fifth century CE). In Sanskrit, "Auspicious to the Community"; the proper name of an influential Indian master of the VAIBHĀsIKA school of SARVĀSTIVĀDA ABHIDHARMA. Historical sources suggest that SaMghabhadra hailed from KASHMIR and was a younger contemporary of his principal rival VASUBANDHU. The historical records of XUANZANG and PARAMĀRTHA agree that SaMghabhadra publicly challenged Vasubandhu to debate, but his challenge was never accepted. SaMghabhadra's most famous works include the *NYĀYĀNUSĀRA, or "Conformity with Correct Principle," and the *Abhidharmasamayapradīpikā (C. Xianzong lun), or "Exposition of Accepted Doctrine." The *Nyāyānusāra is both a clarification of the ABHIDHARMA philosophy of the Vaibhāsika school and a critical commentary on the presentation found in Vasubandhu's ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA. The later Samayapradīpikā is a shorter explanation of the doctrines of the Vaibhāsikas, which in large measure summarizes the positions explored in the *Nyāyānusāra. Neither of these works survives in their Sanskrit originals but only in their Chinese translations. SaMghabhadra's defense of Kashmir Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāsika positions ushered in the neo-Vaibhāsika period of Sarvāstivāda thought, which took the *Nyāyānusāra and the Samayapradīpikā as its main texts.
Sarira(Sanskrit) ::: From a root which can best be translated by saying that it means what is easily dissolved,easily worn away; the idea being something transitory, foam-like, full of holes, as it were. Note themeaning hid in this -- it is very important. A term which is of common usage in the philosophy ofHindustan, and of very frequent usage in modern theosophical philosophy. A general meaning is acomposite body or vehicle of impermanent character in and through which an ethereal entity lives andworks. (See also Linga-Sarira; Sthula-Sarira)
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775-1854) Founder of the philosophy of identity which holds that subject and object coincide in the Absolute, a state to be realized in intellectual intuition. Deeply involved in romanticism, Schelling's philosophy of nature culminates in a transcendental idealism where nature and spirit are linked in a series of developments by unfolding powers or potencies, together forming one great organism in which nature is dynamic visible spirit and spirit invisible nature. Freedom and necessity are different refractions of the same reality. Supplementing science -- which deals with matter as extinguished spirit and endeavors to rise from nature to intelligence -- philosophy investigates the development of spirit, theoretically practically, and artistically, converts the subjective into the objective, and shows how the world soul or living principle animates the whole. Schelling's monism recognizes nature and spirit as real and ideal poles respectively, the latter being the positive one. It is pantheistic and aesthetic in that it allows the world process to create with free necessity unconsciously at first in the manner of an artist. Art is perfect union of freedom and necessity, beauty reflects the infinite in the finite. History is the progressive revelation of the Absolute. The ultimate thinking of Schelling headed toward mysticism in which man, his personality expanded into the infinite, becomes absorbed into the absolute self, free from necessity, contingency, consciousness, and personality. Sämmtliche Werke, 14 vols. (1856, re-edited 1927). Cf. Kuno Fischer, Schellings Leben, Werke und Lehre; E. Brehier, Schelling, 1912; V. Jankelevitch, L'Odysee de la conscience dans la derniere philosophie de Schelling, 1933. -- K.F.L.
Schlick, Moritz: (1882-1936) Taught at Rostock, Kiel, Vienna, also visit, prof.; Stanford, Berkeley. Founder of the Vienna Circle (see Scientific empiricism.) Called his own view "Consistent Empiricism." Main contributions: A logically revised correspondence view of the nature of truth. A systematic epistemology based on the distinction of (immediate) experience and (relational) knowledge. Clarified the analytic -- a priori character of logic and mathematics (by disclosing the "implicit definitions" in postulate systems). Repudiation of Kantian and phenomenological (synthetic) apriorism. Physicalistic, epistemological solution of the psycho-physical problem in terms of a double language theory. Earlier critical-realistic views were later modified and formulated as Empirical Realism. Greatly influenced in this final phase by Carnap and especially Wittgenstein, he considered the logical clarification of meanings the only legitimate task of a philosophy destined to terminate the strife of systems. Important special applications of this general outlook to logic and methodology of science (space, time, substance, causality, probability, organic life) and to problems of ethics (meaning of value judgments, hedonism, free-will, moral motivation). An optimistic, poetic view of the meaning of life is expressed in only partly published writings on a "Philosophy of Youth."
scholasticism ::: A school of philosophy taught by the academics (or schoolmen) of medieval universities circa 1100–1500. Scholasticism attempted to reconcile the philosophy of the ancient classical philosophers with medieval Christian theology. The primary purpose of scholasticism was to find the answer to a question or resolve a contradiction. It is most well known in its application in medieval theology but was applied to classical philosophy and other fields of study. It is not a philosophy or theology on its own, but a tool and method for learning that emphasizes dialectical reasoning.
Science, philosophy of: That philosophic discipline which is the systematic study of the nature of science, especially of its methods, its concepts and presuppositions, and its place in the general scheme of intellectual disciplines.
See, apart from the works of the authors named, George Trumbull Ladd, The Philosophy of Religion; Edwin A. Burtt, Types of Religious Philosophy, Edgar S. Brightman, A Philosophy of Religion. -- K.F.L.
senses: are the physiological methods of perception. The senses and their operation, classification, and theory are overlapping topics studied by a variety of fields, most notably neuroscience, cognitive psychology (or cognitive science), and philosophy of perception.
sevenprinciples ::: Seven Principles (The) The philosophy of Spiritualism in Seven Principles upon which all Spiritualists would agree.
Silent Watchers: In the esoteric philosophy of theosophy, this term is used to refer to the spiritual guides of the worlds.
S. Lovejoy, Arthur O.: (1873-) Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Johns Hopkins University. He was one of the contributors to "Critical Realism." He wrote the famous article on the thirteen pragmatisms (Jour. Philos. Jan. 16, 1908). Also critical of the behavioristic approach. His best known works are The Revolt against Dualism and his recent, The Great Chain of Being, 1936. The latter exemplified L's method of tracing the history of a "unit-idea." A. O. L. is the first editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas (1940-). He is an authority on Primitivism (q.v.) and Romanticism (q.v.). -- L.E.D.
Social Contract: The original covenant by which, according to certain philosophers of modern times -- Hooker, Hohbes, Althusius, Spinoza, Locke, Pufendorf, etc. -- individuals have united and formed the state. This theory was combined with the older idea of the governmental contract by which the people conferred the power of government upon a single person or a group of persons. This theory goes back to ancient philosophy and was upheld by medieval thinkers, suth as Thomas Aquinas, Marsilius of Padova. Though most of the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century realized that no such original compact as the idea of the Social Contract called for, had actually occurred, the idea, nevertheless, served as a criterion to determine whether any act of the government was just or not, i.e., whether the consent of the governed might be assumed (especially Rousseau, Kant). The theory of the Social Contract had a remarkable influence upon the political philosophy of the American colonies. See Political Philosophy. -- W.E.
Soviet philosophy: The contemponiy development of the philosophy of dialecticil materialism in the U. S. S. R.
Spinozism: The philosophic doctrine of Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677). Described by Hegel as the philosophy of Substance. Spinoza denies the possibility of a plurality of substances, and reserves the term for absolute reality. Hence Spinozism is sometimes used as equivalent to Monism. It is also identified with Pantheism, although this is a highly misleading characterization.
Stephen Kleene ::: (person) Professor Stephen Cole Kleene (1909-01-05 - 1994-01-26) /steev'n (kohl) klay'nee/ An American mathematician whose work at the University of theory and for inventing regular expressions. The Kleene star and Ascending Kleene Chain are named after him.Kleene was born in Hartford, Conneticut, USA. He received his bachelor of arts degree from Amherst College in 1930. From 1930 to 1935, he was a graduate doctorate in mathematics in 1934. In 1935, he joined UW-Madison mathematics department as an instructor. He became an assistant professor in 1937.From 1939 to 1940, he was a visiting scholar at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study where he laid the foundation for recursive function theory, an area that would be his lifelong research interest. In 1941 he returned to Amherst as an associate professor of mathematics.During World War II Kleene was a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy. He was an instructor of navigation at the U.S. Naval Reserve's Midshipmen's School in New York, and then a project director at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.In 1946, he returned to Wisconsin, eventually becoming a full professor. He was chair of mathematics, and computer sciences in 1962 and 1963 and dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1969 to 1974. In 1964 he was named the Cyrus C. MacDuffee professor of mathematics.An avid mountain climber, Kleene had a strong interest in nature and the environment and was active in many conservation causes. He led several Logic from 1956 to 1958. In 1961, he served as president of the International Union of the History and the Philosophy of Science.Kleene pronounced his last name /klay'nee/. /klee'nee/ and /kleen/ are extremely common mispronunciations. His first name is /steev'n/, not /stef'n/. His son, pronunciation is incorrect in all known languages. I believe that this novel pronunciation was invented by my father. . (1999-03-03)
Stephen Kleene "person" Professor Stephen Cole Kleene (1909-01-05 - 1994-01-26) /steev'n (kohl) klay'nee/ An American mathematician whose work at the {University of Wisconsin-Madison} helped lay the foundations for modern computer science. Kleene was best known for founding the branch of {mathematical logic} known as {recursion theory} and for inventing {regular expressions}. The {Kleene star} and {Ascending Kleene Chain} are named after him. Kleene was born in Hartford, Conneticut, USA. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1930. From 1930 to 1935, he was a graduate student and research assistant at {Princeton University} where he received his doctorate in mathematics in 1934. In 1935, he joined UW-Madison mathematics department as an instructor. He became an assistant professor in 1937. From 1939 to 1940, he was a visiting scholar at Princeton's {Institute for Advanced Study} where he laid the foundation for recursive function theory, an area that would be his lifelong research interest. In 1941 he returned to Amherst as an associate professor of mathematics. During World War II Kleene was a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy. He was an instructor of navigation at the U.S. Naval Reserve's Midshipmen's School in New York, and then a project director at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. In 1946, he returned to Wisconsin, eventually becoming a full professor. He was chair of mathematics, and computer sciences in 1962 and 1963 and dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1969 to 1974. In 1964 he was named the Cyrus C. MacDuffee professor of mathematics. An avid mountain climber, Kleene had a strong interest in nature and the environment and was active in many conservation causes. He led several professional organisations, serving as president of the {Association of Symbolic Logic} from 1956 to 1958. In 1961, he served as president of the International Union of the History and the Philosophy of Science. Kleene pronounced his last name /klay'nee/. /klee'nee/ and /kleen/ are extremely common mispronunciations. His first name is /steev'n/, not /stef'n/. His son, Ken Kleene "kenneth.kleene@umb.edu", wrote: "As far as I am aware this pronunciation is incorrect in all known languages. I believe that this novel pronunciation was invented by my father." {(gopher://gopher.adp.wisc.edu/00/.data/.news-rel/.9401/.940126a)}. (1999-03-03)
Subconscious Mind: (Lat. sub, under -- cum together + scire to know) A compartment of the mind alleged by certain psychologists and philosophers (see Psycho-analysis) to exist below the threshold of consciousness. The subconscious, though not directly accessible to introspection (see Introspection), is capable of being tapped by special techniques such as random association, dream-analysis, automatic writing, etc. The doctrine of the subconscious was foreshadowed in Leibniz's doctrine of petites perceptions (Monadology, Sections 21, 23) and received philosophical expression by A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, and E. von Hartman, Philosophy of the Unconscious and has become an integral part of Freudian psychology. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, esp. pp. 425-35, 483-93. -- L.W.
Tanmatra: (Skr.) One of the five "subtile elements" in the philosophy of the Sankhya (q.v.) and other systems, corresponding to the matter apprehended in the sensation of sound, touch, color, taste, and smell; generally, the manifold of sensory experience, perhaps also the "reals", or sensation-generals, equivalent to bhutamatra (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
Temple, William: For many years Archbishop of York, Temple (born 1881) has written extensively on the philosophy of religion. In Mens Creatrix and most recently in Nature Man and God, he has argued for a universe of levels, culminating in value, and pointing to God as Supreme Value and hence Ultimate Reality. Recent work on the nature of revelation has given him the definition of revelation as "coincidence of divinely guided event and divinely guided apprehension", in this setting he places (see Christ the Truth) the Incarnation as central and most significant event apprehended by the Christian community. He is a Platonist in tendency, although within recent years this has been modified by scholasticism, and a study of Marxian philosophy. -- W.N.P.
The Academy continued as a school of philosophy until closed by Justinian in 529 A.D. The early scholars (Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo, Crates) were not great philosophers, they adopted a Pythagorean interpretation of the Ideas and concentrated on practical, moral problems. Following the Older Academy (347-247 B.C.), the Middle and New Academies (Arcesilaus and Carneades were the principal teachers) became scepticil and eclectic. Aristotle (384-322 B.C. ) studied with Plato for twenty years and embodied many Platonic views in his own philosophy. Platonism was very highly regarded by the Christian Fathers (Ambrose, Augustine, John Damascene and Anselm of Canterbury, for instance) and it continued as the approved philosophy of the Christian Church until the 12th century. From the 3rd century on, Neo-Platonism (see Plotinism) developed the other-worldly mystical side of Plato's thought. The School of Chartres (Bernard, Thierry, Wm. of Conches, Gilbert of Poitiers) in the 12th century was a center of Christian Platonism, interested chiefly in the cosmological theory of the Timaeus. The Renaissance witnessed a revival of Platonism in the Florentine Academy (Marsilio Ficino and the two Pico della Mirandolas). In England, the Cambridge Platonists (H. More, Th. Gale, J. Norris) in the 17th century started an interest in Plato, which has not yet died out in the English Universities. Today, the ethical writings of A. E. Taylor, the theoiy of essences developed by G. Santayana, and the metaphysics of A. N. Whitehead, most nearly approach a contemporary Platonism. -- V.J.B.
-. The Philosophy of Natural Magic (first of Agrippa’s
The greatest initiates and yogis since Sankaracharya’s time are reputed to have come from the ranks of the Advaita-Vedantists. “Yet the root philosophy of both Adwaita and Buddhist scholars is identical, and both have the same respect for animal life, for both believe that every creature on earth, however small and humble, ‘is an immortal portion of the immortal matter’ — for matter with them has quite another significance than it has with either Christian or materialist — and that every creature is subject to Karma” (SD 1:636; cf 2:637).
The historical antecedents of experimental psychology are various. From British empiricism and the psychological philosophy of Locke, Berkeley and Hume came associationism (see Associationism), the psychological implications of which were more fully developed by Herbart and Bain. Associationism provided the conceptual framework and largely colored the procedures of early experimental psychology. Physics and physiology gave impetus to experiments on sensory phenomena while physiology and neurology fostered studies of the nervous system and reflex action. The names of Helmholtz, Johannes Müller, E. H. Weber and Fechner are closely linked with this phase of the development of experimental psychology. The English biologist Galton developed the statistical methods of Quetelet for the analysis of data on human variation and opened the way for the mental testing movement; the Russian physiologist Pavlov, with his researches on "conditioned reflexes," contributed an experimental technique which has proved of paramount importance for the psychologist. Even astronomy made its contribution; variations in reaction time of different observers having long been recognized by astronomers as an important source of error in their observations.
Theism: (Gr. theos, god) Is in general that type of religion or religious philosophy (see Religion, Philosophy of) which incorporates a conception of God as a unitary being; thus may be considered equivalent to monotheism. The speculation as to the relation of God to world gave rise to three great forms: God identified with world in pantheism (rare with emphasis on God); God, once having created the world, relatively disinterested in it, in deism (mainly an 18th cent, phenomenon); God working in and through the world, in theism proper. Accordingly, God either coincides with the world, is external to it (deus ex machina), or is immanent. The more personal, human-like God, the more theological the theism, the more appealing to a personal adjustment in prayer, worship, etc., which presuppose either that God, being like man, may be swayed in his decision, has no definite plan, or subsists in the very stuff man is made of (humanistic theism). Immanence of God entails agency in the world, presence, revelation, involvement in the historic process, it has been justified by Hindu and Semitic thinkers, Christian apologetics, ancient and modern metaphysical idealists, and by natural science philosophers. Transcendency of God removes him from human affairs, renders fellowship and communication in Church ways ineffectual, yet preserves God's majesty and absoluteness such as is postulated by philosophies which introduce the concept of God for want of a terser term for the ultimate, principal reality. Like Descartes and Spinoza, they allow the personal in God to fade and approach the age-old Indian pantheism evident in much of Vedic and post-Vedic philosophy in which the personal pronoun may be the only distinguishing mark between metaphysical logic and theology, similarly as in Hegel. The endowment postulated of God lends character to a theistic system of philosophy. Much of Hindu and Greek philosophy stresses the knowledge and ration aspect of the deity, thus producing an epistemological theism; Aristotle, in conceiving him as the prime mover, started a teleological one; mysticism is psychologically oriented in its theism, God being a feeling reality approachable in appropriate emotional states. The theism of religious faith is unquestioning and pragmatic in its attitude toward God; theology has often felt the need of offering proofs for the existence of God (see God) thus tending toward an ontological theism; metaphysics incorporates occasionally the concept of God as a thought necessity, advocating a logical theism. Kant's critique showed the respective fields of pure philosophic enquiry and theistic speculations with their past in historic creeds. Theism is left a possibility in agnosticism (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
The Method of Statistics. The basic principle of statistical method is that of simplification, which makes possible a concise and comprehensive knowledge of a mass of isolated facts by correlating them along definite lines. The various stages of this method are: precise definition of the problem or field of inquiry; collection of material required by the problem; tabulation and measurement of material in a manner satisfying the purpose of the problem; clear presentation of the significant features of tabulated material (by means of charts, diagrams, symbols, graphs, equations and the like), selection of mathematical methods for application to the material obtained; necessary conclusion from the facts and figures obtained; general interpretation within the limits of the problem and the procedure used. The special methods of treating statistical data are: collecting, sampling, selecting, tabulating, classifying, totaling or aggregating, measuring, averaging, relating and correlating, presenting symbolically. Each one of these methods uses specialized experimental or mathematical means in its actual application. The special methods of interpreting statistical data already treated are: analyzing, estimiting, describing, comparing, explaining, applying and predicting. In order to be conclusive, the various stages and types of the statistical method must avoid loose definitions, cross divisions resulting ftom conflicting interpretations of the problem, data which are not simultaneous or subject to similar conditions, conclusions from poor oi incomplete data, prejudices in judging, even when there is no conuption of evidence. The philosophy of statistics is concerned in general with the discussion and evaluation of the mathematical principles, methods and results of this science; and in particular with a critical analysis of the fitness of biological, psychological, educational, economic and sociological materials, for various types of statistical treatment. The purpose of such an inquiry is to integrate its results into the general problems and schemes of philosophy proper. Cf.. Richard von Mises, Statistics, Probability, and Truth.
The philosophy of Aristotle was continued after his death by other members of the Peripatetic school, the most important of whom were Theophrastus, Eudemus of Rhodes, and Strato of Lampsacus. In the Alexandrian Age, particularly after the editing of Aristotle's works by Andronicus of Rhodes (about 50 B.C.), Aristotelianism was the subject of numerous expositions and commentaries, such as those of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, John Philoponus, and Simplicius. With the closing of the philosophical schools in the sixth century the knowledge of Aristotle, except for fragments of the logical doctrine, almost disappeared in the west. It was preserved, however, by Arabian and Syrian scholars; from whom, with the revival of learning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it passed again to western Europe and became in Thomas Aquinas the philosophical basis of Christian theology. For the next few centuries the prestige of Aristotle was immense; he was "the philosopher," "the master of those who know." With the rise of modern science his authority has greatly declined. Yet Aristotelianism is still a force in modern thought: in Neo-Scholasticism; in recent psychology, whose behavioristic tendencies are in part a revival of Aristotelian modes of thought; in the various forms of vitalism in contemporary biology; in the dynamism of such thinkers as Bergson; and in the more catholic naturalism which has succeeded the mechanistic materialism of the last century, and which, whether by appeal to a doctrine of levels or by emphasis on immanent teleology, seems to be striving along Aristotelian lines for a conception of nature broad enough to include the religious, moral and artistic consciousness. Finally, a very large part of our technical vocabulary, both in science and in philosophy, is but the translation into modern tongues of the terms used by Aristotle, and carries with it, for better or worse, the distinctions worked out in his subtle mind. -- G.R.M.
the philosophy of the word, the manner of the word, the doctrine of the word. (also see ism and see rasm)
The Platonic philosophy of art and aesthetics stresses, as might be expected, the value of the reasonable imitation of Ideal realities rather than the photographic imitation of sense things and individual experiences. All beautiful things participate in the Idea of beauty (Symposium and Phaedrus). The artist is frequently described as a man carried away by his inspiration, akin to the fool; yet art requires reason and the artist must learn to contemplate the world of Ideas. Fine art is not radically distinguished from useful art. In both the Republic and the Laws, art is subordinated to the good of the state, and those forms of art which are effeminate, asocial, inimical to the morale of the citizens, are sternly excluded from the ideal state.
There are two major points of reference for tracing1 the path that Soviet philosophy has taken -- the successive controversies around the issues of mechanism and of idealism. The first began in the early twenties as a discussion centering on the philosophy of science, and eventually spread to all phases of philosophy. The central issue was whether materialism could be identified with mechanism. Those who answered in the affirmative, among them Timiriazev, Timinski, Axelrod and Stepanov, were called mechanistic materialists. Their position tended to an extreme empiricism which was suspicious of generalization and theory, saw little if any value in Hegel's philosophy, or in dialectical as distinguished from formal logic, and even went so far, in some cases, as to deny the necessity of philosophy in general, resting content with the findings of the specific sciences. It was considered that they tended to deny the reality of quality, attempting to reduce it mechanically to quantity, and to interpret evolution as a mere quantitative increase or decrease of limited factors, neglecting the significance of leaps, breaks and the precipitation of new qualities. In opposition to their views, a group of thinkers, led by Deborin, asserted the necessity of philosophic generalizition and the value of the dialectical method in Hegel as a necessary element in Marxian materialism. In 1929, at a conference of scientific institutions attended by 229 delegates from all parts of the country, the issues were discussed by both sides. A general lack of satisfaction with the mechanist position was expressed in the form of a resolution at the close of the conference. However, the Deborin group was also criticized, not only by the mechanists, but by many who were opposed to the mechanists as well. It was felt by Mitin, Yudin and a group of predominantly younger thinkers that neither camp was really meeting the obligations of philosophy. While they felt there was much that was valuable in Deborin's criticism of mechanism, it seemed to them that he had carried it too far and had fallen over backward into the camp of the idealists. They called his group menshevizing idealists, that is to say, people who talked like the Mensheviks, a pre-revolutionary faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party. By this was meant that they were unduly abstract, vague and tended to divorce theory from practice. In particular, they seemed to accept Hegelian dialectics as such, overlooking the deeper implications of the materialist reconstruction of it which Marx insisted upon. Moreover, they had neglected the field of social problems, and consequently made no significant philosophic contribution to momentous social issues of the times such as collectivization of the land, abandonment of NEP, the possibility of a Five Year Plan. At a three day conference in 1930, the situation was discussed at length by all interested parties. Deborin, Karev and Sten leading the discussion on one side, Mitin and Yudin on the other. The sense of the meetings was that the criticisms made of the Deborin group were valid.
There are two recensions of the Talmud: 1) that of Palestine called the Jerusalem Talmud although the work was prepared by the pupils of Rabbi Yohanan ben ’El‘azar in the school of Tiberias situated some 45 miles north of Jerusalem: it was entitled Talmud of the Benei Me-‘arba’ (of the Sons of the West) by early writers; 2) that of Babylon composed principally in the 5th century from old oral courses by Rabbi ’Ashshei bar Sinai, headmaster of the Academy at Sura’ and completed in the 6th century by Rabbi Yosei. These works are not the religious or natural philosophy of the Jews, but oral traditions and discussion of the rabbis upon these legends. Christian Orientalists have given most attention to the Palestinian recension, although the Babylonian is preferred by the rabbis who call it the Shas — i.e., Shishshah Sedarim — six books ordered or arranged. The Babylonian is four times as large as the Jerusalem.
The renewal of philosophy signalized by Descartes introduced a long line of personilistic thinkers in France who under various classifications offered the main opposition to naturalism, materialism and positivism. Among these were Geulincx (1625-1669), Occasionalism; Malebranche (1638-1715), Activism; de Lignac (1710-1769), Theistic Personalism; de Biran (1766-1824), Philosophy of Effort; Cournot (1801-1877), Probabilism, Vitalism; Ravaisson (1813-1900), Spiritual Realism; Renouvier (1815-1903), Neo criticism, Personalism; Lachelier (1832-1918), Spiritua] Realism; Boutroux (1845-1921), Philosophy of Discontinuity; Bergson (1859-1941), Philosophy of Chinge, Intuitionism.
The scientific study of primitive leligions, with such well known names as E. B. Tylor, F. B. Jevons, W. H. R. Rivers, J. G. Frazer, R. H. Codrington, Spencer and Gillen, E. Westermarck, E. Durkheim, L. Levy-Bruhl; the numerous outlines of the development of religion since Hume's Natural History of Religion and E. Caird's Evolution of Religion; the prolific literature dealing with individual religions of a higher type, the science of comparative religion with such namea as that of L. H. Jordan, the many excellent treitises on the psychology of religion including Wm. James' Varieties of Religious Experience; the sacred literature of all peoples in various editions together with a voluminous theological exegesis, Church history and, finally, the history of dogma, especially the monumental work of von Harnack, -- all are contributing illustrative material to the Philosophy of Religion which became stimulated to scientific efforts through the positivism of Spencer, Huxley, Lewes, Tyndall, and others, and is still largely oriented by the progress in science, as may be seen, e.g., by the work of Emile Boutroux, S. Alexander (Space, Time and Deity), and A. N. Whitehead.
These notes were written apropos of Bergson"s ‘philosophy of change", ‘you" would refer to a proponent of this philosophy.
These notes were written apropos of Bergson’s ‘philosophy of change’, ‘you’ would refer to a proponent of this philosophy.
The subject of the philosophy of religion is regarded in conservative circles not as a discipline given to free philosophical inquiry but as a particular religion's philosophy. In this form it is a more or less disguised apologetics or defense of an already accepted religious faith. While the data for this subject include the so-called classical religions, philosophy of religion, in the genuinely philosophical sense, takes for its material religious expressions of all types, whether classical or not, together with all the psychological material available on the nature of the human spirit and man's whole cultural development. -- V.F.
The Visishtadvaita school teaches that the human spirit is separate and different from the one supreme spirit, though dependent on it and ultimately to be united with it, as well as originally in some manner springing forth from it. The Visishtadvaita speaks of the supreme spirit almost as monists do, because apparently ascribing to it a type of individuality, which is as offensive to the rigid logical impersonal eternal All of the Advaita as is the franker dualism of the Dvaitins. This arises from the fact that the Advaitins claim that it is utterly improper to ascribe individuality, personality, or monadism of any kind to the infinite — a claim which is precisely that of modern theosophy. However, “Dualistic and anthropomorphic as may be the philosophy of the Visishtadwaita, when compared with that of the Adwaita — the non-dualists, — it is yet supremely higher in logic and philosophy than the cosmogony accepted by either Christianity, or its great opponent, modern Science” (SD 1:522).
Three senses of "Ockhamism" may be distinguished: Logical, indicating usage of the terminology and technique of logical analysis developed by Ockham in his Summa totius logicae; in particular, use of the concept of supposition (suppositio) in the significative analysis of terms. Epistemological, indicating the thesis that universality is attributable only to terms and propositions, and not to things as existing apart from discourse. Theological, indicating the thesis that no tneological doctrines, such as those of God's existence or of the immortality of the soul, are evident or demonstrable philosophically, so that religious doctrine rests solely on faith, without metaphysical or scientific support. It is in this sense that Luther is often called an Ockhamist. Bibliography: B. Geyer, Ueberwegs Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Phil., Bd. II (11th ed., Berlin 1928), pp. 571-612 and 781-786; N. Abbagnano, Guglielmo di Ockham (Lanciano, Italy, 1931); E. A. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham (N. Y. & London, 1935); F. Ehrle, Peter von Candia (Muenster, 1925); G. Ritter, Studien zur Spaetscholastik, I-II (Heidelberg, 1921-1922). --E.A.M. Om, aum: (Skr.) Mystic, holy syllable as a symbol for the indefinable Absolute. See Aksara, Vac, Sabda. --K.F.L. Omniscience: In philosophy and theology it means the complete and perfect knowledge of God, of Himself and of all other beings, past, present, and future, or merely possible, as well as all their activities, real or possible, including the future free actions of human beings. --J.J.R. One: Philosophically, not a number but equivalent to unit, unity, individuality, in contradistinction from multiplicity and the mani-foldness of sensory experience. In metaphysics, the Supreme Idea (Plato), the absolute first principle (Neo-platonism), the universe (Parmenides), Being as such and divine in nature (Plotinus), God (Nicolaus Cusanus), the soul (Lotze). Religious philosophy and mysticism, beginning with Indian philosophy (s.v.), has favored the designation of the One for the metaphysical world-ground, the ultimate icility, the world-soul, the principle of the world conceived as reason, nous, or more personally. The One may be conceived as an independent whole or as a sum, as analytic or synthetic, as principle or ontologically. Except by mysticism, it is rarely declared a fact of sensory experience, while its transcendent or transcendental, abstract nature is stressed, e.g., in epistemology where the "I" or self is considered the unitary background of personal experience, the identity of self-consciousness, or the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifoldness of ideas (Kant). --K.F.L. One-one: A relation R is one-many if for every y in the converse domain there is a unique x such that xRy. A relation R is many-one if for every x in the domain there is a unique y such that xRy. (See the article relation.) A relation is one-one, or one-to-one, if it is at the same time one-many and many-one. A one-one relation is said to be, or to determine, a one-to-one correspondence between its domain and its converse domain. --A.C. On-handedness: (Ger. Vorhandenheit) Things exist in the mode of thereness, lying- passively in a neutral space. A "deficient" form of a more basic relationship, termed at-handedness (Zuhandenheit). (Heidegger.) --H.H. Ontological argument: Name by which later authors, especially Kant, designate the alleged proof for God's existence devised by Anselm of Canterbury. Under the name of God, so the argument runs, everyone understands that greater than which nothing can be thought. Since anything being the greatest and lacking existence is less then the greatest having also existence, the former is not really the greater. The greatest, therefore, has to exist. Anselm has been reproached, already by his contemporary Gaunilo, for unduly passing from the field of logical to the field of ontological or existential reasoning. This criticism has been repeated by many authors, among them Aquinas. The argument has, however, been used, if in a somewhat modified form, by Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz. --R.A. Ontological Object: (Gr. onta, existing things + logos, science) The real or existing object of an act of knowledge as distinguished from the epistemological object. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ontologism: (Gr. on, being) In contrast to psychologism, is called any speculative system which starts philosophizing by positing absolute being, or deriving the existence of entities independently of experience merely on the basis of their being thought, or assuming that we have immediate and certain knowledge of the ground of being or God. Generally speaking any rationalistic, a priori metaphysical doctrine, specifically the philosophies of Rosmini-Serbati and Vincenzo Gioberti. As a philosophic method censored by skeptics and criticists alike, as a scholastic doctrine formerly strongly supported, revived in Italy and Belgium in the 19th century, but no longer countenanced. --K.F.L. Ontology: (Gr. on, being + logos, logic) The theory of being qua being. For Aristotle, the First Philosophy, the science of the essence of things. Introduced as a term into philosophy by Wolff. The science of fundamental principles, the doctrine of the categories. Ultimate philosophy; rational cosmology. Syn. with metaphysics. See Cosmology, First Principles, Metaphysics, Theology. --J.K.F. Operation: "(Lit. operari, to work) Any act, mental or physical, constituting a phase of the reflective process, and performed with a view to acquiring1 knowledge or information about a certain subject-nntter. --A.C.B. In logic, see Operationism. In philosophy of science, see Pragmatism, Scientific Empiricism. Operationism: The doctrine that the meaning of a concept is given by a set of operations. 1. The operational meaning of a term (word or symbol) is given by a semantical rule relating the term to some concrete process, object or event, or to a class of such processes, objectj or events. 2. Sentences formed by combining operationally defined terms into propositions are operationally meaningful when the assertions are testable by means of performable operations. Thus, under operational rules, terms have semantical significance, propositions have empirical significance. Operationism makes explicit the distinction between formal (q.v.) and empirical sentences. Formal propositions are signs arranged according to syntactical rules but lacking operational reference. Such propositions, common in mathematics, logic and syntax, derive their sanction from convention, whereas an empirical proposition is acceptable (1) when its structure obeys syntactical rules and (2) when there exists a concrete procedure (a set of operations) for determining its truth or falsity (cf. Verification). Propositions purporting to be empirical are sometimes amenable to no operational test because they contain terms obeying no definite semantical rules. These sentences are sometimes called pseudo-propositions and are said to be operationally meaningless. They may, however, be 'meaningful" in other ways, e.g. emotionally or aesthetically (cf. Meaning). Unlike a formal statement, the "truth" of an empirical sentence is never absolute and its operational confirmation serves only to increase the degree of its validity. Similarly, the semantical rule comprising the operational definition of a term has never absolute precision. Ordinarily a term denotes a class of operations and the precision of its definition depends upon how definite are the rules governing inclusion in the class. The difference between Operationism and Logical Positivism (q.v.) is one of emphasis. Operationism's stress of empirical matters derives from the fact that it was first employed to purge physics of such concepts as absolute space and absolute time, when the theory of relativity had forced upon physicists the view that space and time are most profitably defined in terms of the operations by which they are measured. Although different methods of measuring length at first give rise to different concepts of length, wherever the equivalence of certain of these measures can be established by other operations, the concepts may legitimately be combined. In psychology the operational criterion of meaningfulness is commonly associated with a behavioristic point of view. See Behaviorism. Since only those propositions which are testable by public and repeatable operations are admissible in science, the definition of such concepti as mind and sensation must rest upon observable aspects of the organism or its behavior. Operational psychology deals with experience only as it is indicated by the operation of differential behavior, including verbal report. Discriminations, or the concrete differential reactions of organisms to internal or external environmental states, are by some authors regarded as the most basic of all operations. For a discussion of the role of operational definition in phvsics. see P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, (New York, 1928) and The Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton, 1936). "The extension of operationism to psychology is discussed by C. C. Pratt in The Logic of Modem Psychology (New York. 1939.) For a discussion and annotated bibliography relating to Operationism and Logical Positivism, see S. S. Stevens, Psychology and the Science of Science, Psychol. Bull., 36, 1939, 221-263. --S.S.S. Ophelimity: Noun derived from the Greek, ophelimos useful, employed by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) in economics as the equivalent of utility, or the capacity to provide satisfaction. --J.J.R. Opinion: (Lat. opinio, from opinor, to think) An hypothesis or proposition entertained on rational grounds but concerning which doubt can reasonably exist. A belief. See Hypothesis, Certainty, Knowledge. --J.K.F- Opposition: (Lat. oppositus, pp. of oppono, to oppose) Positive actual contradiction. One of Aristotle's Post-predicaments. In logic any contrariety or contradiction, illustrated by the "Square of Opposition". Syn. with: conflict. See Logic, formal, § 4. --J.K.F. Optimism: (Lat. optimus, the best) The view inspired by wishful thinking, success, faith, or philosophic reflection, that the world as it exists is not so bad or even the best possible, life is good, and man's destiny is bright. Philosophically most persuasively propounded by Leibniz in his Theodicee, according to which God in his wisdom would have created a better world had he known or willed such a one to exist. Not even he could remove moral wrong and evil unless he destroyed the power of self-determination and hence the basis of morality. All systems of ethics that recognize a supreme good (Plato and many idealists), subscribe to the doctrines of progressivism (Turgot, Herder, Comte, and others), regard evil as a fragmentary view (Josiah Royce et al.) or illusory, or believe in indemnification (Henry David Thoreau) or melioration (Emerson), are inclined optimistically. Practically all theologies advocating a plan of creation and salvation, are optimistic though they make the good or the better dependent on moral effort, right thinking, or belief, promising it in a future existence. Metaphysical speculation is optimistic if it provides for perfection, evolution to something higher, more valuable, or makes room for harmonies or a teleology. See Pessimism. --K.F.L. Order: A class is said to be partially ordered by a dyadic relation R if it coincides with the field of R, and R is transitive and reflexive, and xRy and yRx never both hold when x and y are different. If in addition R is connected, the class is said to be ordered (or simply ordered) by R, and R is called an ordering relation. Whitehcid and Russell apply the term serial relation to relations which are transitive, irreflexive, and connected (and, in consequence, also asymmetric). However, the use of serial relations in this sense, instead ordering relations as just defined, is awkward in connection with the notion of order for unit classes. Examples: The relation not greater than among leal numbers is an ordering relation. The relation less than among real numbers is a serial relation. The real numbers are simply ordered by the former relation. In the algebra of classes (logic formal, § 7), the classes are partially ordered by the relation of class inclusion. For explanation of the terminology used in making the above definitions, see the articles connexity, reflexivity, relation, symmetry, transitivity. --A.C. Order type: See relation-number. Ordinal number: A class b is well-ordered by a dyadic relation R if it is ordered by R (see order) and, for every class a such that a ⊂ b, there is a member x of a, such that xRy holds for every member y of a; and R is then called a well-ordering relation. The ordinal number of a class b well-ordered by a relation R, or of a well-ordering relation R, is defined to be the relation-number (q. v.) of R. The ordinal numbers of finite classes (well-ordered by appropriate relations) are called finite ordinal numbers. These are 0, 1, 2, ... (to be distinguished, of course, from the finite cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2, . . .). The first non-finite (transfinite or infinite) ordinal number is the ordinal number of the class of finite ordinal numbers, well-ordered in their natural order, 0, 1, 2, . . .; it is usually denoted by the small Greek letter omega. --A.C. G. Cantor, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, translated and with an introduction by P. E. B. Jourdain, Chicago and London, 1915. (new ed. 1941); Whitehead and Russell, Princtpia Mathematica. vol. 3. Orexis: (Gr. orexis) Striving; desire; the conative aspect of mind, as distinguished from the cognitive and emotional (Aristotle). --G.R.M.. Organicism: A theory of biology that life consists in the organization or dynamic system of the organism. Opposed to mechanism and vitalism. --J.K.F. Organism: An individual animal or plant, biologically interpreted. A. N. Whitehead uses the term to include also physical bodies and to signify anything material spreading through space and enduring in time. --R.B.W. Organismic Psychology: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, an instrument) A system of theoretical psychology which construes the structure of the mind in organic rather than atomistic terms. See Gestalt Psychology; Psychological Atomism. --L.W. Organization: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, work) A structured whole. The systematic unity of parts in a purposive whole. A dynamic system. Order in something actual. --J.K.F. Organon: (Gr. organon) The title traditionally given to the body of Aristotle's logical treatises. The designation appears to have originated among the Peripatetics after Aristotle's time, and expresses their view that logic is not a part of philosophy (as the Stoics maintained) but rather the instrument (organon) of philosophical inquiry. See Aristotelianism. --G.R.M. In Kant. A system of principles by which pure knowledge may be acquired and established. Cf. Fr. Bacon's Novum Organum. --O.F.K. Oriental Philosophy: A general designation used loosely to cover philosophic tradition exclusive of that grown on Greek soil and including the beginnings of philosophical speculation in Egypt, Arabia, Iran, India, and China, the elaborate systems of India, Greater India, China, and Japan, and sometimes also the religion-bound thought of all these countries with that of the complex cultures of Asia Minor, extending far into antiquity. Oriental philosophy, though by no means presenting a homogeneous picture, nevertheless shares one characteristic, i.e., the practical outlook on life (ethics linked with metaphysics) and the absence of clear-cut distinctions between pure speculation and religious motivation, and on lower levels between folklore, folk-etymology, practical wisdom, pre-scientiiic speculation, even magic, and flashes of philosophic insight. Bonds with Western, particularly Greek philosophy have no doubt existed even in ancient times. Mutual influences have often been conjectured on the basis of striking similarities, but their scientific establishment is often difficult or even impossible. Comparative philosophy (see especially the work of Masson-Oursel) provides a useful method. Yet a thorough treatment of Oriental Philosophy is possible only when the many languages in which it is deposited have been more thoroughly studied, the psychological and historical elements involved in the various cultures better investigated, and translations of the relevant documents prepared not merely from a philological point of view or out of missionary zeal, but by competent philosophers who also have some linguistic training. Much has been accomplished in this direction in Indian and Chinese Philosophy (q.v.). A great deal remains to be done however before a definitive history of Oriental Philosophy may be written. See also Arabian, and Persian Philosophy. --K.F.L. Origen: (185-254) The principal founder of Christian theology who tried to enrich the ecclesiastic thought of his day by reconciling it with the treasures of Greek philosophy. Cf. Migne PL. --R.B.W. Ormazd: (New Persian) Same as Ahura Mazdah (q.v.), the good principle in Zoroastrianism, and opposed to Ahriman (q.v.). --K.F.L. Orphic Literature: The mystic writings, extant only in fragments, of a Greek religious-philosophical movement of the 6th century B.C., allegedly started by the mythical Orpheus. In their mysteries, in which mythology and rational thinking mingled, the Orphics concerned themselves with cosmogony, theogony, man's original creation and his destiny after death which they sought to influence to the better by pure living and austerity. They taught a symbolism in which, e.g., the relationship of the One to the many was clearly enunciated, and believed in the soul as involved in reincarnation. Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato were influenced by them. --K.F.L. Ortega y Gasset, Jose: Born in Madrid, May 9, 1883. At present in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Son of Ortega y Munillo, the famous Spanish journalist. Studied at the College of Jesuits in Miraflores and at the Central University of Madrid. In the latter he presented his Doctor's dissertation, El Milenario, in 1904, thereby obtaining his Ph.D. degree. After studies in Leipzig, Berlin, Marburg, under the special influence of Hermann Cohen, the great exponent of Kant, who taught him the love for the scientific method and awoke in him the interest in educational philosophy, Ortega came to Spain where, after the death of Nicolas Salmeron, he occupied the professorship of metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid. The following may be considered the most important works of Ortega y Gasset: Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914; El Espectador, I-VIII, 1916-1935; El Tema de Nuestro Tiempo, 1921; España Invertebrada, 1922; Kant, 1924; La Deshumanizacion del Arte, 1925; Espiritu de la Letra, 1927; La Rebelion de las Masas, 1929; Goethe desde Adentio, 1934; Estudios sobre el Amor, 1939; Ensimismamiento y Alteracion, 1939; El Libro de las Misiones, 1940; Ideas y Creencias, 1940; and others. Although brought up in the Marburg school of thought, Ortega is not exactly a neo-Kantian. At the basis of his Weltanschauung one finds a denial of the fundamental presuppositions which characterized European Rationalism. It is life and not thought which is primary. Things have a sense and a value which must be affirmed independently. Things, however, are to be conceived as the totality of situations which constitute the circumstances of a man's life. Hence, Ortega's first philosophical principle: "I am myself plus my circumstances". Life as a problem, however, is but one of the poles of his formula. Reason is the other. The two together function, not by dialectical opposition, but by necessary coexistence. Life, according to Ortega, does not consist in being, but rather, in coming to be, and as such it is of the nature of direction, program building, purpose to be achieved, value to be realized. In this sense the future as a time dimension acquires new dignity, and even the present and the past become articulate and meaning-full only in relation to the future. Even History demands a new point of departure and becomes militant with new visions. --J.A.F. Orthodoxy: Beliefs which are declared by a group to be true and normative. Heresy is a departure from and relative to a given orthodoxy. --V.S. Orthos Logos: See Right Reason. Ostensible Object: (Lat. ostendere, to show) The object envisaged by cognitive act irrespective of its actual existence. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ostensive: (Lat. ostendere, to show) Property of a concept or predicate by virtue of which it refers to and is clarified by reference to its instances. --A.C.B. Ostwald, Wilhelm: (1853-1932) German chemist. Winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1909. In Die Uberwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialistmus and in Naturphilosophie, his two best known works in the field of philosophy, he advocates a dynamic theory in opposition to materialism and mechanism. All properties of matter, and the psychic as well, are special forms of energy. --L.E.D. Oupnekhat: Anquetil Duperron's Latin translation of the Persian translation of 50 Upanishads (q.v.), a work praised by Schopenhauer as giving him complete consolation. --K.F.L. Outness: A term employed by Berkeley to express the experience of externality, that is the ideas of space and things placed at a distance. Hume used it in the sense of distance Hamilton understood it as the state of being outside of consciousness in a really existing world of material things. --J.J.R. Overindividual: Term used by H. Münsterberg to translate the German überindividuell. The term is applied to any cognitive or value object which transcends the individual subject. --L.W. P
Th. Skolem, Sur la portee du theoreme de Löwenheim-Skolem, Les Entretiens de Zurich sur les Fondements et la Methode des Sciences Mathematiques, Zurich 1941, pp. 25-52. Lucretius, Carus: (98-54 B.C.) Noted Roman poet, author of the famous didactic poem De Natura Rerum, in six books, which forms an interesting exposition of the philosophy of Epicureanism. -- M..F.
Traditionalism: In French philosophy of the early nineteenth century, the doctrine that the truth -- particularly religious truth -- is never discovered by an individual but is only to be found in "tradition". It was revealed in potentia at a single moment by God and has been developing steadily through history. Since truth is an attribute of ideas, the traditionalist holds that ideas are super-individual. They are the property of society and are found embedded in language which was revealed to primitive man bv God at the creation. The main traditionalists were Joseph de Maistre, the Vicomte de Bonald, and Bonetty. -- G.B.
transcendental idealism ::: The philosophy of Immanuel Kant and later Kantian and German idealist philosophers, according to which human experience is not of things as they are in themselves, but of those things as they appear to human beings. It differs from standard (empirical) idealism in that it does not claim that the objects of human experience would be in any sense within the mind. The idea is that whenever humans experience something, they experience it as it is for themselves: the object is real as well as mind-independent, but is, in a sense, altered by people's cognition (by the categories and the forms of sensibility, space and time). Transcendental idealism denies that people could have knowledge of the thing in itself; the opposite view is sometimes called transcendental realism.
Transcendentalism: Any doctrine giving emphasis to the transcendent or transcendental (q.v.). Originally, a convenient synonym for the "transcendental philosophy" (q.v.) of Kant and Schelling. By extension, post-Kantian idealism. Any idealistic philosophy positing the immanence of the ideal or spiritual in sensuous experience. The philosophy of the Absolute (q.v.), the doctrine of: a) the immanence of the Absolute in the finite; b) the transcendence of the Absolute above the finite conceived as illusion or "unreality". A name, onginally pejorative, given to and later adopted by an idealistic movement in New England centering around the informal and so-called "Transcendental Club," organized at Boston in 1836. An outgrowth of the romantic movement, its chief influences were Coleridge, Schelling and Orientalism. While it embodied a general attitude rather than a systematically worked out philosophy, in general it opposed Lockean empiricism, materialism, rationalism, Calvinism, Deism, Trinitarianism, and middle-class commercialism. Its metaphysics followed that of Kant and post-Kantian idealism posited the immanancc of the divine in finite existence, and tended towards pantheism (Emerson's "Nature", "Oversoul", "The Transcendentalist"). Its doctrine of knowledge was idealistic and intuitive. Its ethics embraced idealism, individualism, mysticism, reformism and optimism regarding human nature. Theologically it was autosoteric, unitarian, and broadly mystical (Theo. Parker's "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity"). Popularly, a pejorative term for any view that is "enthusiastic", "mystical", extravagant, impractical, ethereal, supernatural, vague, abstruse, lacking in common sense. --W.L. Transcendentals (Scholastic): The transcendentalia are notions which apply to any being whatsoever. They are Being, Thing, Something, One, True, Good. While thing (res) and being (ens) are synonymous, the other four name properties of being which, however, are only virtually distinct from the concept to which they apply. -- R.A.
Tufts, James Hayden: (1862-) Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Chicago University. He has been strongly influenced by Kant. He collaborated with Dewey in the standard, "Ethics", and among his other writings are: "Ethics of Cooperation," "Education and Training for Social Work" and "America's Social Morality." -- L.E.D.
Two aspects of Russell's work are likely to remain of permanent importance, his major part in the twentieth century renaissance of logic, his reiterated attempts to identify the methods of philosophy with those of the sciences. (1) While the primary objective of Principia was to prove that pure mathematics could be derived from logic, the success of this undertaking (as to which hardly any dissenting opinion persists) is overshadowed by the importance of the techniques perfected in the course of its prosecution. Without disrespect to other pioneers in the field, it is sufficient to point out that a knowledge of the symbolic logic of Russell and Whitehead is still a necessary prerequisite for understanding contemporary studies in logic, in the foundations of mathematics, and tht philosophy of science.
Universals A philosophical and logical term, used in opposition to particulars. For example, matter may be called a universal, and material bodies may be called particulars; or life may be a universal, and living beings particulars. The universal is sometimes defined as that which is left when all particularities or differences have ceased to be. The question arises as to which shall be considered real. If the particulars are realities, then the universals become mere abstract ideas: thus mankind would be merely an indefinite number of human beings. But if the universal is real, then we regard particular humans as being each a manifestation on respective lower planes of man, the Heavenly Man or Qabbalistic ’Adam Qadmon. Again, if living beings are real, then life becomes an abstraction. But if life is a real entity in itself, then living beings are its particular manifestations. The philosophy which starts with universals and proceeds to particulars is called deductive: it is that of theosophy and of Pythagoras and Plato. The inductive philosophy of Aristotle and Francis Bacon proceeds from particulars to universals. Space, motion, duration, intelligence, etc., in themselves abstract realities, are regarded by theosophy as universals, whereas from the opposite viewpoint they appear as only abstractions from experience. The deductive method has its uses in applied science, but in fact it tacitly assumes certain universals and reasons back to them from particulars.
University of Twente ::: (body, education) A university in the east of The Netherlands for technical and social sciences. It was founded in 1961, making it one of the Computer Science; Electrical Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; Philosophy of science, Technology and Society; Educational Technology. . (1995-04-16)
University of Twente "body, education" A university in the east of The Netherlands for technical and social sciences. It was founded in 1961, making it one of the youngest universities in The Netherlands. It has 7000 students studying Applied Educational Science; Applied Mathematics; Applied Physics; Chemical Technology; Computer Science; Electrical Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; Philosophy of science, Technology and Society; Educational Technology. {(http://nic.utwente.nl/uthomuk.htm)}. (1995-04-16)
Urschleim (German) Primitive slime; the name given by natural philosopher Oken (1779-1851) to the primitive cell-stuff out of which organic beings were held to have been evolved. Oken, a member of the deductive or transcendental school of natural philosophy of Fichte and Schelling, sought to formulate a science of the physical world deductively from fundamental principles laid down by Kant and applied to the mental and moral worlds. Reasoning from these principles he inferred that all organic beings are formed from aggregates of cells containing urschleim, arriving at results which have been verified by microscopic observation.
Vasubandhu. (T. Dbyig gnyen; C. Shiqin; J. Seshin; K. Sech'in 世親) (fl. c. fourth or fifth centuries CE). One of the most influential authors in the history of Buddhism, and the only major figure to make significant contributions to both the MAINSTREAM BUDDHIST SCHOOLS and MAHĀYĀNA. In Tibetan Buddhism, Vasubandhu is counted as one of the "six ornaments" (T. rgyan drug), along with NĀGĀRJUNA, ĀRYADEVA, ASAnGA, DIGNĀGA, and DHARMAKĪRTI. There has been considerable speculation about his dates, so much so that ERICH FRAUWALLNER proposed that there were two different Vasubandhus. This theory has been rejected, but there is still no consensus on his dates, with most scholars placing him in the fourth or fifth century CE. Vasubandhu is said to have been born in Purusapura in GANDHĀRA (identified with Peshawar in modern Pakistan), as the brother or half brother (with the same mother) of Asanga. He was ordained as a monk in a SARVĀSTIVĀDA school and studied VAIBHĀsIKA ABHIDHARMA philosophy in KASHMIR-GANDHĀRA, as well as the tenets of the rival SAUTRĀNTIKA school. At the conclusion of his studies, he composed his first and what would be his most famous work, the Abhidharmakosa, or "Treasury of the Abhidharma." In over six hundred stanzas in nine chapters, he set forth the major points of the Vaibhāsika system. He then composed a prose autocommentary, the ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA, in which he critiqued from a Sautrāntika perspective some of the Vaibhāsika positions that he had outlined in the verses. These two texts would become two of the most influential texts on the abhidharma in the later history of Buddhism on the subcontinent and beyond, serving, for example, as the root texts for abhidharma studies in Tibet and as the foundational text for the Kusha (Kosa) school of early Japanese Buddhism. At some point after his composition of the Kosa, he encountered his half brother Asanga, author of at least some of the texts collected in the YOGĀCĀRABHuMI, who "converted" him to the Mahāyāna. After his conversion, Vasubandhu became a prolific author on Mahāyāna materials, helping especially to frame the philosophy of the Yogācāra school. Major works attributed to him include the VIMsATIKĀ, or "Twenty [Stanzas]" and the TRIMsIKĀ, or "Thirty [Stanzas]," two works that set forth succinctly the basic philosophical positions of the Yogācāra. The TriMsikā was, together with DHARMAPĀLA's commentary to the text, the basis of XUANZANG's massive commentary, the CHENG WEISHI LUN (*VijNaptimātratāsiddhi), which was the foundational text for the FAXIANG ZONG of East Asian Yogācāra. In his TRISVABHĀVANIRDEsA, Vasubandhu also set forth the central doctrine of the Yogācāra, the "three natures" (TRISVABHĀVA), of imaginary (PARIKALPITA), dependent (PARATANTRA), and consummate (PARINIsPANNA). His VYĀKHYĀYUKTI set forth principles for the exegesis of passages from the sutras. He is also credited with commentaries on a number of Mahāyāna sutras, including the AKsAYAMATINIRDEsA, the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, and the DAsABHuMIKASuTRA (with his commentary serving as the basis of the DI LUN ZONG in China), as well as commentaries on three of the five treatises of MAITREYA, the MAHĀYĀNASuTRĀLAMKĀRA, the MADHYĀNTAVIBHĀGA, and the DHARMADHARMATĀVIBHĀGA. He also wrote a commentary on Asanga's MAHĀYĀNASAMGRAHA. His KARMASIDDHIPRAKARAnA, or "Investigation Establishing [the Correct Understanding] of KARMAN," examines the theory of action in light of the Yogācāra doctrine of the ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA. The PANCASKANDHAPRAKARAnA, or "Explanation of the Five Aggregates," presents a somewhat different view of the five aggregates (SKANDHA) than that found in his Abhidharmakosabhāsya and thus probably dates from his Mahāyāna period; it is a reworking of the presentation of the five aggregates found in Asanga's ABHIDHARMASAMUCCAYA. In addition to the Abhidharmakosabhāsya and the ViMsatikā, a third text of his was highly influential in East Asia. It is a commentary on the larger SUKHĀVATĪVYuHA, whose Sanskrit title might be reconstructed as the *Sukhāvatīvyuhopadesa. However, the work is known only in Chinese, as the JINGTU LUN, and its attribution to Vasubandhu has been called into question. Nonetheless, based on this traditional attribution, Vasubandhu is counted as an Indian patriarch of the PURE LAND schools of East Asia. ¶ In Tibet, a bṛhattīkā commentary on the sATASĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ and a paddhati on three PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ sutras (T. Yum gsum gnod 'joms) are attributed to Vasubandhu, although his authorship is disputed.
Vedic Hinduism: The religion and philosophy of the Vedas. It is basically optimistic and life-loving. The four Vedas and the Atharva-Veda are the literature of this period which later changed into Brahmanic Hinduism (q.v.).
Vitalism: (Lat. vita, life) The doctrine that phenomena of life possess a character sui generis by virtue of which they differ radically from physico-chemical phenomena. The vitalist ascribes the activities of living organisms to the operation of a "vital force" such as Driesch's "entelechy" or Bergson's elan vital. (See H. Driesch, Der Vttalismus als Geschichte und als Lehre (1905); The Science and Philosophy of Organism, 2 Vols. (1908); The Problem of Individuality (1914); H. Bergson, Creative Evolution.) Opposed to Vitalism is biological mechanism (see Mechanism) which asserts that living phenomena can be explained exclusively in physico-chemical terms. (See J. Loeb, The Organism as a Whole from a Physico-Chemical View-Point, 1919; The Dynamics of Living Matter, 1910. See also C. D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature, ch. II.) -- L.W.
Wang Yang-ming: (Wang Shou-jen, Wang Poan, 1473-1529) Was a count, a cabinet member, and a general credited with many successful campaigns against invaders and rebels. Drawing his inspiration from the teachings of Lu Hsiangshan, he developed Neo-Confucianism (li hsuch) on the basis of the doctrine of the Mind (hsin hsuch). His complete works, Wang Yang-ming Ch'uan-chi (partial Eng. tr. by F. G. Henke: The Philosophy of Wang Yang Ming) consist of 38 chuans in several volumes. -- W.T.C.
Whitehead, Alfred North: British philosopher. Born in 1861. Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1911-14. Lecturer in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at University College, London, 1914-24. Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London. From 1924 until retirement in 1938, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Among his most important philosophical works are the Principia Mathematica, 3 vols. (1910-13) (with Bertrand Russell; An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919); The Concept of Nature (1920); Science and the Modern World (1926); Religion tn the Making (1926); Symbolism (1928); Process and Reality (1929); and Adventures of Ideas (1933). The principle of relativity in physics is the key to the understanding of metaphysics. Whitehead opposes the current philosophy of static substance having qualities which he holds to be based on the simply located material bodies of Newtonian physics and the "pure sensations" of Hume. This 17th century philosophy depends upon a "bifurcation of nature" into two unequal systems of reality on the Cartesian model of mind and matter. The high abstractions of science must not be mistaken for concrete realities. Instead, Whitehead argues that there is only one reality, what appears, whatever is given in perception, is real. There is nothing existing beyond what is present in the experience of subjects, understanding by subject any actual entity. There are neither static concepts nor substances in the world; only a network of events. All such events are actual extensions or spatio-temporal unities. The philosophy of organism, as Whitehead terms his work, is based upon the patterned process of events. All things or events are sensitive to the existence of all others; the relations between them consisting in a kind of feeling. Every actual entity is then a "prehensive occasion", that is, it consists of all those active relations with other things into which it enters. An actual entity is further determined by "negative prehension", the exclusion of all that which it is not. Thus every feeling is a positive prehension, every abstraction a negative one. Every actual entity is lost as an individual when it perishes, but is preserved through its relations with other entities in the framework of the world. Also, whatever has happened must remain an absolute fact. In this sense, past events have achieved "objective immortality". Except for this, the actual entities are involved in flux, into which there is the ingression of eternal objects from the realm of possibilities. The eternal objects are universals whose selection is necessary to the actual entities. Thus the actual world is a certain selection of eternal objects. God is the principles of concretion which determines the selection. "Creativity" is the primal cause whereby possibilities are selected in the advance of actuality toward novelty. This movement is termed the consequent nature of God. The pure possibility of the eternal objects themsehes is termed his primordial nature. -- J.K.F.
With reference to the approach to the central reality of religion, God, and man's relation to it, types of the Philosophy of Religion may be distinguished, leaving out of account negative (atheism), skeptical and cynical (Xenophanes, Socrates, Voltaire), and agnostic views, although insertions by them are not to be separated from the history of religious consciousness. Fundamentalism, mainly a theological and often a Church phenomenon of a revivalist nature, philosophizes on the basis of unquestioning faith, seeking to buttress it by logical argument, usually taking the form of proofs of the existence of God (see God). Here belong all historic religions, Christianity in its two principal forms, Catholicism with its Scholastic philosophy and Protestantism with its greatly diversified philosophies, the numerous religions of Hinduism, such as Brahmanism, Shivaism and Vishnuism, the religion of Judaism, and Mohammedanism. Mysticism, tolerated by Church and philosophy, is less concerned with proof than with description and personal experience, revealing much of the psychological factors involved in belief and speculation. Indian philosophy is saturated with mysticism since its inception, Sufism is the outstanding form of Arab mysticism, while the greatest mystics in the West are Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Ruysbroek, Thomas a Kempis, and Jacob Bohme. Metaphysics incorporates religious concepts as thought necessities. Few philosophers have been able to avoid the concept of God in their ontology, or any reference to the relation of God to man in their ethics. So, e.g., Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, and especially Hegel who made the investigation of the process of the Absolute the essence of the Philosophy of Religion.
With respect to the concept of God, a specific philosophy of religion may be a theism with its many forms of henotheism, monotheism, etc., a deism, pantheism, anthropomorphism, animism, panpsychism (all of which see), or the like, or it rmy fall into the general philosophic classification of a transcendentilism, immanentalism, absolutism, etc. By the term modernism is meant the tendency, subtended by the recent interest of science in religion (Sirs J. H. Jeans and A. S. Eddington, A. Carrell et al.) to interpret religious experience in close contact with physical and social reality, thus transforming the age-old personalism into a thoroughgoing humanism, thereby accomplishing an even greater attachment to social thinking and practical ethics and a trend away from metaphvsical speculation toward a psychologizing in the Philosophy of Religion.
With these principles of matter and form, and the parallel distinction between potential and actual existence, Aristotle claims to have solved the difficulties that earlier thinkers had found in the fact of change. The changes in nature are to be interpreted not as the passage from non-being to being, which would make them unintelligible, but as the process by which what is merely potential being passes over, through form, into actual being, or entelechy. The philosophy of nature which results from these basic concepts views nature as a dynamic realm in which change is real, spontaneous, continuous, and in the main directed. Matter, though indeed capable of form, possesses a residual inertia which on occasion produces accidental effects; so that alongside the teological causation of the forms Aristotle recognizes what he calls "necessity" in nature; but the products of the latter, since they are aberrations from form, cannot be made the object of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, the system of nature as developed by Aristotle is a graded series of existences, in which the simpler beings, though in themselves formed matter, function also as matter for higher forms. At the base of the series is prime matter, which as wholly unformed is mere potentiality, not actual being. The simplest formed matter is the so-called primary bodies -- earth, water, air and fire. From these as matter arise by the intervention of successively more complex forms the composite inorganic bodies, organic tissues, and the world of organisms, characterized by varying degrees of complexity in structure and function. In this realization of form in matter Aristotle distinguishes three sorts of change: qualitative change, or alteration; quantitative change, or growth and diminution; and change, of place, or locomotion, the last being primary, since it is presupposed in all the others. But Aristotle is far from suggesting a mechanical explanation of change, for not even locomotion can be explained by impact alone. The motion of the primary bodies is due to the fact that each has its natural place to which it moves when not opposed; earth to the center, then water, air, and fire to successive spheres about the center. The ceaseless motion of these primary bodies results from their ceaseless transformation into one another through the interaction of the forms of hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus qualitative differences of form underlie even the most elemental changes in the world of nature.
Woodbridge, Frederick James Eugene: (1867-1940) Was Professor of Philosophy of Columbia University and one of the Editors of the Journal of Philosophy. He was an important member of the realist school. For him consciousness was a relation of meaning, a connection of objects and structure was a notion of greater philosophic value than substance. His best known works are Philosophy of Hobbes, The Realm of Mind and Nature and Mind. -- L.E.D.
Yoga (Sanskrit) Yoga Union; one of the six Darsanas or schools of philosophy of India, founded by Patanjali, but said to have existed as a distinct teaching and system of life before that sage. Yajnavalkya, a famous and very ancient sage of pre-Mahabharatan times, to whom the White Yajur-Veda, the Satapatha-Brahmana, and the Brihadaranyaka are attributed, is credited with inculcating the positive duty of religious meditation and retirement into the forests, and therefore is believed to have originated the yoga doctrine. Patanjali’s yoga, however, is more definite and precise as a philosophy, and imbodies more of the occult sciences than any of the extant works attributed to Yajnavalkya.
KEYS (10k)
17 Sri Aurobindo
2 Sergius Bulgakov
2 ?
1 Seth Bernadette
1 Martin Buber
1 H P Blavatsky
1 G Santayana
1 Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola
1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
1 Eliphas Levi
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
20 Yann Martel
17 Sri Aurobindo
12 Anonymous
11 Cal Newport
10 G K Chesterton
10 Bertrand Russell
8 Emma Goldman
7 Martin Luther King Jr
7 Friedrich Nietzsche
6 Fulton J Sheen
6 Alan W Watts
5 William B Irvine
5 Ta Nehisi Coates
5 Swami Vivekananda
5 Ralph Waldo Emerson
5 Michelle Alexander
5 Aldous Huxley
4 Philip Kitcher
4 Neil deGrasse Tyson
4 Jean Paul Sartre
1:The philosophy of laughter will never have anything in common with the religion of tears.
~ Eliphas Levi,#KEYS
2:All sentience is ultimately self-sentience. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Philosophy of the Upanishads, #KEYS
3:The universe is a self-creative process of a supreme Reality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
4:Nothing can exist which is not substance and power of Brahman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
5:All variations resolve themselves into an unity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Philosophy of the Upanishads, #KEYS
6:Where there is no limitation, there can be no pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Philosophy of the Upanishads, #KEYS
7:There is no body without soul, no body that is not itself a form of soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
8:Those who think that Aristotle disagrees with Plato disagree with me, who make a concordant philosophy of both. ~ Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, On Being and the One, #KEYS
9:All things are there as the spirit's powers and means and forms of manifestation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
10:Birth is the first spiritual mystery of the physical universe, death is the second. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
11:There is nothing which is exclusively spirit or exclusively matter. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Philosophy of the Upanishads, #KEYS
12:Body and mind are not the creators of the spirit, the spirit is the creator of the mind and body. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
13:As the essence of Matter is Gravity, so, on the other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence of Spirit is Freedom
~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History,#KEYS
14:I don't like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found." ~ Martin Buber, (1878 - 1965) Austrian philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, Wikipedia., #KEYS
15:The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character. (461) ~ G Santayana, #KEYS
16:The consciousness is there throughout in our occult parts of being, the development is in the manifesting Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
17:In the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, genius entails that an individual possesses unique qualities and talents that make the genius especially valuable to the society in which he or she operates.
~ ?,#KEYS
18:The life of the individual must have the same rhythm of significance, the same law of progression as the cosmic life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
19:It is rebirth that gives to the birth of an incomplete being in a body its promise of completeness and its spiritual significance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
20:Ratio, scientific or theoretical reason, emerges from the ruins of the sophic; it becomes the lantern with which we seek the Logos in the nocturnal darkness. ~ Sergius Bulgakov, The Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household, #KEYS
21:Suicide is merely a frenzied revolt against limitation, a revolt not the less significant because it is without knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Philosophy of the Upanishads, #KEYS
22:Philosophy comprehends the apparent manifold of things and the single truth of their meaning.... There is a coincidence in philosophy and only in philosophy of the understanding of all human things with the human good. ~ Seth Bernadette, #KEYS
23:The soul is not bound by the formula of mental humanity: it did not begin with that and will not end with it; it had a prehuman past, it has a superhuman future. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #KEYS
24:The purpose of economic activity is to defend and to spread the seeds of life, to resurrect nature. This is the action of Sophia on the universe in an effort to restore it to being in Truth. ~ Sergius Bulgakov, The Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household, #KEYS
25:The world is not prepared yet to understand the philosophy of Occult Sciences - let them assure themselves first of all that there are beings in an invisible world, whether 'Spirits' of the dead or Elementals; and that there are hidden powers in man, which are capable of making a God of him on earth. ~ H P Blavatsky, #KEYS
26: The purpose of creation, is lila. The concept of lila escapes all the traditional difficulties in assigning purpose to the creator. Lila is a purpose-less purpose, a natural outflow, a spontaneous self-manifestation of the Divine. The concept of lila, again, emphasizes the role of delight in creation. The concept of Prakriti and Maya fail to explain the bliss aspect of Divine. If the world is manifestation of the Force of Satcitananda, the deployment of its existence and consciousness, its purpose can be nothing but delight. This is the meaning of delight. Lila, the play, the child's joy, the poet's joy, the actor's joy, the mechanician's joy of the soul of things eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and recreating Himself in Himself for the sheer bliss of that self-creation, of that self-representation, Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground ~ Sri Aurobindo, Philosophy of Social Development, pp-39-40 #KEYS
27:In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is called 'the resurrection body ' and 'the glorified body.' The prophet Isaiah said, 'The dead shall live, their bodies shall rise' (Isa. 26:19). St. Paul called it 'the celestial body' or 'spiritual body ' (soma pneumatikon) (I Corinthians 15:40). In Sufism it is called 'the most sacred body ' (wujud al-aqdas) and 'supracelestial body ' (jism asli haqiqi). In Taoism, it is called 'the diamond body,' and those who have attained it are called 'the immortals' and 'the cloudwalkers.' In Tibetan Buddhism it is called 'the light body.' In Tantrism and some schools of yoga, it is called 'the vajra body,' 'the adamantine body,' and 'the divine body.' In Kriya yoga it is called 'the body of bliss.' In Vedanta it is called 'the superconductive body.' In Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, it is called 'the radiant body.' In the alchemical tradition, the Emerald Tablet calls it 'the Glory of the Whole Universe' and 'the golden body.' The alchemist Paracelsus called it 'the astral body.' In the Hermetic Corpus, it is called 'the immortal body ' (soma athanaton). In some mystery schools, it is called 'the solar body.' In Rosicrucianism, it is called 'the diamond body of the temple of God.' In ancient Egypt it was called 'the luminous body or being' (akh). In Old Persia it was called 'the indwelling divine potential' (fravashi or fravarti). In the Mithraic liturgy it was called 'the perfect body ' (soma teilion). In the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, it is called 'the divine body,' composed of supramental substance. In the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, it is called 'the ultrahuman'.
~ ?, http://herebedragons.weebly.com/homo-lumen.html,#KEYS
28:the omnipresent Trinity :::
In practice three conceptions are necessary before there can be any possibility of Yoga; there must be, as it were, three consenting parties to the effort,-God, Nature and the human soul or, in more abstract language, the Transcendental, the Universal and the Individual. If the individual and Nature are left to themselves, the one is bound to the other and unable to exceed appreciably her lingering march. Something transcendent is needed, free from her and greater, which will act upon us and her, attracting us upward to Itself and securing from her by good grace or by force her consent to the individual ascension. It is this truth which makes necessary to every philosophy of Yoga the conception of the Ishwara, Lord, supreme Soul or supreme Self, towards whom the effort is directed and who gives the illuminating touch and the strength to attain. Equally true is the complementary idea so often enforced by the Yoga of devotion that as the Transcendent is necessary to the individual and sought after by him, so also the individual is necessary in a sense to the Transcendent and sought after by It. If the Bhakta seeks and yearns after Bhagavan, Bhagavan also seeks and yearns after the Bhakta. There can be no Yoga of knowledge without a human seeker of the knowledge, the supreme subject of knowledge and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of knowledge; no Yoga of devotion without the human God-lover, the supreme object of love and delight and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of spiritual, emotional and aesthetic enjoyment; no Yoga of works without the human worker, the supreme Will, Master of all works and sacrifices, and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of power and action. However Monistic maybe our intellectual conception of the highest truth of things, in practice we are compelled to accept this omnipresent Trinity.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:A philosophy of life: I'm an adventurer, looking for treasure. ~ paulo-coelho, @wisdomtrove 2:The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 3:Economic disaster begins with a philosophy of doing less and wanting more. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 4:Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 5:It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 6:Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence. ~ albert-camus, @wisdomtrove 7:Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself. ~ arthur-schopenhauer, @wisdomtrove 8:Practice the philosophy of continuous improvement. Get a little bit better every single day. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 9:My philosophy of defense is to keep the pressure on an opponent until you get to his emotions ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 10:Tell me what gives a man or woman their greatest pleasure and I'll tell you their philosophy of life. ~ dale-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 11:You will attract to yourself people who harmonize with your own philosophy of life, whether you wish it or not. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 12:The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 13:Any person can achieve greatness if they understand the philosophy of success and the steps required to achieve it. ~ andrew-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 14:The philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, but its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 15:Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove 16:A sound philosophy of life, I think, may be the most valuable asset for a psychiatrist to have when he is treating a patient. ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove 17:The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 18:I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times ~ john-wheeler, @wisdomtrove 19:Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. ~ winston-churchill, @wisdomtrove 20:The sensual experiences in life are not to be avoided. This is the philosophy of Tantric Buddhism - nor are they particularly to be sought after. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 21:My philosophy of life is that if we make up our mind what we are going to make of our lives, then work hard toward that goal, we never lose - somehow we win out. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 22:I firmly believe that the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent resistance is the only logical and moral approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 23:The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 24:Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 25:Much of the philosophy of religious education has been based upon a false premise, and perhaps many have missed the essence of Christian experience, having had religious training take its place. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 26:The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 27:It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. It's a crazy world out there. Be curious. ~ stephen-hawking, @wisdomtrove 28:I plan to stand by nonviolence, because I have found it to be a philosophy of life that regulates not only my dealings in the struggle for racial justice, but also my dealings with people, and with my own self. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 29:If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life. If, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 30:But in truth I know nothing about the philosophy of education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them. ~ michel-de-montaigne, @wisdomtrove 31:Philosophy is that part of science which at present people chose to have opinions about, but which they have no knowledge about. Therefore, every advance in knowledge robs philosophy of some problems which formerly it had …and will belong to science. ~ bertrand-russell, @wisdomtrove 32:We either have wild places or we don't. We admit the spiritual-emotional validity of wild, beautiful places or we don't. We have a philosophy of simplicity of experience in these wild places or we don't. We admit an almost religious devotion to the clean exposition of the wild, natural earth or we don't. ~ amsel-adams, @wisdomtrove 33:Meditation is not aimed at developing a fine philosophy of life or mind. It is not about thinking at all. It is about keeping things simple. Right now, in this moment, do you see? Do you hear? This seeing, this hearing, when unadorned, is the recovery of original mind, free from all concepts, including “original mind.” ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 34:I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 35:The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 36:The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contract theory of Hobbes, the "back to nature" optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 37:The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea formulated by mankind. If it prevailed in the whole modern world we'd still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we'd be back among the Egyptians of the pyramid age. Its only coherent contribution to Western thought has been theosophy-and theosophy is as idiotic as Christian Science. It has absolutely nothing to offer a civilized white man. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 38:[M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous‚Äîthat it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 39:Why multiply instances? It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents Spirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, put on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of CLOTHES, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been: the whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing; and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:My personal philosophy of life is one of ethics ~ Alva Myrdal, #NFDB
2:one generation is the philosophy of government ~ David Kupelian, #NFDB
3:My philosophy of dating is to just fart right away. ~ Jenny McCarthy, #NFDB
4:That’s the underlying philosophy of Aoki Bootcamp: ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
5:Have a philosophy of investment and try to follow it. ~ Walter Schloss, #NFDB
6:Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
7:Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright, #NFDB
8:Your Philosophy of life shapes you more than anything else ~ Tony Robbins, #NFDB
9:The science of love is the philosophy of the heart ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
10:Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer. ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
11:philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and some of the work of Seneca. ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
12:Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
13:The agenda of the roadblock is the philosophy of the stop sign. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
14:The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. ~ David Schnarch, #NFDB
15:Your face is a billboard advertising your philosophy of life! ~ Barbara Johnson, #NFDB
16:Josiah Royce wrote a book with the title The Philosophy of Loyalty. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
17:The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
18:Economic disaster begins with a philosophy of doing less and wanting more. ~ Jim Rohn, #NFDB
19:My philosophy of life can be summed up in four words: It can't be helped. ~ Will Cuppy, #NFDB
20:I have the general philosophy of creating the future you want to see. ~ Peter Diamandis, #NFDB
21:This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society. ~ Ai Weiwei, #NFDB
22:Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
23:a grand goal in living is the first component of a philosophy of life. ~ William B Irvine, #NFDB
24:In the presence of death, no philosophy of life can feel triumphant! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
25:Adopt a new philosophy of cooperation (win-win) in which everybody wins. ~ W Edwards Deming, #NFDB
26:In the world today, only a philosophy of eternity could justify non-violence. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
27:It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
28:I gotta think that one that becomes a philosophy of work, which is "no excuses." ~ Phil Ramone, #NFDB
29:The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
30:Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life. ~ Eugene Delacroix, #NFDB
31:Hey, you wanna hear my philosophy of life? Do it to him before he does it to you. ~ Marlon Brando, #NFDB
32:'Freedom from fear' could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights. ~ Dag Hammarskjold, #NFDB
33:To create happiness for oneself and others is the whole philosophy of religion. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
34:It's a kind of philosophy of my own life, to create the energy enough to keep on going. ~ Ernie Banks, #NFDB
35:Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
36:...[P]hysics... [is] the philosophy of nature, so far as it is based on empirical laws. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
37:The philosophy of the discoveries, the emigration, and the colonisation was Christianity. ~ Hugh Thomas, #NFDB
38:From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
39:You know, the whole philosophy of ad hoc combinations has its strengths and its weaknesses. ~ Evan Parker, #NFDB
40:Careerism: the self-centered philosophy of governing to win the next election above all else. ~ Tom Coburn, #NFDB
41:It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.” Isaac Asimov ~ William Boyd, #NFDB
42:Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
43:One cannot live through a long stretch of years without forming some philosophy of life. ~ Clarence Darrow, #NFDB
44:The philosophy of laughter will never have anything in common with the religion of tears.
~ Eliphas Levi,#NFDB
45:My philosophy of life is simple: I need someone to love, something to wait and do something. ~ Elvis Presley, #NFDB
46:Philosophy is that which grasps its own era in thought. ~ Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Rights; 1821., #NFDB
47:Philosophy of science is the neurotic self-consciousness of the modern body of knowledge. ~ Peter Sj stedt H, #NFDB
48:Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
49:Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
50:The philosophy of a lot of European teams, even in home matches, is not to give a goal away. ~ Alex Ferguson, #NFDB
51:Strength gives a man the right to do as he wishes." "The philosophy of a bully and a thug, ~ Jonathan Moeller, #NFDB
52:All the big problems of the world today are routed in the philosophy of separateness and dualism. ~ Satish Kumar, #NFDB
53:Here is a good philosophy of life: Enjoy the road with flowers; enjoy the road with stones! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
54:The philosophy of FIFA is to expand world soccer space, to spread out the world football space. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
55:The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
56:To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
57:To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is ken to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
58:To chose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
59:But basing a whole philosophy of life on what you would do in extremis does not seem to me to be right. ~ Jean Ure, #NFDB
60:Every philosophical review ought to be a philosophy of reviews at the same time. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, #NFDB
61:Once we were alone Ryan scooped me into his arms and upheld his philosophy of kiss first, talk later. ~ Kelly Oram, #NFDB
62:The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
63:To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
64:Where the dance of Meera and the silence of Buddha meet, blossoms the true philosophy of Rajneesh. ~ Amrita Pritam, #NFDB
65:No literature is sound, no philosophy of action workable, if it doesn't take a hard look at itself. ~ John W Campbell, #NFDB
66:Tell me what gives a man or woman their greatest pleasure and I'll tell you their philosophy of life. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
67:The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection. ~ William Godwin, #NFDB
68:During the Great Depression, the philosophy of grin-and-bear-it became a national coping mechanism. ~ Maureen Corrigan, #NFDB
69:A cold atheistical materialism is the tendency of the so-called material philosophy of the present day. ~ Adam Sedgwick, #NFDB
70:The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
71:This is the philosophy of nonviolence that I have learned from Gandhi, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. ~ Malala Yousafzai, #NFDB
72:I am,” Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, “an Epicurean. ~ Stephen Greenblatt, #NFDB
73:In conformity with the philosophy of Christ, let us make of our life a training for death. ~ Saint Maximus the Confessor, #NFDB
74:All sentience is ultimately self-sentience. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Philosophy of the Upanishads, #NFDB
75:The philosophy of Africanism holds out the hope of a genuine democracy beyond the stormy sea of struggle ~ Robert Sobukwe, #NFDB
76:The philosophy of the rain is very simple: No obstacle is obstacle when you are strongly determined! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
77:The universe is a self-creative process of a supreme Reality. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #NFDB
78:[...] to introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity ~ Carl von Clausewitz, #NFDB
79:Nothing can exist which is not substance and power of Brahman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #NFDB
80:Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
81:The American Revolution was, in fact, a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians. ~ Robert Trout, #NFDB
82:All variations resolve themselves into an unity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Philosophy of the Upanishads, #NFDB
83:My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration, and ignoble deaths. ~ Harlan Ellison, #NFDB
84:Seeking first to understand isn't about who's right or wrong; it is a philosophy of effective communication. ~ Richard Carlson, #NFDB
85:Every transformation demands as its precondition "the ending of a world"-the collapse of an old philosophy of life. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
86:India is a civilization where the principle and philosophy of sacrifice is ingrained as part of our upbringing. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
87:This wasn’t about an infraction, but dictating a philosophy of life: certain types of people must be overseen. ~ Victor LaValle, #NFDB
88:You will attract to yourself people who harmonize with your own philosophy of life, whether you wish it or not. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
89:the hermetic philosophy of the harmony between man and nature contained in the phrase “As above, so below. ~ Christiane Northrup, #NFDB
90:The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
91:I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey. ~ Aldo Leopold, #NFDB
92:The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
93:There's no longer a monolithic evil empire somewhere, spreading a different philosophy of life. That doesn't exist. ~ Seth Gordon, #NFDB
94:We must exchange the philosophy of excuse - what I am is beyond my control for the philosophy of responsibility. ~ Barbara Jordan, #NFDB
95:Where there is no limitation, there can be no pain. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Philosophy of the Upanishads, #NFDB
96:Jan Dhan Yojana is at the core of our philosophy of 'Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas' & we will work towards its success. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
97:Even religion had to invent some kind of science for itself (Theology = The philosophy of divinity) To justify its existence. ~ Rius, #NFDB
98:One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, #NFDB
99:Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind. ~ Imre Lakatos, #NFDB
100:Any person can achieve greatness if they understand the philosophy of success and the steps required to achieve it. ~ Andrew Carnegie, #NFDB
101:There is no body without soul, no body that is not itself a form of soul. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #NFDB
102:A liberal is only a bundle of prejudices until he has mastered, has understood, experienced the philosophy of Conservatism. ~ Lord Acton, #NFDB
103:You only get married the first time once.” There was the philosophy of a generation wrapped up in a tidy little sentence ~ Carrie Vaughn, #NFDB
104:Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical. ~ Rupert Sheldrake, #NFDB
105:Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the
gospel of envy.”
[PERTH, 28 MAY 1948] ~ Winston S Churchill,#NFDB
106:A general philosophy of the female characters in my films is they all want something to believe in, and not having anything. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
107:Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
108:Marla’s philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn’t. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
109:Rather, think of etiquette as a philosophy of living and enjoying life with grace, compassion, and respect for others. ~ Mary Alice Monroe, #NFDB
110:The philosophy of hedonism means little to lovers of pleasure. They have no inclination to read philosophy, or to write it. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
111:Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the
gospel of envy.”
—WSC, PERTH, 28 MAY 1948 ~ Winston Churchill,#NFDB
112:That's the underlying philosophy of Chinese driving courses: if something is technically difficult, then in must be useful. ~ Peter Hessler, #NFDB
113:The paper was Catholic, but she embraced a philosophy of personalism, which is an affirmation of the dignity of each person, ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
114:The Philosophy of Princes is to dive into the Secrets of men, leaving the secrets of nature to those that have spare time. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
115:Someone asked me once what my philosophy of life was, and I said some crazy thing. I should have said, how the hell do I know? ~ Rock Hudson, #NFDB
116:Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
117:Persons who have been homeless carry within them a certain philosophy of life which makes them apprehensive about ownership. ~ Jerzy Kosinski, #NFDB
118:All things are there as the spirit’s powers and means and forms of manifestation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #NFDB
119:the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. ~ James Clear, #NFDB
120:The philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, but its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
121:A sound philosophy of life, I think, may be the most valuable asset for a psychiatrist to have when he is treating a patient. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
122:Birth is the first spiritual mystery of the physical universe, death is the second. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #NFDB
123:There is nothing which is exclusively spirit or exclusively matter. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Philosophy of the Upanishads, #NFDB
124:The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
125:The philosophy of life is this: Life is not a struggle, not a tension Life is bliss. It is eternal wisdom, eternal existence. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, #NFDB
126:there rose this man Krishna, and in the Gita he tries to reconcile the ceremony and the philosophy of the priests and the people. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
127:It is the forgetfulness of these principles which as made for the anarchy in thinking in so much of the anemic philosophy of our day. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
128:hedonism is the default philosophy of most people and certainly has become the dominant view of consumer “shop till you drop” culture. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
129:He who accepts the unaltered philosophy of another is as ludicrous as he who donshis neighbor's hat, and infinitely more ridiculous. ~ Paulette Goddard, #NFDB
130:His professed philosophy of “Shandyism” is a defiant frivolity that declines to take the world as seriously as it tries to insist upon. In ~ Tim Kreider, #NFDB
131:To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false, is essentially a meaningless question. ~ Carl L Becker, #NFDB
132:If you have to write a fictional adventure to convey a philosophy of evil, the best person is the destroyer of evil himself, Lord Shiva. ~ Amish Tripathi, #NFDB
133:is not really a system of painting but a method of internal investigation. It is not the philosophy of painting but painting as philosophy. ~ Octavio Paz, #NFDB
134:Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery’. ~ Kerry Bolton, #NFDB
135:At the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. On the cranky left, that is very annoying; I can see that. ~ Bono, #NFDB
136:Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
137:The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods; it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the beyond. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
138:What is your philosophy of life?” “Think as little as possible.” “Anything else?” “When you can’t think of anything else to do, be kind. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
139:[H]e developed a private philosophy of total self-reliance, an unyielding internal sufficiency that requires no external support from others. ~ Chinua Achebe, #NFDB
140:Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
141:Body and mind are not the creators of the spirit, the spirit is the creator of the mind and body. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #NFDB
142:My connection to Santa Fe is very closely, and continuously a connection with Reid. I believe in him and his philosophy of photographic education. ~ Sam Abell, #NFDB
143:Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
144:Ronald Reagan was a president of strength. His philosophy was a philosophy of strength - a strong military, a strong economy and strong families. ~ Mitt Romney, #NFDB
145:They sound like the philosophy of a man who, having a headache, beats himself on the head with a hammer so that he cannot feel the ache. ~ Alcoholics Anonymous, #NFDB
146:A philosophy of education, in short, is essential to being a proper parent; otherwise, you are merely turning your child over to blind chance. ~ Leonard Peikoff, #NFDB
147:Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
148:Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
149:My philosophy of leadership is to surround myself with good people who have ability, judgment and knowledge, but above all, a passion for service. ~ Sonny Perdue, #NFDB
150:The political philosophy of black nationalism means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community; no more. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
151:The sensual experiences in life are not to be avoided. This is the philosophy of Tantric Buddhism - nor are they particularly to be sought after. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
152:The leftist philosophy of violence is simple: It’s good when it’s being used for leftist causes. It’s bad when it’s being used for any other purpose. ~ Ben Shapiro, #NFDB
153:I was in a delirium of destruction, as if the body were an insult to the philosophy of my life, and only in destroying it could I reclaim my sanity. ~ Stephen Hunter, #NFDB
154:I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times ~ John Archibald Wheeler, #NFDB
155:monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
156:The basic outline of the philosophy of the Buribunks: I think, therefore I am; I speak therefore I am; I write, therefore I am; I publish therefore I am. ~ Carl Schmitt, #NFDB
157:The basic philosophy of stoicism is that you have nothing real external to your own consciousness, that the only thing real is in fact your consciousness. ~ Roger Avary, #NFDB
158:Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
159:Boston Mayor James Michael Curley once summarized the philosophy of many politicians as, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
160:I think if Tottenham are going to be top four side, the fans and the club will need to get away from the philosophy of 'pretty football', that's got to go. ~ Alan Hansen, #NFDB
161:The food we ate was Indian, and both my mother and father were very deep into the ancient philosophy of India, so it could well have been an Indian household. ~ Amar Bose, #NFDB
162:The philosophy of the rich and the poor is this: the rich invest their money and spend what is left. The poor spend their money and invest what is left. ~ Robert Kiyosaki, #NFDB
163:Humanism is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity, of application of new ideas of scientific progress for the benefit of all. ~ Linus Pauling, #NFDB
164:Surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
165:There is also a philosophy of less-is-more, and a little dignity that never hurt anybody. There are many qualities to admire about our father's generation. ~ James Redford, #NFDB
166:Michael believed in the old biblical philosophy of cut down the tree, burn out the roots and then salt the ground so nothing ever grew there again. Nathan ~ Michael Anderle, #NFDB
167:surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosingn immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
168:It is my hope that as the Negro plunges deeper into the quest for freedom and justice he will plunge even deeper into the philosophy of non-violence. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
169:Jean-Pierre Marquis, From a Geometrical Point of View: A Study of the History and Philosophy of Category Theory, Springer Science & Business Media, 2008. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
170:I know that bein a idiot an all, I ain't sposed to have no philosophy of my own, but maybe it's just because nobody never took the time to talk to me bout it. ~ Winston Groom, #NFDB
171:The consciousness is there throughout in our occult parts of being, the development is in the manifesting Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #NFDB
172:Bicyclist's Philosophy of Life..."It's a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. ~ Susan Vreeland, #NFDB
173:But the need for conflict to expose prejudice and unclear reasoning, which is deeply embedded in my philosophy of science, has its origin in these debates. ~ Robert B Laughlin, #NFDB
174:Revenge is the philosophy of dictators and mob bosses everywhere and always, used to keep others in line with threats of economic ruin, violence, or worse. ~ David Cay Johnston, #NFDB
175:The philosophy of the school was quite simple - the bright boys specialised in Latin, the not so bright in science and the rest managed with geography or the like. ~ Aaron Klug, #NFDB
176:We will have to abandon the philosophy of Democritus and the concept of elementary particles. We should accept instead the concept of elementary symmetries. ~ Werner Heisenberg, #NFDB
177:My philosophy of life is that if we make up our mind what we are going to make of our lives, then work hard toward that goal, we never lose - somehow we win out. ~ Ronald Reagan, #NFDB
178:The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
179:Yoga is a philosophy of discipline and meditation that transforms the spirit and makes the individual a better person in thought, action, knowledge and devotion. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
180:The life of the individual must have the same rhythm of significance, the same law of progression as the cosmic life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #NFDB
181:The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events. ~ Ernst F Schumacher, #NFDB
182:If I had to sum up my philosophy of fuckness in a few words so I could cram it on a bumper sticker or t-shirt, those were the words I would have chosen: “Fuck it. ~ Andersen Prunty, #NFDB
183:Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of the philosophy of science. ~ William Poundstone, #NFDB
184:The main thing Karate offers to me is a philosophy of life. The philosophy of Karate is respect and discipline. You give 100% of whatever you do, in every activity. ~ Lyoto Machida, #NFDB
185:You know what my philosophy of life is? That it’s important to have some laughs, but you got to suffer a little too, because otherwise you miss the whole point to life. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
186:Martial arts have two parts. One is external, other internal. The external is physical part. The internal is philosophy of how to be, what kind of person learns martial arts. ~ Jet Li, #NFDB
187:There's something about the style of living in the country that they feel, "This is what represents me." So style is about the philosophy of how we create our civilization. ~ David Bowie, #NFDB
188:As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
189:As the essence of Matter is Gravity, so, on the other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence of Spirit is Freedom
~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History,#NFDB
190:He'd stolen his philosophy of editing from the old New Critics—it's just about the book. Not the author, not the market, not the reader...one judged a book only by the book. ~ Tiffany Reisz, #NFDB
191:What you have to know is that Marla is still alive. Marla's philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn't. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
192:I firmly believe that the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent resistance is the only logical and moral approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
193:It is rebirth that gives to the birth of an incomplete being in a body its promise of completeness and its spiritual significance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #NFDB
194:My mother is probably the wisest person I've ever known. She's not schooled, she's not well read. But she has a philosophy of life that makes well-read people seem like morons. ~ Gene Simmons, #NFDB
195:The GDP rises whenever money changes hands....The whole thing is reminiscent of Edward Abbey's reflection that "growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell. ~ John Robbins, #NFDB
196:The pretended physical philosophy of modern days strips Man of all his moral attributes, or holds them of no account in the estimate of his origin and place in the created world. ~ Adam Sedgwick, #NFDB
197:My cloud photographs are equivalents of my most profound life experiences, my basic philosophy of life. All art is an equivalent of the artist’s most profound life experiences. ~ Alfred Stieglitz, #NFDB
198:The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
199:Whether people know the evolution of the conversation or not, I don't know, but thematically, as a comedian, I stay in the same ballpark - around my issues and my philosophy of life. ~ Marc Maron, #NFDB
200:The myth that the founding of American Republic was based on the philosophy of John Locke could only have been maintained, because the history of Leibniz's influence was suppressed. ~ Robert Trout, #NFDB
201:What we do with our lives largely depends on the philosophy of life we have subjected our lives to as a way of living life, and which controls, move and directs our lives! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, #NFDB
202:And we wonder what can be that 'philosophy of education' which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool. ~ Henry Steele Commager, #NFDB
203:Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
204:The folkish philosophy of life must succeed in bringing about that nobler age in which men no longer are concerned with breeding dogs, horses, and cats, but in elevating man himself. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
205:The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character. (461) ~ G Santayana, #NFDB
206:First of all you must understand that practising martial arts means studying a certain oriental philosophy of life, otherwise it's merely a vacuous sport devoid of any significance. ~ William C Brown, #NFDB
207:It was since he returned home that the evil eye of discontent had been on him, making empty air of his attempts to find a philosophy of his own, turning to ashes whatever he grasped. ~ Winston Graham, #NFDB
208:Suicide is merely a frenzied revolt against limitation, a revolt not the less significant because it is without knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Kena and Other Upanishads, The Philosophy of the Upanishads, #NFDB
209:There is no difference in principle, ... between the economic philosophy of Nazism, socialism, communism, and fascism and that of the American welfare state and regulated economy. ~ Jacob G Hornberger, #NFDB
210:could we not conceive of a philosophy of existence linked, not solely to experiences of separation, forlornness, and profound melancholy, but also to feelings of hope and confidence? ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
211:In a political context of the utmost significance, ["freedom from fear"] recognizes a human right which, in a broad sense, may be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights. ~ Dag Hammarskjold, #NFDB
212:It's the whole Nietzche philosophy of you are your own God. That's why I debase myself in the concerts and tell people to spit on me. I'm saying to them 'You are no different from me'. ~ Marilyn Manson, #NFDB
213:The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
214:But I intend to enjoy the weeks I have left with you to the fullest. Because I know from my study of the philosophy of time, whatever is going to happen in the future is already unavoidable. ~ Meg Cabot, #NFDB
215:In the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, genius entails that an individual possesses unique qualities and talents that make the genius especially valuable to the society in which he or she operates.
~ ?,#NFDB
216:This is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going; it is a philosophy of not making where one is going so much more important than where one is that there will be no point in going. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
217:During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms. ~ Johannes V Jensen, #NFDB
218:Every theory of social action is ultimately a philosophy of history. It attempts, as best it may, to read in the experience of mankind the lessons which would justify its own special urgency. ~ Harold J Laski, #NFDB
219:In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
220:By understanding the world I mean being equal to the world. It is the hard reality of living that is the essential, not the concept of life, that the ostrich philosophy of idealism propounds. ~ Oswald Spengler, #NFDB
221:Much of the philosophy of religious education has been based upon a false premise, and perhaps many have missed the essence of Christian experience, having had religious training take its place. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
222:...the tough philosophy of Ginaz taught that there were no accidents, no excuses for failure. Every event was the result of a sequence of actions. Intentions were irrelevant to actual outcomes. ~ Brian Herbert, #NFDB
223:The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
224:Only with maturity did I come to appreciate my own Chinese roots: not just the food and the ancient history, but also the philosophy of child-rearing and the respect for education and knowledge. ~ Tess Gerritsen, #NFDB
225:The human being needs a framework of values, a philosophy of life, a religion or religion-surrogate to live by and understand by, in about the same sense that he needs sunlight, calcium or love. ~ Abraham Maslow, #NFDB
226:Our modern worship needs the philosophy of the second glance, an ongoing attempt to make sure that all that we do in worship gatherings is to God’s glory, to His honor, and according to His will. May ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
227:Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance... Something fundamamental is going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understnd. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
228:The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
229:At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats. ~ P J O Rourke, #NFDB
230:A Christian philosophy of literature begins with the same agenda of issues that any philosophy of literature addresses. Its distinctive feature is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith. ~ Leland Ryken, #NFDB
231:I became an anti-fascist, and the more I saw what was happening to the peoples of Europe, the Jews, the more I saw the deep cruelty and inhumanity of that system and its philosophy of white supremacy. ~ Harry Belafonte, #NFDB
232:I emphatically do not assert the general 'truth' of this philosophy of punctuational change. Any attempt to support the exclusive validity of such a grandiose notion would border on the nonsensical. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
233:The history of mathematics, lacking the guidance of philosophy, [is] blind, while the philosophy of mathematics, turning its back on the most intriguing phenomena in the history of mathematics, is empty. ~ Imre Lakatos, #NFDB
234:Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future.4 That’s the sort of thing he cares about. The ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
235:There are times when the end justifies the means. But when you build an argument based on a whole series of such times, you may find that you've constructed an entire philosophy of evil." --Luke Skywalker ~ Aaron Allston, #NFDB
236:It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
237:I believe in the philosophy of staying hungry. If you have a dream and it becomes a reality, don't stay satisfied too long. Make up a new dream and hunt after that one and turn it into a reality. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger, #NFDB
238:Lady Middleton resigned herself to the idea of it with all the philosophy of a well-bred woman, contenting herself with merely giving her husband a gentle reprimand on the subject five or six times every day. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
239:The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. ~ Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918)., #NFDB
240:The soul is not bound by the formula of mental humanity: it did not begin with that and will not end with it; it had a prehuman past, it has a superhuman future. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Philosophy of Rebirth, #NFDB
241:It's a philosophy of life. A practice. If you do this, something will change, what will change is that you will change, your life will change, and if you can change you, you can perhaps change the world. ~ Vivienne Westwood, #NFDB
242:The philosophy of fasting calls upon us to know ourselves, to master ourselves, and to discipline ourselves the better to free ourselves. To fast is to identify our dependencies, and free ourselves from them. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
243:Resisting a task is usually a sign that it's meaningful-which is why it's awakening your fears and stimulating procrastination. You could adopt "Do whatever you're resisting the most" as a philosophy of life. ~ Oliver Burkeman, #NFDB
244:ANARCHISM:The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
245:The philosophy of science is inherent in the process. This is to say, you think critically, you draw a conclusion based on evidence, but we all pursue discovery based on our observations. That's where science starts. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
246:ANARCHISM:—The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
247:As the new spirituality begins to become the pervasive spirituality of the planet, we'll find that we have abandoned our philosophy of contradictions in which we say we're all one but continue to try to win. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
248:In the 1980s... it was a liberal philosophy of government that changed the rules to suit its own political ends. We were forfeiting our freedoms to conform to a humanistic philosophy that was patently antireligious. ~ James G Watt, #NFDB
249:Art teaches you the philosophy of life, and if you can't learn it from art, you can't learn it at all. It shows you that there is no perfection. There is light, and there is shadow. Everything is in half tint. ~ William Morris Hunt, #NFDB
250:[...] for the philosophy of Square rendered him superior to all emotions, and he very calmly smoaked his pipe, as was his custom in all broils, unless when he apprehended some danger of having it broke in his mouth. ~ Henry Fielding, #NFDB
251:They entered there into the unconscious philosophy of the town; that life was an incomprehensible marvel, since it was incessantly wasted and spent, yet none the less it lasted and endured 'like the bridge on the Drina'. ~ Ivo Andri, #NFDB
252:Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
253:The basis of the Philosophy of Impossible Standard is that no matter how hard you try you can’t ever be good enough. The Standard raises as you do. (…) The Philosophy allows for only one result: we fail the Standard. ~ Niall Williams, #NFDB
254:They entered there into the unconscious philosophy of the town; that life was an incomprehensible marvel, since it was incessantly wasted and spent, yet none the less it lasted and endured 'like the bridge on the Drina'. ~ Ivo Andric, #NFDB
255:When I was a student, I studied philosophy and religion. I talked about being patient. Some people say I was too hopeful, too optimistic, but you have to be optimistic just in keeping with the philosophy of non-violence. ~ John Lewis, #NFDB
256:I plan to stand by nonviolence, because I have found it to be a philosophy of life that regulates not only my dealings in the struggle for racial justice, but also my dealings with people, and with my own self. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
257:It's very hard to operate on a general philosophy of power. They say that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but I don't agree with that. I think you have to be corrupted to be corrupted by power. ~ Mark Pellegrino, #NFDB
258:I've worked with people and I've known people that were really competitive but I've always said that I take an Elizabeth Bennett philosophy of life - I laugh. I love my job but if it means hurting someone, I won't do it. ~ Anne Hathaway, #NFDB
259:We must set an example now and move environmentalism from being the philosophy of a passionate minority ... to a way of life that automatically integrates ecology into governmental policy and normal living standards. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio, #NFDB
260:I think that consciousness has always been the most important topic in the philosophy of mind, and one of the most important topics in cognitive science as a whole, but it had been surprisingly neglected in recent years. ~ David Chalmers, #NFDB
261:No one should pay attention to a man delivering a lecture or a sermon on his "philosophy of life" until we know exactly how he treats his wife, his children, his neighbors, his friends, his subordinates and his enemies. ~ Sydney J Harris, #NFDB
262:To define twentieth-century humanism briefly, I would say that it is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity in this natural world and advocating the methods of reason, science, and democracy. ~ Corliss Lamont, #NFDB
263:Each person must discover his own philosophy of life, and it is not fair or right to impose our codes upon others. It is also our responsibility, however, to share, one with another, such experiences as may have common value. ~ Manly Hall, #NFDB
264:Here we don’t drink coffee, we ‘take’ it, as a medicine,” echoed his business partner, Luigi Solito. “To me, the philosophy of the suspended coffee is that you are happy today, and you give a coffee to the world, as a present. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
265:The first act of man, filled and carried away with enthusiasm (of the divine breath), is to adore the invisible Providence on which he feels that he depends, and which he calls GOD. ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The Philosophy of Misery. § 1.1, #NFDB
266:There is a saying in Bali: "We have no art. We do everything as beautifully as possible." This reflects my philosophy of practice. I try to remember daily what a gift it is to have the privilege of living in this wondrous world. ~ Sam Keen, #NFDB
267:Teaching, as well as preaching, to which it is allied, is certainly a work belonging to the active life, but it derives in a way from the very fullness of contemplation ~ Étienne Gilson, Thomism: The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, Introduction, #NFDB
268:With honesty of purpose, balance, a respect for tradition, courage, and, above all, a philosophy of life, any young person who embraces the historical profession will find it rich in rewards and durable in satisfaction. ~ Samuel Eliot Morison, #NFDB
269:If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life. If, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
270:Look at us! Are we not proof that there is no good, no evil, no truth, no reason? Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense - Mr Nobody on the fundamental philosophy of the Brotherhood of DADA ~ Grant Morrison, #NFDB
271:There is not one single social or economic principle or concept in the philosophy of the Russian Bolshevik which has not been realized, carried into action, and enshrined in immutable laws a million years ago by the white ant. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
272:Philosophy is this amazing technique we've devised for getting reality to answer us back when we're getting it wrong. Science itself can't make those arguments. You actually have to rely on philosophy, on philosophy of science. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, #NFDB
273:Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves. Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web. ~ Sean Carroll, #NFDB
274:NEWTONIAN, Pertaining to a philosophy of the universe invented by Newton, who discovered that an apple will fall to the ground, but was unable to say why. His successors and disciples have advanced so far as to be able to say when. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
275:PERIPATETIC, adj. Walking about. Relating to the philosophy of Aristotle, who, while expounding it, moved from place to place in order to avoid his pupil's objections. A needless precaution - they knew no more of the matter than he. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
276:There would be a course on the philosophy of history; another year the philosophy of Marxism, another the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of science, etc. All of these were presented in the light of the thought of St. Thomas. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
277:But you are good-natured princes, and you do not think it a bad thing that belief in the good God should constitute the philosophy of the people, very much as the goose stuffed with chestnuts is the truffled turkey of the poor." CHAPTER ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
278:Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
279:Jung's work is not only a psychology of the person, but a philosophy of the world, having much in common with Chinese Taoism and Buddhism, which refuse to make a definitive "cut" between internal and external worlds. ~ David Tacy, The Darkening Spirit, #NFDB
280:the great world, so far as we know it from philosophy of nature, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us happy or unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance, and are best corrected by a little astronomy. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
281:Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive. ~ Robert Wilson Lynd, #NFDB
282:A philosophy of life is a bundle of wisdom you have gathered from your reading and experience. It is not a rigid ideology that allows no development and complexity. It’s a living thing, a developing idea about life that belongs to you alone. ~ Thomas Moore, #NFDB
283:The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
284:A philosophy of work is essential if we would be whole men, holy men, healthy men, joyous men. A certain amount of goods is necessary for a man to lead a good life, and we have to make that kind of society where it is easier for men to be good. ~ Dorothy Day, #NFDB
285:I don't see myself as conservative, but I'm not ultra-leftist. You build a philosophy of your own. I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live. ~ Clint Eastwood, #NFDB
286:We have a philosophy of we'll keep putting it up until people get it. We did that actually these last three weeks with Cracked Out from New York. People didn't really understand them. We put them up three weeks ago and they just got stared at. ~ Scott Aukerman, #NFDB
287:The philosophy of being able as a woman to decide what you want and being unashamed about making it happen was new. Most successful businessmen are in that role. 'No' is never perceived as the end of the line. 'No' just means picking a new avenue. ~ Sharon Stone, #NFDB
288:You know, bicycling isn't just a matter of balance," I said. "it's a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. I'm going to call that the Bicyclist's Philosophy of Life. ~ Susan Vreeland, #NFDB
289:Like most people of my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism. There is no particular religious tradition in my work. There is only one psychological assertion that I would insist upon. That is: the SELF takes precedence. ~ Stanley Elkin, #NFDB
290:The Fascist philosophy of the Third Reich, replete with parades, medals, hero-worship and neo-Gothic heraldry, helped to create a generation of over-achievers who sought to gain recognition through dedicated service and self-sacrificing behavior. ~ Robert Forczyk, #NFDB
291:it is not the institution, ultimately it is you and you alone who can change your life by hard work.’ Probably he was not aware that he was following the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Your best friend is yourself and your worst enemy is yourself. ~ Sudha Murty, #NFDB
292:He dismissed with contempt the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, the foremost German thinker of the age, according to which history was the progressive unfoldment of a world-spirit – a view Schopenhauer rightly believed was Christian theodicy in disguise. ~ John N Gray, #NFDB
293:Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices. ~ Jean Baptiste Rousseau, #NFDB
294:Once you understand the economics of the Austrian School and the philosophy of liberty in the tradition of Rothbard, you never look at anything – not the state, the media, the central bank, the political class, nothing – the same way again. ~ Llewellyn H Rockwell Jr, #NFDB
295:Philosophy is that part of science which at present people chose to have opinions about, but which they have no knowledge about. Therefore every advance in knowledge robs philosophy of some problems which formerly it had ...and will belong to science. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
296:Yes, this little vacation was just what the doctor ordered, if that doctor was of the philosophy of running away from your problems. I needed space, I needed to clear my head, and I needed to get back on track. Somehow, somewhere, I'd fallen off course. ~ Ophelia London, #NFDB
297:Humanism or atheism is a wonderful philosophy of life as long as you are big, strong, and between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. But watch out if you are in a lifeboat and there are others who are younger, bigger, or smarter. ~ William Murray 1st Earl of Mansfield, #NFDB
298:Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism. Then realise what the separation has shown to us, that the Buddhists cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor the Brahmin without the heart of the Buddhist. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
299:because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all her problems in their solutions are theological. Some knowledge of what kind of God it is that operates the universe is indispensable to a sound philosophy of life and is seeing outlook on the world scene ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
300:Walking toward the music” isn’t a bad philosophy of life. Doors might seem closed, the evening might seem prematurely over, but if you can catch a glimpse of nightlife or hear the sound of music in the distance, why not walk toward it and see what you find? ~ Gary L Thomas, #NFDB
301:His philosophy of life had been that we only live once.
Now there had matured in him the sense of another truth about himself and the world: that we have only one conscience - and that a crippled conscience is as irretrievable as a lost life. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,#NFDB
302:If the philosophy of Christianity were lived, wars would cease, unhappiness would cease, economic problems would be solved, poverty would be wiped from the face of the earth, and man's inhumanity to man would be transmuted into a spirit of mutual helpfulness. ~ Ernest Holmes, #NFDB
303:A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged with the conviction that all existence is one-a single conception sustained from beginning to end upon one identical law. ~ Friedrich Ratzel, #NFDB
304:As it was impossible however now to prevent their coming, Lady Middleton resigned herself to the idea of it, with all the philosophy of a well bred woman, contenting herself with merely giving her husband a gentle reprimand on the subject five or six times a day. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
305:In the 20th century philosophy of time for a great many theorists became part of science because it was time as is studied in physics that became the object of philosophical speculation. That's very different from the way time has normally been understood. ~ William Lane Craig, #NFDB
306:...it was Buddhism that inspired the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and, through him, attracted Richard Wagner. This Orientalism reflected the struggle of the German Romantics, in the words of Léon Poliakov, to free themselves from Judeo-Christian fetters. ~ Joscelyn Godwin, #NFDB
307:Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
308:The board immediately reinstated Rudy's license and sealed all the records from the public and the press--thus honoring the long-held philosophy of Florida's medical establishment that the last persons who need to know about a doctor's incompetence are the patients. ~ Carl Hiaasen, #NFDB
309:A new psychology based on the exploration of the unconscious becomes the locus for the recovery of wisdom in a postsecular age. Depth psychology provides the subjective dimension of the new philosophy of religion that we need to negotiate our way out of the wasteland. ~ David Tacey, #NFDB
310:I don't have the faith now. I certainly believe in Jesus - you know, that he existed and he was a very nice man. And who can disagree with a simple philosophy of treat other people like you'd like to be treated yourself? It's absolutely - nothing I can disagree with that. ~ Nick Lowe, #NFDB
311:The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single treatise of which his Politics is the other half. Both deal with one and the same subject. This subject is what Aristotle calls in one place the "philosophy of human affairs;" but more frequently Political or Social Science. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
312:Whatever measure of influence I had as a result of the importance which the world attaches to the Nobel Peace Prize would have to be used to bring the philosophy of nonviolence to all the world’s people who grapple with the age-old problem of racial injustice. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
313:If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
314:The philosophy of project-based homeschooling — this particular approach to helping children become strong thinkers, learners, and doers — is dependent upon the interest and the enthusiastic participation and leadership of the learners themselves, the children. ~ Lori McWilliam Pickert, #NFDB
315:Problems or successes, they all are the results of our own actions. Karma. The philosophy of action is that no one else is the giver of peace or happiness. One's own karma, one's own actions are responsible to come to bring either happiness or success or whatever. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, #NFDB
316:No one can be certain where a nation which spans two continents, whose history begins in the faint traces of early civilization, a nation now struggling to find a new and valid philosophy of existence, will be propelled by the transcendental forces of the nuclear age. ~ Harrison Salisbury, #NFDB
317:The trouble arises from the generally received philosophy of life, according to which life is a contest, a competition, in which respect is to be a ccorded to the victor. This view leads to an undue cultivation of the will at the expense of the senses and the intellect. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
318:The republic, as I at least understand it, means association, of which liberty is only an element, a necessary antecedent. It means association, a new philosophy of life, a divine Ideal that shall move the world, the only means of regeneration vouchsafed to the human race. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini, #NFDB
319:I was occupied by a range of questions, often different from those fashionable in the professional philosophy of the past half century, that have sometimes troubled philosophers in the past. It's taken me several decades to work out my own philosophical agenda, and it is wide. ~ Philip Kitcher, #NFDB
320:I'm a geophysicist who has conducted and published climate studies in top-rank scientific journals. My perspective on Mr. Inhofe and the issue of global warming is informed not only by my knowledge of climate science but also by my studies of the history and philosophy of science. ~ David Deming, #NFDB
321:For there are fashions in myth, and the world-conquering West of the nineteenth century needed a philosophy of life in which realpolitik—victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts—was the guiding principle. Thus the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
322:Masonic ideas are the precious jewels of Speculative Masons; the should be kept bright and sparkling for all the brethren to see and to admire. As such, they should be the special care of Masonic leaders particularly those who teach and interpret the philosophy of Freemasonry. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
323:Oh no.' Straight raised his eyes to me, and a slight smile touched the corners of his lips. 'A philosophy of life is more terrible than syphilis and people - you have to give them credit - take every precaution not to become infected. Especially by a philosophy of life. ~ Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, #NFDB
324:If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
325:If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
326:I speak about universal evolution and teleological evolution, because I think the process of evolution reflects the wisdom of nature. I see the need for wisdom to become operative. We need to try to put all of these things together in what I call an evolutionary philosophy of our time. ~ Jonas Salk, #NFDB
327:A search for justification and the impossibility of justification are recurrent motifs in the philosophy of Sartre. His philosophy is one of the incarnations of problematism and of the ambiguity of contemporary thought (for Man does seem, to the contemporary mind, to be ambiguous). ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
328:I come from the philosophy of: "Whatever happens to me is the greatest thing that could happen, no matter what." Sometimes in the moment I have a regret, but then I have found myself every time down the line saying to myself: "I wouldn't be here if it weren't for that so called failure." ~ Jim Carrey, #NFDB
329:Romanticism is a philosophy of intuitive agreement. In real love, there is no need tiresomely to articulate or spell things out. When two people belong together, there is simply – at long last – a wondrous reciprocal feeling that both parties see the world in precisely the same way. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
330:The liberal philosophy of race relations emphasized the stigma of segregation and the hypocrisy of a government that celebrates freedom and equality yet denies both on account of race. This philosophy, born in the North, never gained much traction among Southern whites or blacks. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
331:We do not follow the philosophy of purity versus pollution. That is a false choice, a false dichotomy. The truth is, nothing is “pure”. Everything is the product of something else. To name something “pure” is to pretend it has no history, nothing before it, which is obviously false. ~ Ian C Esslemont, #NFDB
332:When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems; a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by; a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man - the faith that moves mountains. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin, #NFDB
333:We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment no matter what. —GEORGE SANTAYANA, “THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL ~ Rolf Potts, #NFDB
334:It’s not true what they say, that you can only give your heart away once. That’s the philosophy of the young. The old know better, they know it’s not the heart that you giveaway, but the mind. Fuck…shit…the mind is a powerful thing. It controls the heart, but most people don’t know that. ~ Tarryn Fisher, #NFDB
335:It’s not true what they say, that you can only give your heart away once. That’s the philosophy of the young. The old know better, they know it’s not the heart that you give away, but the mind. Fuck…shit…the mind is a powerful thing. It controls the heart, but most people don’t know that. ~ Tarryn Fisher, #NFDB
336:Life is short - while we speak it flies; enjoy, then, the present, and forget the future; such is the moral of ancient poetry, a graceful and a wise moral - indulged beneath a southern sky, and all deserving, the phrase applied to it - the philosophy of the garden. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton, #NFDB
337:For more than a decade--from the mid-195ps until the late 1960s--conservatoves systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr's philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime, ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
338:There was indeed a clear difference between the philosophy of Republicans and Democrats on the issue of race and racial equality. Southern Democrats had been willing to form an entire nation on the foundation of white supremacy – and there was no doubt that the South was strongly Democratic. ~ David Barton, #NFDB
339:There are clearly people for whom Stoicism immediately "clicks," it comes natural, and others for whom it doesn't. Then again, Stoicism isn't the only positive philosophy of life. Buddhism is an excellent alternative, if it speaks more clearly to one's personality or cultural background. ~ Massimo Pigliucci, #NFDB
340:Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor.... It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
341:No left wing parties have any respect for liberal economic values; and most centre and right wing parties merely promote a paternalistic stateism. Does it thus fall to the self-reliant students of the ruggedly individualist philosophy of magick to champion a certain measured libertarianism? ~ Peter J Carroll, #NFDB
342:If I had to pick one tribe to go back and live with permanently - and I hate doing this, it's not a contest - it would be the people of Anuta, in the South Pacific. It's got white beaches, blue seas, good food and gentle, friendly people who have a wonderful philosophy of sharing. And it's warm. ~ Bruce Parry, #NFDB
343:Non-attachment is not complacency. It doesn't imply a lack of caring and commitment. The philosophy of non-attachment is based in the understanding that holding on too tightly to those things, which in any case are always going to be slipping through our fingers, hurts and gives us rope burn. ~ Lama Surya Das, #NFDB
344:'Dreamsongs' allows me to show the scope of my writing - with personal commentary that puts the works in context and includes some autobiographical details intended to reveal how each piece came to be, what it represents, and how it has formed, or been informed by, my philosophy of writing. ~ George R R Martin, #NFDB
345:When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the philosophy of mathematics was plain nonsense. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
346:This philosophy of hate, of religious and racial intolerance, with its passionate urge toward war, is loose in the world. It is the enemy of democracy; it is the enemy of all the fruitful and spiritual sides of life. It is our responsibility, as individuals and organizations, to resist this. ~ Mary Heaton Vorse, #NFDB
347:It's not atheists who get stuck in my caw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for awhile. We all must pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we... But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
348:The world is not prepared yet to understand the philosophy of Occult Sciences - let them assure themselves first of all that there are beings in an invisible world, whether 'Spirits' of the dead or Elementals; and that there are hidden powers in man, which are capable of making a God of him on earth. ~ H P Blavatsky, #NFDB
349:The world is not prepared yet to understand the philosophy of Occult Sciences - let them assure themselves first of all that there are beings in an invisible world, whether 'Spirits' of the dead or Elementals; and that there are hidden powers in man, which are capable of making a God of him on earth. ~ H P Blavatsky, #NFDB
350:modern individuals rarely see the need to adopt a philosophy of life. They instead tend to spend their days working hard to be able to afford the latest consumer gadget, in the resolute belief that if only they buy enough stuff, they will have a life that is both meaningful and maximally fulfilling. ~ William B Irvine, #NFDB
351:We either have wild places or we don't. We admit the spiritual-emotional validity of wild, beautiful places or we don't. We have a philosophy of simplicity of experience in these wild places or we don't. We admit an almost religious devotion to the clean exposition of the wild, natural earth or we don't. ~ Ansel Adams, #NFDB
352:Remember the philosophy of the U.S. Navy SEALs: “I will never quit...My Nation expects me to be physically harder and mentally stronger than my enemies. If knocked down, I will get back up, every time. I will draw on every remaining ounce of strength to protect my teammates...I am never out of the fight. ~ Marcus Luttrell, #NFDB
353:The moral peril to humanity of thoughtlessly accepting these conveniences [of materialism] (with their inherent disadvantages) as constituting a philosophy of life is now becoming apparent. For the implications of this disruptive materialism... are that human beings are nothing but bodies, animals, machines. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
354:The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine, #NFDB
355:Because ethics is fundamentally about questioning the ends, the goals and aims of our actions, we must come back to the rules and ask why. So we must return to the philosophy of law, the raison d'etre and the point of what we're asked to do. It's not easy, it's very demanding and it needs intellectual courage. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
356:Both sides in Germany’s cultural battle elevated feeling above reason. And both sides experienced the same basic kind of feeling. The left called it alienation or the angst of nothingness. The right called it götterdämmerung or the philosophy of Schopenhauer. The common denominator is the conviction of doom. ~ Leonard Peikoff, #NFDB
357:The economic philosophy of black nationalism only means that our people need to be re-educated into the importance of controlling the economy of the community in which we live, which means that we won't have to constantly be involved in picketing and boycotting other people in other communities in order to get jobs. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
358:The confessing church of American Ragamuffins needs to join Magdalene and Peter in witnessing that Christianity is not primarily a moral code but a grace-laden mystery; it is not essentially a philosophy of love but a love affair; it is not keeping rules with clenched fists but receiving a gift with open hands. ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
359:The greatest and perhaps only utility of all philosophy of pure reason is thus only negative, namely that it does not serve for expansion, as an organon, but rather, as a discipline, serves for the determination of boundaries, and instead of discovering truth it has only the silent merit of guarding against errors ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
360:In the history and literature courses I took, epistemological questions came to interest me most. What makes one explanation of the French Revolution better than another? What makes one interpretation of "Waiting for Godot" better than another? These questions led me to philosophy and then to philosophy of science. ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
361:Most professional humanists as a result are unable to make the connection between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of practices such as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poetry, fiction, philosophy of the society that engages in these practices on the other. ~ Edward W Said, #NFDB
362:If Christ played doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
363:One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced the guilt-free, external-less, everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end philosophy of economics in order to justify their own evil works. And the economists, for the most part, have sucked up to that money. ~ Jane Smiley, #NFDB
364:You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.''
"I cannot give you credit for any philosophy of the kind. Your retrospections must be so totally void of reproach, that the contentment arising from them is not of philosophy, but, what is much better, of innocence. ~ Jane Austen,#NFDB
365:Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter solved? Does not the word "God" only confuse and make more difficult the solution by assuming a conclusion that is utterly groundless and palpably absurd? ~ Joseph Lewis, The Philosophy of Atheism, #NFDB
366:The political philosophy of black nationalism only means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community. The time when white people can come in our community and get us to vote for them so that they can be our political leaders and tell us what to do and what not to do is long gone. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
367:Sovereign marronage is a philosophy of freedom referring to non-fleeting mass flight from slavery on a scale much larger than grand marronage. Its goal is emancipation, its scope is social-structural, its spatialization is polity-wide, its metaphysics includes the individual and community, and its medium is the lawgiver. ~ Neil Roberts, #NFDB
368:The day you shoot something, everything changes. You still have the same overall vision and approach. You create a world that you're going to be true to or the film tells you what you're going to do. And so, it's like you've got a philosophy of what you're doing. You try and have that changing texturally over the movie. ~ Fred Schepisi, #NFDB
369:Epistemology, the philosophy of history, and statistics aim at understanding truths, investigating the mechanisms that generate them, and separating regularity from the coincidental in historical matters. They all address the question of what one knows, except that they are all to be found in different buildings, so to speak. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
370:If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
371:When experimental psychology limits itself to rats and kittens, squabs and eyelids, philosophy of nature has little opportunity for formation. But when experimental psychology delivers over its findings concerning phenomenal manifestations of the mind, then the philosophy of nature may apply his philosophical principles. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
372:The teaching philosophy of most companies today is similar to that of the schools I went to – lots of people sitting in a classroom, with an expert up front telling you things. I’ve always thought that if that was the natural way for people to learn, we ought to see four-year-olds spontaneously forming themselves into rows. ~ Andy Stanley, #NFDB
373:In my work on this topic, I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
374:The Galileo saga is typically told as a conflict between science and religion. But in reality it was a conflict among Christians over the correct philosophy of nature. Was it Aristotle’s quality or Galileo’s quantity? Galileo’s victory was the triumph of the idea that the nature is constructed on a mathematical blueprint. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
375:Whatever open-border libertarians think about immigration law, once the immigration scofflaw steals, trespasses, or vandalizes private property, said alien is guilty of crimes. To say, moreover, that the state's laws made masses of men and women commit such crimes is to voice the philosophy of determinism, not individualism. ~ Ilana Mercer, #NFDB
376:... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias. ~ Adrienne Rich, #NFDB
377:In an American state prison or house of correction, I found it difficult at first to persuade myself that I was really in a jail: a place of ignominious punishment and endurance. And to this hour I very much question whether the humane boast that it is not like one, has its root in the true wisdom or philosophy of the matter. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
378:Christian philosophy of work was this. God is our creator. God made us in His image and likeness. Therefore we are creators. He gave us a garden to till and cultivate. We become co-creators by our responsible acts, whether in bringing forth children, or producing food, furniture or clothing. The joy of creativeness should be ours. ~ Dorothy Day, #NFDB
379:I have a very simple philosophy of life: Kindness. Ferocious, unrelenting, ruthless, committed, passionate, kindness. Life is sacred everywhere. We all have better things to do than beat each other up. Arguing for the exception is to invest it with energy, it's to negotiate the loophole. The commitment to kindness must be total. ~ David Gerrold, #NFDB
380:This is the philosophy of YAGNI: “You aren’t going to need it.” There is wisdom in this message, since over-engineering is often much worse than under-engineering. On the other hand, when you discover that you truly do need an architectural boundary where none exists, the costs and risks can be very high to add such a boundary. ~ Robert C Martin, #NFDB
381:But our society - unlike most in the world - presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas. That is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is this article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world. ~ William O Douglas, #NFDB
382:Existentialism is no mournful delectation but a humanist philosophy of action, effort, combat, and solidarity. Man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines say what this man is before he dies, or what mankind is before it has disappeared. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
383:The Cold War philosophy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which prevented the former Soviet Union and the United States from using the nuclear weapons they had targeted at each other, would not apply to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran. For him (Ahmadinejad), Mutual Assured Destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. ~ Bernard Lewis, #NFDB
384:Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment.... The philosophy of atheism expresses the expansion and growth of the human mind. The philosophy of theism, if we can call it a philosophy, is static and fixed. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
385:I called my philosophy the philosophy of fuckness. I first developed this philosophy when I realized I was the type of person who would go to just about any lengths necessary in order to avoid trouble and misery. That is, I just wanted to live life the way I wanted to live it without any interruptions or having to answer to anyone. ~ Andersen Prunty, #NFDB
386:I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
387:In one of his puckish moods Saul talked the president of a university into letting him anonymously take an examination being administered to candidates for a doctorate in community organization. "Three of the questions were on the philosophy of and motivations of Saul Alinsky," writes Saul. "I answered two of them incorrectly." ~ Nicholas von Hoffman, #NFDB
388:The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
389:What was most important in Epicurus’ philosophy of nature was the overall conviction that our life on this earth comes with no strings attached; that there is no Maker whose puppets we are; that there is no script for us to follow and be constrained by; that it is up to us to discover the real constraints which our own nature imposes on us. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
390:With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe. Pursuing philosophy of the universe through art under such circumstances has led me to what I call stereotypical repetition. ~ Yayoi Kusama, #NFDB
391:Philosophy of course is the essence of every religion; mythology explains and illustrates it by means of the more or less legendary lives of great men, stories and fables of wonderful things, and so on; ritual gives to that philosophy a still more concrete form, so that every one may grasp it — ritual is in fact concretised philosophy. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
392:Power is living while others inevitably perish. Power is cool indifference to their suffering. Power is taking nourishment from the deaths of others, just as the mighty redwoods draw sustenance from the perpetual decomposition of what once lived, but lived only briefly, around them. This is also part of the philosophy of Edgler Foreman Vess. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
393:There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
394:Individual psychotherapy - that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship - requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient, modest, and a perceptive listener, rather than a talker and advice-giver. ~ Thomas Szasz, #NFDB
395:think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
396:As Mazzini said ... it is around the standard of duty rather than around the standard of self-interest that men must rally to win the rights of man. And herein may we see the deep philosophy of Him who bade men love their neighbors as themselves. In that spirit, and in no other, is the power to solve social problems and carry civilization onward. ~ Henry George, #NFDB
397:When the country surrendered its educational institutions—in countless forms, direct and indirect, public and private, from nursery school on up—to the legion of Progressive educators spawned by Dewey, it formally delivered its youth into the hands of the philosophy of pragmatism, to be “reconstructed” according to the pragmatist image of man. ~ Leonard Peikoff, #NFDB
398:THOSE who start with the pagan philosophy of sex must face life as a descent. Associated with a growing old, there is a loss of physical energy and the horrible perspective of death. The Christian philosophy of love, on the contrary, implies an ascension. The body may grow older, but the Spirit grows younger, and love often becomes more intense. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
399:I have a very simple philosophy of life:
Kindness. Ferocious, unrelenting, ruthless, committed, passionate, kindness.
Life is sacred everywhere. We all have better things to do than beat each other up.
Arguing for the exception is to invest it with energy, it's to negotiate the loophole. The commitment to kindness must be total. ~ David Gerrold,#NFDB
400:I think Hamas should be challenged to consider really embracing Gandhi and Dr. Kings philosophy of advocating nonviolence as a way to achieve self determination, end occupation, achieve unity within their country, and gain allies within Israel. I think this idea of an eye for and eye, a rocket for a bomb, will never bring about peace for either side. ~ Jesse Jackson, #NFDB
401:Each individual is a cosmos of organs, each organ is a cosmos of cells, each cell is a cosmos of infinitely small ones; and in this complex world, the well-being of the whole depends entirely on the sum of well-being enjoyed by each of the least microscopic particles of organized matter. A whole revolution is thus produced in the philosophy of life. ~ Peter Kropotkin, #NFDB
402:Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. ~ Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction..., p. 1 (1843), #NFDB
403:the bimodal philosophy of deep work. This philosophy asks that you divide your time, dedicating some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leaving the rest open to everything else. During the deep time, the bimodal worker will act monastically—seeking intense and uninterrupted concentration. During the shallow time, such focus is not prioritized. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
404:It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
405:For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
406:Why did the humanitarian philosophy of eighteenth century Europe usher in the Reign of Terror? It did not happen by chance; it followed from the original premise, objective and means proposed. The objective is to do good to others as a primary justification of existence; the means is the power of the collective; and the premise is that "good" is collective. ~ Isabel Paterson, #NFDB
407:Even so, in the philosophy of Joseph Smith, the doctrine is taught that all things advance; that man shall continue to advance, in intelligence, and all pertaining to it, until he shall become as God is now. Meanwhile, our God will also increase in his fulness, and ever be a God to us. Through this doctrine, all the principles of the Gospel are made coherent. ~ John A Widtsoe, #NFDB
408:For my part I have sought liberty more than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom. What interested me was not a philosophy of the free man (all who try that have proved tiresome), but a technique: I hoped to discover the hinge where our will meets and moves with destiny, and where discipline strengthens, instead of restraining, our nature. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar, #NFDB
409:After two years of undergraduate study, it was clear that I was bored by the regime of problem-solving required by the Cambridge mathematical tripos. A very sensitive mathematics don recommended that I talk to the historian of astronomy, Michael Hoskin, and the conversation led me to enroll in the History and Philosophy of Science for my final undergraduate year. ~ Philip Kitcher, #NFDB
410:Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval scholar whose ideas became the semi-official philosophy of the Roman Catholic church, wrote that whatever we have in “superabundance”—that is, above and beyond what will reasonably satisfy our own needs and those of our family, for the present and the foreseeable future—“is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
411:One of the great challenges you will face is that a part of the world, and some in it, do not have or do not believe in a standard of moral values. Many in the world today operate on the basis of practical expediency. You have undoubtedly observed this yourselves. It has become a philosophy of life for many. This is true among nations as well as among individuals. ~ King Hussein I, #NFDB
412:If we turn to the differences separating Communist, Fascist, and National Socialist regimes, we find that they can be accounted for by contrasting social, economic, and cultural condition in which the three had to operate. In other words, they resulted from tactical adaptation of the same philosophy of government to local circumstances, not from different philosophies. ~ Richard Pipes, #NFDB
413:The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism ... for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. ~ Okakura Kakuzo, #NFDB
414:it was mentioned that there was support by celebrities, but also different companies and authorities would have the chance of having a mutual benefit of pleasure in the society, as it is also mentioned in the philosophy of Epicureanism mentioning (Anon., n.d.) pleasure needed in a society within all of its kinds to reach happiness, and this is concerning also this campaign. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
415:The most widely accepted philosophy of life at present is that what matters most to a man’s happiness is his income. This philosophy, apart from other demerits, is harmful because it leads men to aim at a result rather than an activity, an enjoyment of material goods in which men are not differentiated, rather than a creative impulse which embodies each man’s individuality. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
416:Abbott says, 'Biggest...difference...between...people...is...quality...of...attention.' And since a person's quality of attention is one of the few things about her that a human can control, then she better damn well do it, say I. Put that together with the Golden Rule in a nutshell, and you've got my philosophy of life. Abbott's too. And you don't need religion for that. ~ Russell Banks, #NFDB
417:Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has said that “The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.” Substitute “master learner” for “novel,” and you have my philosophy of life. Often, all that stands between you and what you want is a better set of questions. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
418:The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
419:All I’m suggesting is that the President, like any other U.S citizen, is entitled to constitutionally provided protections. Like due process. Like the right to fair trial. Part of the reason these constitutional guarantees were created to prevent hasty, reactionary decisions in difficult times that would undermine the fundamental philosophy of the nation. - Ben Kincaid ~ William Bernhardt, #NFDB
420:I've gotten a lot of comfort from the philosophy of the Roman Stoics. For me, one of the most powerful ideas of Stoicism is that you can't pick or choose in the world what you want to happen and what you don't want to happen, and that actually if you did get to choose, the version you would come up with would be unsociable, lame, and basically less beautiful than the truth. ~ Elif Batuman, #NFDB
421:One of the things that I most believe in is the compose and wait philosophy of photography. It’s a very satisfying, almost spiritual way to photograph. Life isn't’ knocking you around, life isn't controlling you. You have picked your place, you’ve picked your scene, you’ve picked your light, you’ve done all the decision making and you are waiting for the moment to come to you. ~ Sam Abell, #NFDB
422:This formal philosophy of learning treats knowledge like a fixed asset: learn, then you have it forever! But as a modern professional, you can’t acquire knowledge this way, because the knowledge you need isn’t static—it’s always changing. Stockpiling facts won’t get you anywhere. What will get you somewhere is being able to access the information you need, when you need it. ~ Reid Hoffman, #NFDB
423:Some change their philosophy of life with every book they read: one book sells them on Freud, the next on Marx; materialists one year, idealists the next; cynics for another period, and Eberals for still another. They have their quivers full of arrows but no fixed target. As no game makes the hunter tired of the sport, so the want of destiny makes the mind bored with life. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
424:As Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote: “The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.” Having no cognitive dissonance in my philosophy of death is a profound comfort. This might not be true for everybody: some people do seem better able to live with cognitive dissonance than others. But it’s certainly true for me. And it seems to be true for many other people. ~ Greta Christina, #NFDB
425:the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
426:BERTRAND RUSSELL, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism We've associated that word philosophy with academic study that in its own way has gotten so far beyond the layman that if you read contemporary philosophy you've no clue, because it's almost become math. And it's odd that if you don't do that and you call yourself a philosopher that you always get 'homespun' attached to it. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
427:The Scriptures, beginning with the Book of Judges, teach a philosophy of human government, which you will find was true of God’s people and which has been true of every nation. The first step in a nation’s decline is religióus apostasy, a turning from the living and true God. The second step downward for a nation is moral awfulness. The third step downward is political anarchy. ~ J Vernon McGee, #NFDB
428:Early socialists and latter-day mercantilists and interventionist were united in the battle for state-controlled education as a means of social control. The uncontrolled mind was a dangerous mind. ~ Rousas John Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Education, Phillpsburg, NJ, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company (1963) p. 35, #NFDB
429:Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust. ~ Kingsley Amis, #NFDB
430:Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the civil rights pioneers who took an interest. While working on his philosophy of non-violent resistance, he read Sartre, Heidegger and the German-American existentialist theologian Paul Tillich. ~ Sarah Bakewell, #NFDB
431:What we also need to have a discussion on the philosophy of art: so we must ask what is it that we want in the first place? Is it just about saying and doing whatever you want, or is it about something more? We should let the artist be free, but we must also question how exactly he deals with freedom. Is it arts for elevation or arts for destruction? Is there dignity in the process? ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
432:As I swept the last bit of dust, I made a covenant with myself: I will accept. Whatever will be, will be. I have a life to lead. I recalled words a friend had told me, the philosophy of her faith. "Life is a journey and a struggle," she had said. "We cannot control it, but we can make the best of any situation." I was indeed in quite a situation. It was up to me to make the best of it. ~ Wangari Maathai, #NFDB
433:Albert Camus introduced his philosophy of the absurd, in which man searches for meaning in a fundamentally meaningless world. In this context, Camus proposed that the only real question in philosophy is whether or not to commit suicide. (He concluded that one should not commit suicide; instead, one should live to revolt against the absurd life, even though it will always be without hope. ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
434:In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world. ~ Martin Heidegger, #NFDB
435:The embodiment of mind leads us to a philosophy of embodied realism. Our concepts cannot be a direct reflection of external, objective, mind-independent reality because our sensorimotor system plays a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it is the involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world. ~ George Lakoff, #NFDB
436:The weeds of a seemingly learned and brilliant but actually trivial and empty philosophy of Nature which, after having been replaced some 50 years ago by the exact sciences, is now once more dug up by pseudo scientists from the lumber room of human fallacies, and like a trollop, newly attired in elegant dress and make-up, is smuggled into respectable company, to which she does not belong. ~ Hermann Kolbe, #NFDB
437:Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance... to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its tides and the life of man... The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to Kent. ~ James G Frazer, #NFDB
438:He has read whole volumes on the philosophy of nonviolence. How peace had to be understood in all its moral dimensions. The proper coexistence of all existents. The excluded middle ground. The surpassing of personality. The vanity of cultural superiority. The tension between individual conscience and collective responsibility. The need to proclaim again and again what has already been said. ~ Colum McCann, #NFDB
439:In this way, and in no other, we can determine what our heritage really was and, instead of just talking about "identity," we shall know at last precisely what purely African body of principles, value systems or philosophy of life gradually evolved from our own forefathers over countless ages, and we will be able to develop an African ideology to guide us onward. In other words, there c ~ Chancellor Williams, #NFDB
440:First, it has been charged with inviting people to remain in a kind of desperate quietism because, since no solutions are possible, we should have to consider action in this world as quite impossible. We should then end up in a philosophy of contemplation; and since contemplation is a luxury, we come in the end to a bourgeois philosophy. The communists in particular have made these charges. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
441:the philosophy of men who, instead of exteriorising the objects of their aspirations, endeavour to extract from the accumulation of the years already spent a fixed residue of habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic and permanent, and with which they will deliberately arrange, before anything else, that the kind of existence they choose to adopt shall not prove inharmonious. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
442:In the final accounting, the journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling remains difficult to pull off. But if you’re confident in the value of what you’re trying to produce, and practiced in the skill of going deep (a skill we will continue to develop in the strategies that follow), it can be a surprisingly robust way to squeeze out large amounts of depth from an otherwise demanding schedule. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
443:If we consider what science already has enabled men to know-the immensity of space, the fantastic philosophy of the stars, the infinite smallness of the composition of atoms, the macrocosm whereby we succeed only in creating outlines and translating a measure into numbers without our minds being able to form any concrete idea of it-we remain astounded by the enormous machinery of the universe. ~ Guglielmo Marconi, #NFDB
444:Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
445:Doubt is useful for awhile. We must all pass through the garden of Gesthemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
446:Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
447:Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. ~ Frederick Douglass, #NFDB
448:Nixon was the one force in Montgomery for a number of years that made any effort in the direction of challenging the power structure. Ed Nixon's source of direction for that comes out of his relationship with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Care Porters and the Randolph philosophy of mass action. So, Ed Nixon really was the force that conceived of the boycott and drew up the original papers for the boycott. ~ Ella Baker, #NFDB
449:What if God in all his might is simply waiting to show his power in a people who turn their backs on a philosophy of life that exalts their supposed ability to do anything they want and who instead confess their desperate need for him? What if God in all his grace is radically committed to showing himself strong on behalf of a people who express their need for him so their lives might make much of him? ~ David Platt, #NFDB
450:Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christmas played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
451:Knuth deploys what I call the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling. This philosophy attempts to maximize deep efforts by eliminating or radically minimizing shallow obligations. Practitioners of the monastic philosophy tend to have a well-defined and highly valued professional goal that they’re pursuing, and the bulk of their professional success comes from doing this one thing exceptionally well. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
452:Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it? .. But in truth I know nothing about the philosophy of education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them. ~ Michel de Montaigne, #NFDB
453:I thought I was going to die a few times. On the Freedom Ride in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7th, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a State Trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death, but nothing can make me question the philosophy of nonviolence. ~ John Lewis, #NFDB
454:The books were alive in these men. They talked with fire and enthusiasm, the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink and anger stir other men. What he heard was no longer the philosophy of the dry, printed word, written by half-mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer. It was living philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in these two men till its very features worked with excitement. Now ~ Jack London, #NFDB
455:The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us. ~ Vil m Flusser, #NFDB
456:expressed itself not only in politics, but also in art, romance, chivalry, and war. It expressed itself very little in the intellectual world, because education was almost wholly confined to the clergy. The explicit philosophy of the Middle Ages is not an accurate mirror of the times, but only of what was thought by one party. Among ecclesiastics, however--especially among the Franciscan friars --a certain ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
457:The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon [the] possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us. ~ Vilem Flusser, #NFDB
458:Christina is one of those people swamped by her emotions, clouded by what Jung might call "anima moods"...unable to breath and see the greater picture of her life, a way of understanding events, and a list of priorities --- her own livable value system. Such a philosophy of life would be a spiritual achievement for her. Just as a formal religion might offer a bigger picture, a personal philosophy can also help. ~ Thomas Moore, #NFDB
459:with its graceful language and poetic conceit, and even more because it expressed his own philosophy of science. To wit: As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited logic—that all observed effects may have been wrought by Him in any one of an infinite number of omnipotent ways, and these must ever evade mortal comprehension. ~ Dava Sobel, #NFDB
460:Every business is manmade. It is a result of individuals. It reflects the personalities and the business philosophy of the founders and those who have directed its affairs throughout its existence. If you want to have an understanding of any business, it is important to know the background of the people who started it and directed its past and the hopes and ambitions of those who are planning its future. ~ Thomas Rowe Price Jr, #NFDB
461:What possible meaning can the self-existence of God have for me and others like me in a world such as this and in times such as these?” To this I reply that, because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological. Some knowledge of what kind of God it is that operates the universe is indispensable to a sound philosophy of life and a sane outlook on the world scene. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
462:Years should not be devoted to the acquisition of dead languages or to the study of history which, for the most part, is a detailed account of things that never occurred. It is useless to fill the individual with dates of great battles, with the births and deaths of kings. They should be taught the philosophy of history, the growth of nations, of philosophies, theories, and, above all, of the sciences. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
463:The other was that all the major civil rights organizations, new as well as old, were committed to the philosophy of non-violence, the doctrine preached by the most conspicuous leader in the Negro movement, Martin Luther King. ‘We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer,’ he told the whites, ‘and in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process. ~ C Vann Woodward, #NFDB
464:Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding--and this means, among other things, a public philosophy of gender equality and concern for child welfare. When instead the larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers, the family gets a little more dangerous for everyone, and so, inevitably, does the larger world. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich, #NFDB
465:Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity. ~ Rudolf Rocker, #NFDB
466:Subjective reason ... is inclined to abandon the fight with religion by setting up two different brackets, one for science and philosophy, and one for institutionalized mythology, thus recognizing both of them. For the philosophy of objective reason there is no such way out. Since it hold to the concept of objective truth, it must take a positive or a negative stand with regard to the content of established religion. ~ Max Horkheimer, #NFDB
467:Frankly, I do not like the idea of conversations to define the term "unconditional surrender."The German people can have dinned into their ears what I said in my Christmas Eve speech--in effect, that we have no thought of destroying the German people and that we want them to live through the generations like other European peoples on condition, of course, that they get rid of their present philosophy of conquest. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
468:The philosophy of love and peace strangely overlooked who was in possession of the guns. There had been love and peace for some time on the continent of Africa because for all this time black men had been captivated by the doctrines of Christianity. It took them centuries to realize its contradictions. ... perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ. ~ Bessie Head, #NFDB
469:There is no way of learning to pray but by praying. No reasoned philosophy of prayer ever taught a soul to pray. We know not what we should pray for as we ought, and if prayer waits for understanding it will never begin. We discover by using. We learn by practice. Though a man should have all knowledge about prayer, and though he should understand all mysteries about prayer, unless he prays he will never learn to pray. ~ Samuel Chadwick, #NFDB
470:One can only attempt a rational, descriptive philosophy of the universe on the assumption that one is totally separate from it. But if you and your thoughts are part of this universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them. This is why all philosophical and theological systems must ultimately fall apart.
To “know” reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it. ~ Alan W Watts,#NFDB
471:Ibn Taymiyyah was a worrying figure to the establishment. His return to the fundamentals of the Quran and sunnah and his denial of much of the rich spirituality and philosophy of Islam may have been reactionary, but it was also revolutionary. He outraged the conservative ulama, who clung to the textbook answers, and criticized the Mamluk government of Syria for practices which contravened Islamic law as he understood it. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
472:Even though it is almost impossible to attribute with certainty any specific mathematical achievements either to Pythagoras himself or to his followers, there is no question that they have been responsible for a mingling of mathematics, philosophy of life, and religion unparalleled in history. In this respect it is perhaps interesting to note the historical coincidence that Pythagoras was a contemporary of Buddha and Confucius. ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
473:The most current philosophy of life is self-expressionism: “Let yourself go”; “Do whatever you please.” Any suggestion of restraining errant impulses is called a masochistic survival of the dark ages. The truth is that the only really self-expressive people in the world are in the insane asylum. They have absolutely no inhibitions, no conventions, and no codes. They are as self-expressive as hell, i.e., in complete disorder. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
474:And this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but I'd hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
475:In another of his most famous essays, Montaigne argued that to philosophise is to learn to die. I learned how to die with fatherhood. From the day Tito was born, I was completely cancelled out by him. I lost my will. I ceased to exist. Only a dead person can cease to exist. If philosophising is learning to die, then fatherhood is the philosophy of the ordinary man, the philosophy of the poor in spirit, the philosophy of the masses. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
476:In the strictest sense, we cannot actually think about life and reality at all, because this would have to include thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking about thinking, and so ad infinitum. One can only attempt a rational, descriptive philosophy of the universe on the assumption that one is totally separate from it. But if you and your thoughts are part of this universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
477:There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his [sic] activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
478:Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition; but that the brain capacity of the average reader be not taxed too much, I also shall begin with a definition, and then elaborate on the latter. ANARCHISM:—The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
479:Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836), #NFDB
480:Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosophy of another: he takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him. —Thomas Paine, 1778 ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
481:On the philosophy of the Asiatics; "Asiatic Researches", vol. IV, p. 164: "the fundamental tenet of the Vedanta school consisted not in denying the existence of matter, that is of solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure (to deny which would be lunacy), but in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending that it has no essence independent of mental perception; that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
482:Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosophy of another: he takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him. —Thomas Paine, 17781 ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
483:there is little in the world of French Decadence of the late nineteenth century that can be seen as furthering the philosophical aims of left-hand-path philosophies. Because they tended to hang onto medieval imagery—conditioned by their thoroughly Catholic cultural milieu—the French Satanists (of fact and fiction) actually seem to have retarded the renewal of the philosophy of the transcendental branch of the left-hand path in the West. ~ Stephen E Flowers, #NFDB
484:I would say we had two goals when doing this CD. The first goal is to introduce people who have never seen the show before to the best comics that are on the show. And goal number two is to introduce people that they never heard of before and give you a bit more flavor of what the show is actually like. And those goals are very much in line with the philosophy of the show from the very beginning. It's the very best people who are out there. ~ Scott Aukerman, #NFDB
485:It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them--and then they leap. I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while....But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
486:There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
487:France is going to endure, and I’ll tell you [ISIS people who attacked Paris ] why. If you’re in a war of culture and lifestyle with France, good fucking luck, because go ahead, bring your bankrupt ideology. They’ll bring Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf, fine wine, Camus, Camembert, madeleines, macarons, Marcel Proust and the fucking croquembouche. You just brought a philosophy of rigorous self-abnegation to a pastry fight, my friend. You are fucked. ~ John Oliver, #NFDB
488:When economic power desires to be left alone it uses the philosophy of laissez faire to discourage political restraint upon economic freedom. When it wants to make use of the police power of the state to subdue rebellions and discontent in the ranks of its helots, it justifies the use of political coercion and the resulting suppression of liberties by insisting that peace is more precious than freedom and that its only desire is social peace. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr, #NFDB
489:If so many find it easier to accept the total destruction of society rather than see that a new society is all around them, a society based on cooperative labor, it is not merely because of greed, desire to retain privilege, original sin. It is because, arising out of these material privileged and re-enforcing them is a habit of mind, a way of viewing the world, a philosophy of life still so powerful because by means of it man has conquered nature. ~ C L R James, #NFDB
490:Certain issues in philosophy of science (having to do with observation and the definition of a theory's empirical import) had beenmisconstrued as issues in philosophy of logic and of language. With respect to modality, I hold the exact opposite: important philosophical problems concerning language have been misconstrued as relating to the content of science and the nature of the world. This is not at all new, but is the traditional nominalist line. ~ Bas van Fraassen, #NFDB
491:Someone with a coherent philosophy of life will know what in life is worth attaining, and because this person has spent time trying to attain the thing in life he believed to be worth attaining, he has probably attained it, to the extent that it was possible for him to do so. Consequently, when it comes time for him to die, he will not feel cheated. To the contrary, he will, in the words of Musonius, “be set free from the fear of death.”2 Consider, ~ William B Irvine, #NFDB
492:Satyagraha is the pursuit of truth. My grandfather believed that truth should be the cornerstone of everybody's life and that we must dedicate our lives to pursuing truth, to finding out the truth in our lives. And so his entire philosophy was the philosophy of life. It was not just a philosophy for conflict resolution, but something that we have to imbibe in our life and live it all the time so that we can improve and become better human beings. ~ Arun Manilal Gandhi, #NFDB
493:Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
494:Even today many educated people think that the victory of Christianity over Greek philosophy is a proof of the superior truth of the former - although in this case it was only the coarser and more violent that conquered the more spiritual and delicate. So far as superior truth is concerned, it is enough to observe that the awakening sciences have allied themselves point by point with the philosophy of Epicurus, but point by point rejected Christianity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
495:It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
496:Like the architects of the fifteenth-century Spanish Inquisition and the doctrine of limpieza de sangre (cleanliness of blood), causing Jews from Spain and Portugal to flee to the Caribbean, the Code Noir defines Jews and conversos of Jewish descent as beyond saving. The logics of anti-Semitism and antiblack racism, seemingly differentiated by religious and secular discourses, converge in the political philosophy of white supremacy and the disposition of bad faith. ~ Neil Roberts, #NFDB
497:In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world. ~ Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, J. Glenn Gray, trans. (New York: Harper, 1968), p. 21., #NFDB
498:The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contract theory of Hobbes, the "back to nature" optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
499:true human grandeur lay in the practice of kindness without conditions, in the capacity of giving to those who had nothing, but not what we have left over but rather a part of what little we have—giving until it hurts without practicing the deceitful philosophy of forcing others to accept our concepts of good and truth because (we believe) they’re the only possible ones and because, besides, they should be grateful for what we give them, even when they didn’t ask for it. ~ Leonardo Padura, #NFDB
500:My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. What I see in my country, progressively over these years, is that the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, and the poorer have become hopeless because they're not properly cared for. That's actually something that is happening in many Western societies. Your own, I am told, is not free from it. ~ John le Carre, #NFDB
501:I would say to anybody who thinks that all the problems in philosophy can be translated into empirically verifiable answers - whether it be a Lawrence Krauss thinking that physics is rendering philosophy obsolete or a Sam Harris thinking that neuroscience is rendering moral philosophy obsolete - that it takes an awful lot of philosophy - philosophy of science in the first case, moral philosophy in the second - even to demonstrate the relevance of these empirical sciences. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, #NFDB
502:When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East--above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe--we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy. ~ Victor Cousin, #NFDB
503:Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation? ~ Barry Lopez, #NFDB
504:Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there. ~ Lev Grossman, #NFDB
505:If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
506:I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
507:I’ll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
508:The philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de-sac, regressions, periods of blindness, and amnesia. The great discoveries which determined its course were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after quite different hares. At other times, the process of discovery consisted merely in the cleaning away of the rubbish that blocked the path, or in the rearranging of existing items of knowledge in a different pattern. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
509:I wouldn't wish now to digress into the philosophy of the relationship between life and logic ,but we shall agree that it was a good thing we were not wholly logical.For if we had been ,we would have surrendered at the end of April or the beginning of May 1992.The entire logic of the world was against us at that time.And now we have these illogical people who say: we have no food,we have no bullets ,but we'll fight and win.what is one to do with them? They are good,courageous people. ~ Alija Izetbegovi, #NFDB
510:Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
511:In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it is essential or very important to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” 37 percent to be “very well-off financially” (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively. For well over thirty years, we’ve been loudly announcing that happiness is money, with a side order of fame. No wonder students have come to believe that college is all about getting a job. ~ William Deresiewicz, #NFDB
512:All those formal systems, in mathematics and physics and the philosophy of science, which claim to give foundations for certain truth are surely mistaken. I am tempted to say that we do not look for truth, but for knowledge. But I dislike this form of words, for two reasons. First of all, we do look for truth, however we define it, it is what we find that is knowledge. And second, what we fail to find is not truth, but certainty; the nature of truth is exactly the knowledge that we do find. ~ Jacob Bronowski, #NFDB
513:Resentment is a powerful and corrosive force, both on the slippery left and the slippery right, and the history of humankind can largely be read as a history of resentment. Aside from a profound philosophy of capital, what we really need is a profound psychology and philosophy of resentment. We must learn to live for ourselves, without reference to the other, and, at the same time, to rise above and beyond ourselves. Or else history will keep repeating itself, and our life will be a living death. ~ Neel Burton, #NFDB
514:Some people become so centered on an enemy, so totally obsessed with the behavior of another person that they become blind to everything except their desire for that person to lose, even if it means losing themselves. Lose/Lose is the philosophy of adversarial conflict, the philosophy of war. Lose/Lose is also the philosophy of the highly dependent person without inner direction who is miserable and thinks everyone else should be, too. “If nobody ever wins, perhaps being a loser isn’t so bad. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
515:It is my hope that as the Negro plunges deeper into the quest for freedom and justice he will plunge even deeper into the philosophy of non-violence. The Negro all over the South must come to the point that he can say to his white brother: "We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we will not obey your evil laws. We will soon wear you down by pure capacity to suffer". ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
516:I early learned that there were two natures in me. This caused me a great deal of trouble, till I worked out a philosophy of life and struck a compromise between the flesh and the spirit. Too great an ascendancy of either was to be abnormal, and since normality is almost a fetish of mine, I finally succeeded in balancing both natures. Ordinarily they are at equilibrium; yet as frequently as one is permitted to run rampant, so is the other. I have small regard for an utter brute or for an utter saint. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
517:The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it express cojointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
518:Although technology often leads science in discovery, the philosophy of technology is usually drawn from the scientific philosophy of its time. In our time, the technology of machines has drawn its inspiration from mechanics, dealing with complexity by reducing the number of relevant parts. The technology of government, on the other hand, has drawn upon statistical mechanics, creating simplicity by dealing only with people in the structureless mass, as interchangeable units, and taking averages. ~ Gerald M Weinberg, #NFDB
519:Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.
So, in the kapia, between the skies, the river and the hills, generation after generation learnt not to mourn overmuch what the troubled waters had borne away. They entered there into the unconscious philosophy of the town; that life was an incomprehensible marvel, since it was incessantly wasted and spent, yet none the less it lasted and endured 'like the bridge on the Drina'. ~ Ivo Andri,#NFDB
520:Fore more than a decade - from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s - conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime. Civil rights protests were frequently depicted as criminal rather than political in nature, and federal courts were accused of excessive 'lenience' toward lawlessness, thereby contributing to the spread of crime. ~ Michelle Alexander, #NFDB
521:Hence the great irony: Hayek, one of the greatest champions of individual liberty and economic freedom the world has ever known, believed that knowledge was communal. Dewey, the champion of socialism and collectivism, believed that knowledge was individual. Hayek's is a philosophy that treats individuals as the best judges of their own self-interests, which in turn yield staggering communal cooperation. Dewey's was the philosophy of a giant, Monty Pythonesque crowd shouting on cue: "We're All Individuals! ~ Jonah Goldberg, #NFDB
522:The person senses what it feels like to be free from inhibitions. At the same time he feels connected and integrated – with his body and, through his body, with his environment. He has a sense of well-being and inner peace. He gains the knowledge that the life of the body resides in its involuntary aspect. […] Unfortunately these beautiful feelings do not always hold up under the stress of daily living in our modern culture. The pace, the pressure and the philosophy of our times are antithetical to life. ~ Alexander Lowen, #NFDB
523:Trump spent two years suing author Tim O’Brien and his publisher for writing that his net worth was probably not in the billions, but rather the hundreds of millions. After a court dismissed the case, Trump made it clear that he merely wanted to harass O’Brien, not necessarily win damages. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about,” Trump bragged. It was a comment that fit cozily within his philosophy of revenge. In ~ David Cay Johnston, #NFDB
524:He is, I believe, a kind of “test case” for a philosophy of life that has become the default alternative to the bland “normality” he did everything he could to outrage. It is a philosophy and ethic that, for sake of a better term, I call “liberationist.” Its message is that if we can only rid ourselves of all repression, all inhibitions, all hang-ups, all authority, then the Golden Age will miraculously appear. It is an antinomian philosophy (“against the norms”) that reaches for some ethos “beyond good and evil. ~ Gary Lachman, #NFDB
525:Whole idea of progress - that presence is based on the past, that future generations are going to improve our achievements, and that man will be always moving forward - obviously negate the idea of some absolute measure. Everything became relative, just like in Hume's subjectivism. Man's current criterion was left for future generations to improve it. After a while, people realized that this is philosophy of continuous change, continuous moving. Then, a soul became upset. It felt there is no peace, there is no safety. ~ Seraphim Rose, #NFDB
526:I think that sitting there talking to Dan was a thing that had a great impression on my life. I know that being an idiot and all, I ain't supposed to have no philosophy of my own, but maybe it's just because nobody never too the time to talk to me about it. It was Dan's philosophy that everything that happen to us, or for that matter, to anything everywhere, is controlled by natural laws that govern the universe. His views were extremely complicated, but the gist of what he said begun to change my whole outlook on things. ~ Winston Groom, #NFDB
527:Poetic naturalism is a philosophy of freedom and responsibility. The raw materials of life are given to us by the natural world, and we must work to understand them and accept the consequences. The move from description to prescription, from saying what happens to passing judgment on what should happen, is a creative one, a fundamentally human act. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it. ~ Sean Carroll, #NFDB
528:Heirs to the philosophy of a Zionist zealot named Vladimir Jabotinsky, they clung to the dream of a Jewish state running from Acre to Amman, from Mount Hermon to the Suez Canal. For them, Churchill's decision to create the emirate of Transjordan with a stroke of his pen on a Sunday afternoon in Cairo had been a mutilation of the Balfour Declaration. They wanted it all, all the land that had once belonged to the Biblical kingdom of Israel, and they wanted it, if possible, without the encumbering presence of its Arab inhabitants. ~ Larry Collins, #NFDB
529:Philosophy doesn’t travel at the same speed technology does. It takes a man forty years to realize what it took his father forty years to realize. And what’s worse, he resists the truths his father’s come to know, until he learns them himself. Meanwhile, technology doesn’t wait. All a man has to do is add another piece to his father’s technological puzzle and the machines, the weapons, the means, are stronger. In the end you have an army with the same philosophy of the cavemen, but with the weapons of ten billion artless minds. ~ Josh Malerman, #NFDB
530:Philosophy doesn’t travel at the same speed technology does. It takes a man forty years to realize what it took his father forty years to realize. And what’s worse, he resists the truths his father’s come to know, until he learns them himself. Meanwhile, technology doesn’t wait. All a man has to do is add another piece to his father’s technological puzzle and the machines, the weapons, the means, are stronger. In the end you have an army with the same philosophy of the cavemen, but with the weapons of ten billion artless minds. Do ~ Josh Malerman, #NFDB
531:The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea formulated by mankind. If it prevailed in the whole modern world we'd still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we'd be back among the Egyptians of the pyramid age. Its only coherent contribution to Western thought has been theosophy-and theosophy is as idiotic as Christian Science. It has absolutely nothing to offer a civilized white man. ~ H L Mencken, #NFDB
532:The solutions put forth by imperialism are the quintessence of simplicity...When they speak of the problems of population and birth, they are in no way moved by concepts related to the interests of the family or of society...Just when science and technology are making incredible advances in all fields, they resort to technology to suppress revolutions and ask the help of science to prevent population growth. In short, the peoples are not to make revolutions, and women are not to give birth. This sums up the philosophy of imperialism. ~ Fidel Castro, #NFDB
533:I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
534:Slava, working in concert with the philosophy of the nation that had taken them in—good works as the by-product of self-interest—was able to give the descendants at the table, the children and grandchildren, the gift of knowing, at last, the unknown corners of their forebears, all because the forebears stood to make money. How cheaply they fell—the heart’s greatest terrors for a bushel of euros. Slava wasn’t a judge: He was a middleman, a loan shark, an alchemist—he turned lies into facts, words into money, silence into knowledge at last. ~ Boris Fishman, #NFDB
535:My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration and ignoble deaths; that there is security in personal strength; that you can fight City Hall and win; that any action is better than no action, even if it's the wrong action; that you never reach glory or self-fulfillment unless you're willing to risk everything, dare anything, put yourself dead on the line every time; and that once one becomes strong or rich or potent or powerful it is the responsibility of the strong to help the weak become strong. ~ Harlan Ellison, #NFDB
536:In his early text, somewhat cumbersomely titled 'Towards a Critique of Hegel's PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT,' the young Karl Marx famously noted that religion - the Christian faith, he meant primarily - is 'the opiate of the people.' It's a drug, and it's a 'downer' or 'depressant' insulating people from the pain of oppressive social realities and consoling them with a dream world of heavenly bliss. Alternatively, religion can function as an 'upper,' a 'stimulant' energizing people for the tasks at hand - a function of religion Marx failed to grasp. ~ Miroslav Volf, #NFDB
537:Corporations are great and appalling things. They take you and shape you in nearly nothing flat, twist and swivel you. And they do it without overt persuasion, they do it with smiles and nods, a collective inflection of the voice. You stand at the head of a corridor and by the time you walk to the far end you have adopted the comprehensive philosophy of the firm, the Weltanschauung. I use this grave and layered word because somewhere in its depths there is a whisper of mystical contemplation that seems totally appropriate to the subject of waste. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
538:Equality as a condition for the development of individuality was also the meaning of the concept in the philosophy of the Western Enlightenment. It meant (most clearly formulated by Kant) that no man must be the means for the ends of another man. That all men are equal inasmuch as they are ends, and only ends, and never means to each other. Following the ideas of the Enlightenment, Socialist thinkers of various schools defined equality as abolition of exploitation, of the use of man by man, regardless of whether this use were cruel or “human.” In ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
539:Fiqh is man-made!"
By that reasoning and applying your standards, so are logic, math, natural sciences, and virtually every single body of knowledge and its fruits. If being man made is sufficient reason to reject fiqh, it's more than sufficient reason to reject those, too. And before arguing that science is special, know that the epistemology and philosophy of science are also man-made.
UPDATE. Pay particular attention to where it says the "body of knowledge." And if you want to eliminate that qualifier, read up a bit on antirealism. ~ Musa Furber,#NFDB
540:Man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
541:The philosophy of tough love is based on the conviction that no effective recovery can be initiated until a man admits that he is powerless over alcohol and that his life has become unmanageable. The alternative to confronting the truth is always some form of self-destruction. For Max there were three options: eventual insanity, premature death, or sobriety. In order to free the captive, one must name the captivity. Max’s denial had to be identified through merciless interaction with his peers. His self-deception had to be unmasked in its absurdity. ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
542:Everywhere he sees people filled with anger and fear, society breaking up into warring fragments. Each fragment says to the others, “We are right and you are wrong.” Every such pressure group, if it is strong enough, self-righteously imposes its will upon the rest. And everywhere the same thing is being done on an individual basis. The sum of all this mighty effort is less peace and less brotherhood than before. The philosophy of self-sufficiency is not paying off. Plainly enough, it is a bone-crushing juggernaut whose final achievement is ruin. ~ Alcoholics Anonymous, #NFDB
543:Our very success, gained you will agree by skill, will draw more people than ever to see it. And that will benefit many more clubs than Rangers. Let the others come after us. We welcome the chase. It is healthy for us. We will never hide from it. Never fear, inevitably we shall have our years of failure, and when they arrive, we must reveal tolerance and sanity. No matter the days of anxiety that come our way, we shall emerge stronger because of the trials to be overcome. That has been the philosophy of the Rangers since the days of the gallant pioneers. ~ Bill Struth, #NFDB
544:[M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
545:A love of neighbor manifests itself in the tolerance not only of opinions of others but, what is more important, of the essence and uniqueness of others, when we subscribe to that religious philosophy of life that insists that God has made each man and woman an individual sacred personality endowed with a specific temperament, created with differing needs, hungers, dreams. This is a variegated, pluralistic world where no two stars are the same and every snowflake has its own distinctive pattern. God apparently did not want a regimented world of sameness. ~ Joshua L Liebman, #NFDB
546:Why multiply instances? It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents Spirit to Spirit, is properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, put on for a season, and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of CLOTHES, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been: the whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing; and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
547:The philosophy of praxis does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing contradictions in history and society, but is the very theory of these contradictions. It is not the instrument of government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent and exercise hegemony over the subaltern classes. It is the expression of subaltern classes who want to educate themselves in the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all truths, even the unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the impossible deceptions of the upper class, and even more their own. ~ Antonio Gramsci, #NFDB
548:This book explores an unrecognized but mighty taboo—our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East—in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man’s natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
549:He ran out of possibilities. Still, Blevins could perhaps help him there. Or Mrs. Wainer. On the other hand— Hamish said it for him. “I wouldna’ be in haste to show it.” Getting to his feet, Rutledge found a flat leather case lying in a corner of the room, a coating of dust covering it, and a cobweb linking it to the frame of the bottomless chair beside it. The grip was broken at one end, but it would do. Rutledge looked around him a last time at the “waste not, want not” philosophy of householders who store in their upper floors and attics the ruined furnishings ~ Charles Todd, #NFDB
550:Over the years I've worked out a philosophy of failure which I find extraordinarily liberating. If I'm not free to fail, I'm not free to take risks, and everything in life that's worth doing involves a willingness to risk failure. Although I have had 30 books published, there are at least six unpublished books which have failed, but which have been necessary for the book that then gets published. The same thing is true in all human relationships. Unless I'm willing to open myself up to risk and to being hurt, then I'm closing myself off to love and friendship. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
551:...Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them-and then they leap.
I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemene. If Christ played with doubt, so must we.If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation ~ Yann Martel,#NFDB
552:In a commentary on CNNMoney.com, Fortune senior writer Anne Fisher reported that scientists have begun to realize “that people may do their best thinking when they are not concentrating on work at all.” She cites studies published in the journal Science by Dutch psychologists who concluded, “The unconscious mind is a terrific solver of complex problems when the conscious mind is busy elsewhere or, perhaps better yet, not overtaxed at all.” That’s why I subscribe to the philosophy of the late Satchel Paige, who said, “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits. ~ Phil Jackson, #NFDB
553:I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today - and even professional - seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
554:. . . the membership relation for sets can often be replaced by the composition operation for functions. This leads to an alternative foundation for Mathematics upon categories -- specifically, on the category of all functions. Now much of Mathematics is dynamic, in that it deals with morphisms of an object into another object of the same kind. Such morphisms (like functions) form categories, and so the approach via categories fits well with the objective of organizing and understanding Mathematics. That, in truth, should be the goal of a proper philosophy of Mathematics. ~ Saunders Mac Lane, #NFDB
555:If you tend to focus on the particular events in your life, try to put things into perspective. When you do, you'll be able to share the philosophy of someone such as the apostle Paul, who was able to say, "I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content."3 And that was saying a lot, considering that Paul had been shipwrecked, whipped, beaten, stoned, and imprisoned. Throughout everything, his faith enabled him to maintain perspective. He realized that as long as he was doing what he was supposed to do, his being labeled success or failure by others really didn't matter. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
556:What this means is that it is entirely possible these days for someone to have been raised in a religion and to have taken philosophy courses in college but still to be lacking a philosophy of life. (Indeed, this is the situation in which most of my students find themselves.) What, then, should those seeking a philosophy of life do? Perhaps their best option is to create for themselves a virtual school of philosophy by reading the works of the philosophers who ran the ancient schools. This, at any rate, is what, in the following pages, I will be encouraging readers to do. I ~ William B Irvine, #NFDB
557:When the senses are well-controlled and withdrawn from contact with the objects of the world, then sense perceptions no longer create images in the mind. The mind is then trained in one-pointedness. When the mind no longer recalls thought-patterns from the unconscious, a balanced state of mind leads to a higher state of consciousness. A perfect state of serenity established in sattva is the highest state of enlightenment. The practice of meditation and non-attachment are the two keynotes. A very firm conviction is essential for establishing a definite philosophy of life. Intellect ~ Swami Rama, #NFDB
558:the old mantra—“Either I can beat him or the police.” I understood it all—the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
559:The philosophy of Atheism has its root in the earth, in this life; its aim is the emancipation of the human race from all God-heads, be they Judaic, Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhistic, Brahmanistic, or what not. Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods, nothing but pain and persecution, have been man's lot since gods began. There is but one way out of this blunder. Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon the earth. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
560:Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul. ~ J M Coetzee, #NFDB
561:Buddhism has become for me a philosophy of action and responsibility. It provides a framework of values, ideas, and practices that nurture my ability to create a path in life, to define myself as a person, to act, to take risks, to image things differently, to make art. The more I prize Gotama's teachings free from the matrix of Indian religious thought in which they are entrenched and the more I come to understand how his own life unfolded in the context of his times, the more I discern a template for living that I can apply at this time in this increasingly secular and globalized world. ~ Stephen Batchelor, #NFDB
562:Writer's groups work for some new writers, not for others. I was never cut out for a writer's group. So much depends on the people in it. What are they criticizing about your work? Grammar, syntax, plot holes? Or are they criticizing your personal style, your world view and your personal philosophy? If they're criticizing the latter, it's not a good group for you, no matter what support you might think you're getting from it. Your style, your perspective, and your philosophy of life are the main things you have to sell; they are what make you different, and you shouldn't--in fact you can't--change them. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
563:For many intelligences,the thought of homely intimacies is associated with a spontaneous disgust at too much sweetness-which is why there is neither a philosophy of sweetness nor an elaborated ontology of the intimate. One must assess the nature of this resistance if one is to get past typical initial aversions. From a distance,the subject appears so unattractive and inconsequential that for the time being,only suckers for harmony or theophilic eunuchs would get stuck on it. An intellect that spends its energy on worthy objects usually prefers the sharp to the sweet; one does not offer candy to heroes ~ Peter Sloterdijk, #NFDB
564:As per the Indian philosophy of the Upanishads, the source of evil is one’s ego-sense –Ahankara—which differentiates oneself from the other selves. A person, who visualizes himself independent of others, tries to guard or please himself at the cost of others. Evil is thus the tendency of a person to live a life that is not ‘in harmony’ with the rest of the world, but ‘in opposition’ to it or at best ‘in indifference’ to it. The good is to discover the unity in the diversity of ‘all selves’ and beings. Once unity in diversity is realized, every being becomes our own self and good deeds follow automatically ~ Awdhesh Singh, #NFDB
565:The philosophy of the Declaration, that government is set up by the people to secure their life, liberty, and happiness, and is to be overthrown when it no longer does that, is often traced to the ideas of John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government. That was published in England in 1689, when the English were rebelling against tyrannical kings and setting up parliamentary government. The Declaration, like Locke’s Second Treatise, talked about government and political rights, but ignored the existing inequalities in property. And how could people truly have equal rights, with stark differences in wealth? ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
566:The error I found in the philosophy of Henry George was its cocksureness, its simplicity, and the small value that it placed upon the selfish motives of men. The doctrine was a hang-over from the seventeenth century in France, when the philosophers had given up the idea of God, but still thought that there must be some immovable basis for man’s conduct and ideals. In this dilemma they evolved the theory of natural rights. If ‘natural rights’ means anything it means that the individual rights are to be determined by the conduct of Nature. But Nature knows nothing about rights in the sense of human conception. ~ Clarence Darrow, #NFDB
567:The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants. The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, the humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians, who had almost universally embraced the philosophy of Epicurus, enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquillity, and suffered not the pleasing dream to be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous freedom. ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
568:My basic philosophy of teaching was straightforward and deeply personal. I wanted to teach the way I wished that I myself had been taught. Which is to say, I hoped to convey the sheer joy of learning, the thrill of understanding things about the universe. I wanted to pass along to students not only the logic but the beauty of math and science. Furthermore, I wanted to do this in a way that would be equally helpful to kids studying a subject for the first time and for adults who wanted to refresh their knowledge; for students grappling with homework and for older people hoping to keep their minds active and supple. ~ Salman Khan, #NFDB
569:Jürgen Habermas currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Bridging continental and Anglo-American traditions of thought, he has engaged in debates with thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Putnam, Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Brandom. His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social-political theory to aesthetics, epistemology and language to philosophy of religion, and his ideas have significantly influenced not only philosophy but also political-legal thought, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology and theology. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
570:The current implicit ideology that dominates the world, especially in the West, still continues to profess, officially, the utopia inherited from the egalitarian philosophy of the Enlightenment (Eighteenth century), positivism and scientism (Nineteenth century): to create a situation where, in a few decades, some eight billion people will live on the planet with a good standard of living and democracy for all. All this resembles the billiard player who imagines that after four or five rebounds his ball will automatically fall into the hole. These professors of ballistics are playing golf, but they do not know it. ~ Guillaume Faye, #NFDB
571:Perhaps some sincere but puzzled Christian may at this juncture wish to inquire about the practicality of such concepts as I am trying to set forth here. ”What bearing does this have on my life?” he may ask. ”What possible meaning can the self-existence of God have for me and others like me in a world such as this and in times such as these?” To this I reply that, because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological. Some knowledge of what kind of God it is that operates the universe is indispensable to a sound philosophy of life and a sane outlook on the world scene. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
572:To Nanine
Dear, if I never saw your face again;
If all the music of your voice were mute
As that of a forlorn and broken lute;
If only in my dreams I might attain
The benediction of your touch, how vain
Were Faith to justify the old pursuit
Of happiness, or Reason to confute
The pessimist philosophy of pain.
Yet Love not altogether is unwise,
For still the wind would murmur in the corn,
And still the sun would splendor all the mere;
And I-I could not, dearest, choose but hear
Your voice upon the breeze and see your eyes
Shine in the glory of the summer morn.
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
573:According to Kuznets’s theory, income inequality would automatically decrease in advanced phases of capitalist development, regardless of economic policy choices or other differences between countries, until eventually it stabilized at an acceptable level. Proposed in 1955, this was really a theory of the magical postwar years referred to in France as the “Trente Glorieuses,” the thirty glorious years from 1945 to 1975.9 For Kuznets, it was enough to be patient, and before long growth would benefit everyone. The philosophy of the moment was summed up in a single sentence: “Growth is a rising tide that lifts all boats. ~ Thomas Piketty, #NFDB
574:Fundamentalism is the philosophy of the powerless, the conquered, the displaced and the dispossessed. Its spawning ground is the wreckage of political and military defeat, as Hebrew fundamentalism arose during the Babylonian captivity, as white Christian fundamentalism appeared in the American South during Reconstruction, as the notion of the Master Race evolved in Germany following World War I. In such desperate times, the vanquished race would perish without a doctrine that restored hope and pride. Islamic fundamentalism ascends from the same landscape of despair and possesses the same tremendous and potent appeal. ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
575:When you are criticizing the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents to all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
576:While the philosophy of Advaita, and Ramana’s own words, may tend to support a metaphysical reading of teachings of this kind, their validity is not metaphysical. Rather, it is experiential. The whole of Advaita reduces to a series of very simple and testable assertions: Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling “I,” and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness—free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
577:Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications. ~ Anne Michaels, #NFDB
578:When Mr. Lippmann says that the founders of our free institutions were adherents of the philosophy of natural law, and that ‘the free political institutions of the Western world were conceived and established’ by men who held certain abstract beliefs, he speaks with the shortened perspective of an American way of thinking in which a manner of conducting affairs is inconceivable without an architect and without a premeditated ‘dedication to a proposition.’ But the fact is that nobody ever ‘founded these institutions.’ They are the product of innumerable human choices, over long stretches of time, but not of any human design. ~ Michael Oakeshott, #NFDB
579:In our hunger for guidance, we were ordinary. The American Freshman Survey, which has followed students since 1966, proves the point. One prompt in the questionnaire asks entering freshmen about “objectives considered to be essential or very important.” In 1967, 86 percent of respondents checked “developing a meaningful philosophy of life,” more than double the number who said “being very well off financially.” Naturally, students looked to professors for moral and worldly understanding. Since then, though, finding meaning and making money have traded places. The first has plummeted to 45 percent; the second has soared to 82 percent. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
580:The Pythagoreans were indeed baffled. Here was a totally new element in the universe that could not be described in terms of whole numbers. Their entire philosophy of nature, which was based on the principle that every phenomenon could be reduced to whole numbers, was threatened. They called this new number irrational, which term then meant unmentionable or unknowable though today it means a number not expressible as a ratio of whole numbers. There is a legend that the discovery of √2 was made by a member while the entire group of Pythagoreans was on a ship at sea. The member was thrown overboard and the rest of the group pledged to secrecy. ~ Morris Kline, #NFDB
581:Today, all kinds of philosophical conclusions are made concerning physical or astronomical theories and discoveries, often with total neglect for the limitations and assumptions originally made by the scientists. With Kant, physics became the source of philosophy and there developed a physicism very much similar to the earlier mathematicism of Descartes. With a real philosophy of nature there would be an independent matrix within which the implications of different sciences could be tested and tried and their meaning made known without the aberrations which so often accompany philosophical interpretations of scientific theories today. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
582:I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today - and even professional scientists - seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.
[Correspondance to Robert Thorton in 1944] ~ Albert Einstein,#NFDB
583:It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them - and then they leap. I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for awhile. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
584:My sense, although I don’t remember discussing it with anyone, was that with the fall of France to the Nazis in June 1940, European civilization had collapsed. I also recalled that although both George Herbert Mead and John Dewey had been born in New England, they developed their distinctively American philosophy of pragmatism in Chicago. So thinking of my own New England roots, I decided to go to Chicago, which, seen through Carl Sandburg’s eyes, was the opposite of European decadence: Hog Butcher for the World, Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler, Stormy, husky, brawling. City of the Big Shoulders.7 ~ Grace Lee Boggs, #NFDB
585:In the wake of the Neoliberal proclamation of the end of class struggle, the only social categories remaining are winner and loser. No more capitalists and workers; no more exploiters and exploited. Either you are strong and smart, or you deserve your misery. The establishment of capitalist absolutism is based on the mass adhesion...to the philosophy of natural selection. The mass murderer is someone who believes in the right of the fittest and the strongest to win in the social game, but he also knows or senses that he is not the fittest or the strongest. So he opts for the only possible act of retaliation and self assertion: to kill and be killed. ~ Franco Bifo Berardi, #NFDB
586:Consider a cognitive scientist concerned with the empirical study of the mind, especially the cognitive unconscious, and ultimately committed to understanding the mind in terms of the brain and its neural structure. To such a scientist of the mind, Anglo-American approaches to the philosophy of mind and language of the sort discussed above seem odd indeed. The brain uses neurons, not languagelike symbols. Neural computation works by real-time spreading activation, which is neither akin to prooflike deductions in a mathematical
logic, nor like disembodied algorithms in classical artificial intelligence, nor like derivations in a transformational grammar. ~ George Lakoff,#NFDB
587:Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito--out! Every simile that would have made sub-moron's mouth twitch--gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer--lost!
Every story slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like--in the finale--Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant's attention--shot dead. ~ Ray Bradbury,#NFDB
588:This book attempts to convey something of the characteristic viewpoint on the world of each language whose story it tells. Evidently, living in a particular language does not define a total philosophy of life: but some metaphors will come to mind more readily than others; and some states of mind, or attitudes to others, are easier to assume in one language than another. It cannot be a matter of indifference which language we speak, or which languages our ancestors spoke. Languages frame, analyse and colour our views of the world. 'I have three hearts,' claimed Ennius, an early master poet in Latin, on the strength of his fluency in Latin, Greek, and Oscan. ~ Nicholas Ostler, #NFDB
589:If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes. ~ Alfred Tarski, "The Semantic Conception of Truth" (1952) reprinted in Semantics and the Philosophy of Language (1952) ed., L. Linsky., #NFDB
590:Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. . . . If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. . . . ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
591:It was Jesus’s ideas about truth and freedom that made him dangerous to the principalities and powers. But today our gospel isn’t very dangerous. It’s been tamed and domesticated. If Jesus of Nazareth had preached the paper-thin version of what passes for the “gospel” today—a shrunken, postmortem promise of going to heaven when you die—Pilate would have shrugged his shoulders and released the Nazarene, warning him not to get mixed up in the affairs of the real world. But that’s not what happened. Why? Because Pilate was smart enough to understand that what Jesus was preaching was a challenge to the philosophy of empire (or as we prefer to call it today, superpower). ~ Brian Zahnd, #NFDB
592:Do you see this lantern? cried Syme in a terrible voice.'Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind, you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
593:In Oppenheimer's view, it would be a waste of his precious time, or of mine, to concern ourselves with the details of particular solutions. This was how the philosophy of reductionism led Oppenheimer and Einstein astray. Since the only purpose of physics was to reduce the world of physical phenomena to a finite set of fundamental equations, the study of particular solutions such as black holes was an undesirable distraction from the general goal. Like Hilbert, they were not content to solve particular problems one at a time. They were entranced by the dream of solving all the basic problems at once. And as a result, they failed in their later years to solve any problems at all. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
594:Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket. It was only after you that I understood love, that I understood the grip of my mother's hand. She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
595:It was a perfect school for Einstein. The teaching was based on the philosophy of a Swiss educational reformer of the early nineteenth century, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who believed in encouraging students to visualize images. He also thought it important to nurture the “inner dignity” and individuality of each child. Students should be allowed to reach their own conclusions, Pestalozzi preached, by using a series of steps that began with hands-on observations and then proceeded to intuitions, conceptual thinking, and visual imagery. 56 It was even possible to learn—and truly understand—the laws of math and physics that way. Rote drills, memorization, and force-fed facts were avoided. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
596:more militant. Frederick Douglass spoke in 1857: Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle…. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will…. ~ Howard Zinn, #NFDB
597:There is probably no more abused a term in the history of philosophy than “representation,” and my use of this term differs both from its use in traditional philosophy and from its use in contemporary cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.... The sense of “representation” in question is meant to be entirely exhausted by the analogy with speech acts: the sense of “represent” in which a belief represents its conditions of satisfaction is the same sense in which a statement represents its conditions of satisfaction. To say that a belief is a representation is simply to say that it has a propositional content and a psychological mode. ~ John Searle (1983) Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. p. 12, #NFDB
598:The fully human person is in deep and meaningful contact with the world outside of him. He not only listens to himself, but to the voices of the world. The breadth of his own individual experience is infinitely multiplied through a sensitive empathy with others. He suffers with the suffering, rejoices with the joyful. He is born again in every springtime, feels the impact of the great mysteries of life: birth, growth, love, suffering, death. His heart skips along with the 'young lovers', and he knows something of the exhilaration that is in them. He also knows the ghetto's philosophy of despair, the loneliness of suffering without relief, and the bell never tolls without tolling in some strange way for him. ~ John Joseph Powell, #NFDB
599:In that day every trial borne in patience will be pleasing and the voice of iniquity will be stilled; the devout will be glad; the irreligious will mourn; and the mortified body will rejoice far more than if it had been pampered with every pleasure. Then the cheap garment will shine with splendor and the rich one become faded and worn; the poor cottage will be more praised than the gilded palace. In that day persevering patience will count more than all the power in this world; simple obedience will be exalted above all worldly cleverness; a good and clean conscience will gladden the heart of man far more than the philosophy of the learned; and contempt for riches will be of more weight than every treasure on earth. ~ Thomas Kempis, #NFDB
600:rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar. Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use every day for deep work. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
601:But it is quite possible that, even in what concerns the millennial existence of the human race, the philosophy of the journalist, according to which everything is destined to oblivion, is less true than a contrary philosophy which would predict the conservation of everything. In the same newspaper in which the moralist of the ‘Paris column’ says to us of an event, of a work of art, all the more forcibly of a singer who has enjoyed her ‘crowded hour’: “Who will remember this in ten years’ time?” overleaf does not the report of the Académie des Inscriptions speak often of a fact, in itself of smaller importance, of a poem of little merit, which dates from the epoch of the Pharaohs and is now known again in its entirety? ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
602:Yet, although he could not quite work this out in simple terms in his own mind, the very savour of life, he thought, was itself enhanced if it were not totally taken for granted. Perhaps it was something to do with the whole philosophy of the world into which we were born. If we lived for ever, who would look forward eagerly to tomorrow? If there were no darkness, should we appreciate the sun? Warmth after cold, food after hunger, drink after thirst, sexual love after the absence of sexual love, the fatherly greeting after being away, the comfort and dryness of home after a ride in the rain, the warmth and peace and security of one’s fireside after being among enemies. Unless there was contrast there might be satiety. ~ Winston Graham, #NFDB
603:1. Symbology — The employment of various external aids to preserve and develop the religious faculty of man. 2. History — The philosophy of each religion as illustrated in the lives of divine or human teachers acknowledged by each religion. This includes mythology; for what is mythology to one race, or period, is or was history to other races or periods. Even in cases of human teachers, much of their history is taken as mythology by successive generations. 3. Philosophy — The rationale of the whole scope of each religion. 4. Mysticism — The assertion of something superior to sense-knowledge and reason which particular persons, or all persons under certain circumstances, possess; runs through the other divisions also. All ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
604:In self-actualizing people, the orgasm is simultaneously more important and less important than in average people. It is often a profound and even mystical experience, and yet the absence of sexuality is more easily-tolerated by these people. Loving at a higher-need level makes the lower needs and their frustrations and satisfactions less important, less central, more easily neglected. But it also makes them more whole-heartedly enjoyed when gratified. Food is simultaneously enjoyed and yet regarded as relatively unimportant in the total scheme of life. Sex can be whole-heartedly enjoyed, enjoyed far beyond the possibility of the average person, even at the same time that it does not play a central role in the philosophy of life. ~ Betty Friedan, #NFDB
605:All human life is sunk deep in untruth; the individual cannot pull it out of this well without growing profoundly annoyed with his entire past, without finding his present motives (like honor) senseless, and without opposing scorn and disdain to the passions that urge one on to the future and to the happiness in it. If this is true, is there only one way of thought left, with despair as a personal end and a philosophy of destruction as a theoretical end? I believe that a man’s temperament determines the aftereffect of knowledge; although the aftereffect described above is possible in some natures, I could just as well imagine a different one, which would give rise to a life much more simple, more free of affects than the present one. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
606:The question as to which of these two theories applies to the actual world is, like all questions concerning the actual world, in itself irrelevant to pure mathematics.* But the argument against absolute position usually takes the form of maintaining that a space composed of points is logically inadmissible, and hence issues are raised which a philosophy of mathematics must discuss. In what follows, I am concerned only with the question: Is a space composed of points self-contradictory? It is true that, if this question be answered in the negative, the sole ground for denying that such a space exists in the actual world is removed; but this is a further point, which, being irrelevant to our subject, will be left entirely to the sagacity of the reader. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
607:Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat. The world is bad; let us learn to be independent of it. External goods are precarious; they are the gift of fortune, not the reward of our own efforts. Only subjective goods—virtue, or contentment through resignation—are secure, and these alone, therefore, will be valued by the wise man. Diogenes personally was a man full of vigour, but his doctrine, like all those of the Hellenistic age, was one to appeal to weary men, in whom disappointment had destroyed natural zest. And it was certainly not a doctrine calculated to promote art or science or statesmanship, or any useful activity except one of protest against powerful evil. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
608:But this discourse, expressed in our paternal language, keeps clear the meaning of its words. The very quality of speech and of the Egyptian words have in themselves the energy of the object they speak of.
Therefore, my king, in so far as you have the power (who are all powerful), keep the discourse uninterpreted, lest mysteries of such greatness come to the Greeks, lest the extravagant, flaccid and (as it were) dandified Greek idiom extinguish something stately and concise, the energetic idiom of usage. For the Greeks have empty speeches, O king, that are energetic only in what they demonstrate, and this is the philosophy of the Greeks, an inane foolosophy of speeches. We, by contrast, use not speeches but sounds that are full of action. (Chapter XVI) ~ Hermes Trismegistus,#NFDB
609:God is an organized, material being, filled with the form of energy known as intelligence. "The glory of God is intelligence." All other forces of nature may be converted into intelligence; and from intelligence all other forces may be obtained; God is the center of these forces, and their directing power. Because of this centralization, nature is orderly. Natural laws are not, as supposed by some philosophers, accidental relations of phenomena, observed and recorded by man. The force of intelligence controls all phenomena; there is mind behind the operations of nature. God, himself a part of nature, is not the creator of nature, but the organizer and director of it. What a beautifully reasonable climax that is to the wonderful philosophy of Joseph the Prophet! The ~ John A Widtsoe, #NFDB
610:[...] It is. Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, "those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym." And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it's fairly technical. And so it's really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't.
[the atlantic, Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete? - interview, apr 23 2012] ~ Lawrence M Krauss,#NFDB
611:We are in the habit of visualizing .. the history of science as a steady, cumulative process,.. where each epoch adds some new item of knowledge to the legacy of the past, making the temple of science grow brick by brick to ever greater height.. In fact, .. the philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de-sac, regressions, periods of blindness and amnesia. The great discoveries .. were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after quite different hares. At other times, the process of discovery consisted merely in the cleaning away of the rubbish that blocked the path, or in the rearranging of existing items of knowledge in a different pattern.. Europe knew less geometry in the fifteenth century than in Archimedes' time. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
612:If, by way of contrast, you went to a twentieth-century analytic philosopher and asked the same question, he probably would have responded not by answering the question you asked but by analyzing the question itself: "The answer to your question depends on what you mean by 'a good life,' which in turn depends on what you mean by 'good' and 'a life.'" He might then walk you through all the things you could conceivably mean in asking how to live a good life and explain why each of these meanings is logically muddled. His conclusion: It makes no sense to ask how to live a good life. When this philosopher had finished speaking, you might be impressed with his flair for philosophical analysis, but you might also conclude, with good reason, that he himself lacked a coherent philosophy of life. ~ William B Irvine, #NFDB
613:IN 1908, A Harvard philosopher named Josiah Royce wrote a book with the title The Philosophy of Loyalty. Royce was not concerned with the trials of aging. But he was concerned with a puzzle that is fundamental to anyone contemplating his or her mortality. Royce wanted to understand why simply existing—why being merely housed and fed and safe and alive—seems empty and meaningless to us. What more is it that we need in order to feel that life is worthwhile? The answer, he believed, is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves. This was, to him, an intrinsic human need. The cause could be large (family, country, principle) or small (a building project, the care of a pet). The important thing was that, in ascribing value to the cause and seeing it as worth making sacrifices for, we give our lives meaning. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
614:Thought and cognition are not the same. Thought, the source of art works, is manifest without transformation or transfiguration in all great philosophy, whereas the chief manifestation of the cognitive processes, by which we acquire and store up knowledge, is the sciences. Cognition always pursues a definite aim, which can be set by practical considerations as well as by “idle curiosity”; but once this aim is reached, the cognitive process has come to an end. Thought, on the contrary, has neither an end nor an aim outside itself, and it does not even produce results; not only the utilitarian philosophy of homo faber but also the men of action and the lovers of results in the sciences have never tired of pointing out how entirely “useless” thought is—as useless, indeed, as the works of art it inspires. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
615:The marketing techniques were getting refined. There had been a trend away from conventional political consultants and the traditional campaign philosophy of “getting our message out to the people.” Surveys showed the people were allergic to messages and refused to listen, even if the president was on TV saying the water supply was radioactive and giant spiders were running the government. The strategy shifted from “the message” to brand recognition after it was learned that most campaigns were decided during the selection of color scheme, typeface and logo. Campaigns began aggressively headhunting at Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. They spent heavily on focus groups and test markets. Conference rooms full of average citizens ate potato chips and pickle spears while campaign workers auditioned fonts and swatches. ~ Tim Dorsey, #NFDB
616:ATTITUDE DRIVES ACTIONS. ACTIONS DRIVE RESULTS. RESULTS DRIVE LIFESTYLES. IF YOU DON'T LIKE YOUR LIFESTYLE, LOOK AT YOUR RESULTS. IF YOU DON'T LIKE YOUR RESULTS, LOOK AT YOUR ACTIONS. IF YOU DON'T LIKE YOUR ACTIONS, LOOK AT YOUR ATTITUDE. IF YOU DON'T LIKE YOUR ATTITUDE, LOOK AT YOUR PHILOSOPHY. "If you have a philosophy of service to others, and if you have a positive attitude, then you can BEGIN to become successful and can BEGIN to take success actions." "Successful people do what unsuccessful people don't (won't) do. Successful people live outside their comfort zone. Successful people hang around money or things that make money. Successful people are consistent (will be here next year). Successful people stay in the fire. Successful people know how to access information. Successful people are always learning. ~ Jeffrey Gitomer, #NFDB
617:Antinomy, that is, the existence of two laws or tendencies which are opposed to each other, is possible, not only with two different things, but with one and the same thing. Considered in their thesis, that is, in the law or tendency which created them, all the economical categories are rational, — competition, monopoly, the balance of trade, and property, as well as the division of labor, machinery, taxation, and credit. But, like communism and population, all these categories are antinomical; all are opposed, not only to each other, but to themselves. All is opposition, and disorder is born of this system of opposition. Hence, the sub-title of the work, — “Philosophy of Misery.” No category can be suppressed; the opposition, antinomy, or contre-tendance, which exists in each of them, cannot be suppressed. ~ Pierre Joseph Proudhon, #NFDB
618:It is best to simplify life. I have seen saints in India who eat hardly anything and live under the most rigorous conditions; yet they have wonderfully strong bodies, far better than those of the average well-fed, well-cared-for American. They have trained their minds not to be dependent on externals for health and contentment.
...Make your life more simple...Self-Realization [Yogoda Satsanga] is a philosophy of living: right meditation, right thinking, and right living. Bring up your children in this philosophy. Don't pamper them, or teach them by wrong example to cater to their bodies and harmful desires...Give them true freedom by keeping their lives simple and cultivating in them inner peace and happiness. Do the same with your own life. Don't be bound by anything. That philosophy will save you. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda,#NFDB
619:In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
620:by allies, meant no good to its neighbor. Between them, Pakistan, China, and the United States, each for its own reasons, wanted to contain India, the new, independent, and rising power. This was the dominant Indian strategic outlook in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, up to the end of the cold war. India was able to pursue a policy of inaction for several reasons.15 First, it was the preferred policy most of the time—the default policy, and the guiding philosophy of one of India's least-heralded prime ministers, P. V. Narasimha Rao. He used to tell associates that in time most problems would take care of themselves. Rao demonstrated this by forwarding no significant initiatives toward Islamabad during his tenures as foreign minister and prime minister. At the same time, India has often been unable to act because ~ Stephen Philip Cohen, #NFDB
621:Henry Ford is best known for his sweeping adoption of the assembly line. It’s less well known that his philosophy of recognizing and rewarding work was remarkably progressive for the time: The kind of workman who gives the business the best that is in him is the best kind of workman a business can have. And he cannot be expected to do this indefinitely without proper recognition. … [I]f a man feels that his day’s work is not only supplying his basic need, but is also giving him a margin of comfort, and enabling him to give his boys and girls their opportunity and his wife some pleasure in life, then his job looks good to him and he is free to give it of his best. This is a good thing for him and a good thing for the business. The man who does not get a certain satisfaction out of his day’s work is losing the best part of his pay. ~ Laszlo Bock, #NFDB
622:The very first thing I remember in my early childhood is a flame, a blue flame jumping off a gas stove somebody lit... I remember being shocked by the whoosh of the blue flame jumping off the burner, the suddenness of it... I saw that flame and felt that hotness of it close to my face. I felt fear, real fear, for the first time in my life. But I remember it also like some kind of adventure, some kind of weird joy, too. I guess that experience took me someplace in my head I hadn't been before... The fear I had was almost like an invitation, a challenge to go forward into something I knew nothing about. That's where I think my personal philosophy of life and my commitment to everything I believe in started... In my mind I have always believed and thought since then that my motion had to be forward, away from the heat of that flame. ~ Miles Davis, #NFDB
623:was Yeshayahu Leibowitz—whom Danny adored. Leibowitz had come to Palestine from Germany via Switzerland in the 1930s, with advanced degrees in medicine, chemistry, the philosophy of science and—it was rumored—a few other fields as well. Yet he’d tried and failed to get his driver’s license seven times. “You’d see him walking the streets,” recalled one former Leibowitz student, Maya Bar-Hillel. “His pants pulled up to his neck, he had these hunched shoulders and a Jay Leno chin. He’d be talking to himself and making these rhetorical gestures. But his mind attracted youth from all over the country.” Whatever Leibowitz happened to be teaching—and there seemed no subject he could not teach—he never failed to put on a show. “The course I took from him was called biochemistry, but it was basically about life,” recalled another student. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
624:Now I realize, of course, that not everyone accepts the Thomistic (or any other traditional) ontology, and that moreover a reductio to quantity constitutes in fact the definitive tendency of the modern age. One fact, however, is incontrovertible: as I have shown in The Quantum Enigma, it is possible to interpret all of physics—by virtue of its definitive modus operandi—in traditional (and thus non-Cartesian) terms, based precisely on a categorical distinction between the 'corporeal' (i.e., perceptible) and the 'physical' universe: the universe, namely, as conceived by the physicist. Everyone, of course, is free to disagree with the non-Cartesian interpretation of physics: what is NOT possible (by virtue of the above-said finding) is to do so on SCIENTIFIC ground.
("Taking Stock of a New Philosophy of Physics: The KKE Theory") ~ Wolfgang Smith,#NFDB
625:In the philosophy of mind - as, indeed, in more important matters - [the twentieth century] has been a less than fully satisfactory century. We pretty much wasted the first half, so it seems to me, in a neurotic and obsessive preoccupation with refuting Cartesian skepticism about other minds. In the event, it didn't matter that the skeptics weren't refuted since there turned out not to be any. The only philosophers who really were doubtful about the existence of other minds were relentless anti-Cartesians like Wittgenstein, Dewey, Ryle, Quine and Rorty, and they were equally doubtful about the existence of their own. What we got for our efforts was mostly decades of behaviorism and the persistent bad habit of trying to run epistemological or semantic arguments for metaphysical conclusions. The end of this, I fear, is still not with us. ~ Jerry A Fodor, #NFDB
626:Competition considered as the main thing in life is too grim, too tenacious, too much a matter of taut muscles and intent will, to make a possible basis of life for more than one or two generations at most. After that length of time it must produce nervous fatigue, various phenomena of escape, a pursuit of pleasures as tense and as difficult as work (since relaxing has become impossible), and in the end a disappearance of the stock through sterility. It is not only work that is poisoned by the philosophy of competition; leisure is poisoned just as much. The kind of leisure which is quiet and restoring to the nerves comes to be felt boring. There is bound to be a continual acceleration of which the natural termination would be drugs and collapse. The cure for this lies in admitting the part of sane and quiet enjoyment in a balanced ideal of life. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
627:let's say you and a small child go to a magic show, where things are made to float in the air. Which of you would have the most fun?"
"I probably would."
"And why would that be?"
"Because I would know how impossible it all is."
"So... for the child it's no fun to see the laws of nature being defied before it has learned what they are."
"I guess that's right."
"And we are still at the crux of Hume's philosophy of experience. He would have added that the child has not yet become a slave of the expectations of habit; he is thus the more open-minded of you two. I wonder if the child is not also the greater philosopher? He comes utterly without preconceived opinions. And that, my dear Sophie, is the philosopher's most distinguishing virtue. The child perceives the world as it is, without putting more into things than he experiences ~ Jostein Gaarder,#NFDB
628:In the word vast, the vowel a retains all the virtues of an enlarging vocal agent. Considered vocally, therefore, this word is no longer merely dimensional. Like some soft substance, it receives the balsamic powers of infinite calm. With it, we take infinity into our lungs, and through it, we breathe, cosmically, far from human anguish. Some may find these minor considerations. But no factor, however slight, should be neglected in the estimation of poetic values. And indeed, everything that contributes to giving poetry its decisive psychic action should be included in a philosophy of the dynamic imagination. Sometimes, the most varied, most delicate perceptive values relay one another, in order to dynamize and expand a poem. Long research devoted to Baudelaire's correspondences should elucidate the correspondence of each sense with the spoken word. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
629:It was strange to listen to slick young Nazis along Fifth Avenue haranguing small gatherings from little mahogany pulpits. One spiel went as follows: "The philosophy of Hitler is a profound and thoughtful study of this industrial age, in which there is little room for the middleman or Jew."
A woman interrupted. "What kind of talk is that!" she exclaimed. "This is America. Where do you think you are?"
The young man, an obsequious, good-looking type, smiled blandly. "I'm in the United States and I happen to be an American citizen," he said smoothly.
"Well," she said, "I'm an American citizen, and a Jew, and if I were a man I'd knock your block off!"
One or two endorsed the lady's threat, but most of them stood apathetically silent. A policeman standing by quieted the woman. I came away astonished, hardly believing my ears. ~ Charlie Chaplin,#NFDB
630:It is significant that modern believers in power are in complete accord with the philosophy of the only great thinker who ever attempted to derive public good from private interest and who, for the sake of private good, conceived and outlined a Commonwealth whose basis and ultimate end is the accumulation of power. Hobbes, indeed, is the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim....
.... The consistency of this conclusion is in no way altered by the remarkable fact that for some three hundred years there was neither a sovereign who would "convert this Truth of Speculation into the Utility of Practice," nor a bourgeoisie politically conscious and economically mature enough openly to adopt Hobbes's philosophy of power. ~ Hannah Arendt,#NFDB
631:OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
632:May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense - three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies - continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus. - May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour." - For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
633:You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described. You must forgive me my ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s and ‘he’s and ‘she’s, my lack of modern words and modern objectivity. It will be hard at first, but whether you are my contemporary still awed by the new order, or an historian gazing back at my Twenty-Fifth Century as remotely as I gaze back on the Eighteenth, you will find yourself more fluent in the language of the past than you imagined; we all are. ~ Ada Palmer, #NFDB
634:Christian Hedonism is a philosophy of life built on the following five convictions: The longing to be happy is a universal human experience, and it is good, not sinful. We should never try to deny or resist our longing to be happy, as though it were a bad impulse. Instead, we should seek to intensify this longing and nourish it with whatever will provide the deepest and most enduring satisfaction. The deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in God. Not from God, but in God. The happiness we find in God reaches its consummation when it is shared with others in the manifold ways of love. To the extent that we try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure, we fail to honor God and love people. Or, to put it positively: The pursuit of pleasure is a necessary part of all worship and virtue. That is: The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
635:In our current culture, we place a lot of emphasis on job description. Our obsession with the advice to “follow your passion” (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by the (flawed) idea that what matters most for your career satisfaction is the specifics of the job you choose. In this way of thinking, there are some rarified jobs that can be a source of satisfaction—perhaps working in a nonprofit or starting a software company—while all others are soulless and bland. The philosophy of Dreyfus and Kelly frees us from such traps. The craftsmen they cite don’t have rarified jobs. Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn’t glamorous. But this doesn’t matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
636:Fundamentalism is the philosophy of the powerless, the conquered, the displaced and the dispossessed. Its spawning ground is the wreckage of political and military defeat, as Hebrew fundamentalism arose during the Babylonian captivity, as white Christian fundamentalism appeared in the American South during Reconstruction, as the notion of the Master Race evolved in Germany following World War I. In such desperate times, the vanquished race would perish without a doctrine that restored hope and pride. Islamic fundamentalism ascends from the same landscape of despair and possesses the same tremendous and potent appeal. What exactly is this despair? It is the despair of freedom. The dislocation and emasculation experienced by the individual cut free from the familiar and comforting structures of the tribe and the clan, the village and the family. It is the state of modern life. The ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
637:Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has probably been more widely read—and more widely misinterpreted—than any other book in the recent philosophy of science. The broad circulation of his views has generated a popular caricature of Kuhn’s position. According to this popular caricature, scientists working in a field belong to a club. All club members are required to agree on main points of doctrine. Indeed, the price of admission is several years of graduate education, during which the chief dogmas are inculcated. The views of outsiders are ignored. Now I want to emphasize that this is a hopeless caricature, both of the practice of scientists and of Kuhn’s analysis of the practice. Nevertheless, the caricature has become commonly accepted as a faithful representation, thereby lending support to the Creationists’ claims that their views are arrogantly disregarded. ~ Philip Kitcher, #NFDB
638:In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed creativity; and [[God] is its primordial, non-temporal accident. In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed The Absolute. In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, eminent reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), #NFDB
639:After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
640:To illustrate: A man with 314 employees joined one of these courses. For years, he had driven and criticized and condemned his employees without stint or discretion. Kindness, words of appreciation and encouragement were alien to his lips. After studying the principles discussed in this book, this employer sharply altered his philosophy of life. His organization is now inspired with a new loyalty, a new enthusiasm, a new spirit of teamwork. Three hundred and fourteen enemies have been turned into 314 friends. As he proudly said in a speech before the class: “When I used to walk through my establishment, no one greeted me. My employees actually looked the other way when they saw me approaching. But now they are all my friends and even the janitor calls me by my first name.” This employer gained more profit; more leisure and—what is infinitely more important—he found far more happiness in his business and in ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
641:It has been known, for forty years now, that the difference between a noble, upright man and a maniacal degenerate can be pinpointed at the sight of a few clumps of white matter in the brain, and that the movement of the lancet in the supraorbital area of the brain, if it damages those clumps , can transform a splendid soul into a loathsome creature. Yet what and enormous portion of anthropology - not to mention the philosophy of man - refuses to take cognizance of this circumstance! But I am no exception here; whether scientist or laymen, we agree finally that our bodies detoriate with age - but the mind?! We would like to see it different from any earthly mechanism subject to defect. We crave an ideal - even one carrying a minus sign, even one shameful, sinful, so as it delivers us from an explanation worse than the Satanic: that what is taking place is a certain play of forces perfectly indifferent to man. ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
642:The artist and the fundamentalist arise from societies at differing stages of development. The artist is the advanced model. His culture possesses affluence, stability, enough excess of resource to permit the luxury of self-examination. The artist is grounded in freedom. He is not afraid of it. He is lucky. He was born in the right place. He has a core of self-confidence, of hope for the future. He believes in progress and evolution. His faith is that humankind is advancing, however haltingly and imperfectly, toward a better world. The fundamentalist entertains no such notion. In his view, humanity has fallen from a higher state. The truth is not out there awaiting revelation; it has already been revealed. The word of God has been spoken and recorded by His prophet, be he Jesus, Muhammad, or Karl Marx. Fundamentalism is the philosophy of the powerless, the conquered, the displaced and the dispossessed. ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
643:Thinks about the three-mild, slow, and wild-as if the realm of chance were a world in its own right, with its own peculiar laws of physics. Mild randomness, then, is like the solid phase of matter: low energies, stable structures, well-defined volume. It stays where you put it. Wild randomness is like the gaseous phase of matter: high energies, no structure, no volume. No telling what it can do, where it will go. Slow randomness is intermediate between the others, the liquid state. I first proposed some of my views of chance in 1964 in Jerusalem, at an International Congress of Logic and Philosophy of Science. Since then, I have much expanded the theory and shown it to be critical to understanding financial markets in their proper light. As will be seen, the standard theories of finance assume the easier, mild form of randomness. Overwhelming evidence shows markets are far wilder, and scarier, than that. ~ Beno t B Mandelbrot, #NFDB
644:Dialectics is the philosophy of opposites.”
I thought about this. “How do you make a philosophy out of opposites?”
“Well, you know how people are. They like to see things in black and white? Up or down, male or female?”
She had my attention now. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, dialectics says that’s all bullshit. That life is not about opposites, but about finding the balance between all these extremes.”
I tried to sound less interested than I actually was. “How do you do that?” I said. “Find balance, I mean?”
“By paying attention,” she said. “By trying to see how everything also contains its opposite.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “Because if you live your life at the extremes, you go nuts. If you want to make any sense out of the world, you have to live in the gray.”
“That sounds hard,” I said.
“The hell yes it’s hard,” she said. “People don’t like gray. It makes people uncomfortable. ~ Jennifer Finney Boylan,#NFDB
645:Just as Nietzsche appealed to the Nazis as a way to formulate a right-wing anti-moralism, it is precisely the transgressive sensibility that is used to excuse and rationalize the utter dehumanization of women and ethnic minorities in the alt-right online sphere now. The culture of transgression they have produced liberates their conscience from having to take seriously the potential human cost of breaking the taboo against racial politics that has held since WWII. The Sadean transgressive element of the 60s, condemned by conservatives for decades as the very heart of the destruction of civilization, the degenerate and the nihilistic, is not being challenged by the emergence of this new online right. Instead, the emergence of this new online right is the full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right. ~ Angela Nagle, #NFDB
646:However, one intriguing shift that suggests there are limits to automation was the recent decision by Toyota to systematically put working humans back into the manufacturing process. In quality and manufacturing on a mass scale, Toyota has been a global leader in automation technologies based on the corporate philosophy of kaizen (Japanese for “good change”) or continuous improvement. After pushing its automation processes toward lights-out manufacturing, the company realized that automated factories do not improve themselves. Once Toyota had extraordinary craftsmen that were known as Kami-sama, or “gods” who had the ability to make anything, according to Toyota president Akio Toyoda.49 The craftsmen also had the human ability to act creatively and thus improve the manufacturing process. Now, to add flexibility and creativity back into their factories, Toyota chose to restore a hundred “manual-intensive” workspaces. ~ John Markoff, #NFDB
647:To illustrate: A man with 314 employees joined one of these courses. For years, he had driven and criticised and condemned his employees without stint or discretion. Kindness, words of appreciation and encouragement were alien to his lips. After studying the principles discussed in this book, this employer sharply altered his philosophy of life. His organisation is now inspired with a new loyalty, a new enthusiasm, a new spirit of teamwork. Three hundred and fourteen enemies have been turned into 314 friends. As he proudly said in a speech before the class: ‘When I used to walk through my establishment, no one greeted me. My employees actually looked the other way when they saw me approaching. But now they are all my friends and even the janitor calls me by my first name.’ This employer gained more profit, more leisure and – what is infinitely more important – he found far more happiness in his business and in his home. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
648:I have a problem,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, getting to his feet. ‘I have a problem, that I wish to share with this, our science fiction writers’ collective. We are to concoct a race of aliens against which humanity can unite. Spacefaring aliens, no?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ ‘Then this is my problem. We know the party line. The philosophy of the party has always been that capitalistic Western fantasies of launching rockets to other planets will always be doomed by the internal contradictions of the competitive inefficiency of capitalism itself. Only the combined and unified effort of a whole people would be able to achieve so monumental an achievement as interstellar flight. No capitalist race could ever achieve something as sophisticated as interstellar flight; only communists could do this. Now, how can it be that these evil aliens are able to build spaceships and fly across the void? Surely they are not communists? ~ Adam Roberts, #NFDB
649:there are three stages through which preaching has repeatedly passed with the same results. The first is that in which scriptural truth is faithfully presented in scriptural garb – that is to say, not only are all the doctrines asserted which truly belong to the revealed system of redemption, but they are presented in that dress and connection in which the Holy Spirit has presented them without seeking any other from human science. This state of the pulpit marks the golden age of the Church. The second is the transition stage. In this, the doctrines taught are still those of the Scriptures, but their relations are moulded into conformity with the prevalent human dialectics. God’s truth is now shorn of a part of its power over the soul. The third stage is then near, in which not only are the methods and explanations conformed to the philosophy of the day, but the doctrines themselves contradict the truth of the Word. ~ Robert Lewis Dabney, #NFDB
650: The purpose of creation, is lila. The concept of lila escapes all the traditional difficulties in assigning purpose to the creator. Lila is a purpose-less purpose, a natural outflow, a spontaneous self-manifestation of the Divine. The concept of lila, again, emphasizes the role of delight in creation. The concept of Prakriti and Maya fail to explain the bliss aspect of Divine. If the world is manifestation of the Force of Satcitananda, the deployment of its existence and consciousness, its purpose can be nothing but delight. This is the meaning of delight. Lila, the play, the child’s joy, the poet’s joy, the actor’s joy, the mechanician’s joy of the soul of things eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and recreating Himself in Himself for the sheer bliss of that self-creation, of that self-representation, Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground ~ Sri Aurobindo, Philosophy of Social Development, pp-39-40, #NFDB
651:It is not beside the point to note that, in the thought which will inspire our
revolutions, the supreme good does not, in reality, coincide with existence, but with an arbitrary facsimile.
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest
of universal prestige and absolute power. It is, in its essence, imperialist. We are far from the gentle
savage of the eighteenth century and from the Social Contract. In the sound and fury of the passing
centuries, each separate consciousness, to ensure its own existence, must henceforth desire the death of
others. Moreover, this relentless tragedy is absurd, since, in the event of one consciousness being
destroyed, the victorious consciousness is not recognized as such, in that it cannot be victorious in the
eyes of something that no longer exists. In fact, it is here the philosophy of appearances reaches its limits. ~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
652:To the horror of those who can genuinely claim to have suffered from its effects, alienation has proved a highly profitable commodity in the cultural marketplace. Modernist art with its dissonances and torments, to take one example, has become the staple diet of an increasingly voracious army of culture consumers who know good investments when they see them. The avant-garde, if indeed the term can still be used, has become an honored ornament of our cultural life, less to be feared than feted. The philosophy of existentialism, to cite another case, which scarcely a generation ago seemed like a breath of fresh air, has now degenerated into a set of easily manipulated clichés and sadly hollow gestures. This decline occurred, it should be noted, not because analytic philosophers exposed the meaninglessness of its categories, but rather as a result of our culture’s uncanny ability to absorb and defuse even its most uncompromising opponents. ~ Martin Jay, #NFDB
653:The religion of this 'I', the poetry of this 'I', and the philosophy of the same 'I' that from Poggio and Felelfo to Byron and Goethe produced a number of works astonishing for their profundity and brilliance have finally exhausted its content; and in the poetry of Decadence we see the rapid falling away of the empty shell of this 'I'. We remarked previously about the exaggeration without the exaggerated object, and about the precious style without the subject of this preciosity, which characterize this poetry — this is so in regard to its form; in regard to its content Decadence is above all hopeless egoism. The world, as an object of love, of interest, even as the object of indignation or contempt, has disappeared from this "poetry”; the world has disappeared, not only as an object exciting some reaction in this vapid 'I', but also as a spectator and possible judge of this 'I'; it is not even present.
("On Symbolists And Decadence") ~ Vasily Rozanov,#NFDB
654:One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythical covers. He had tried to use, as a "generator of ideas" — for we were running out of them — those works of fantastic literature, that popular genre (especially in the States), called, by a persistent misconception, "science fiction." He had not read such books before; he was annoyed — indignant, even — expecting variety, finding monotony. "They have everything except fantasy," he said. Indeed, a mistake. The authors of these pseudo-scientific fairy tales supply the public with what it wants: truisms, clichés, stereotypes, all sufficiently costumed and made "wonderful" so that the reader may sink into a safe state of surprise and at the same time not be jostled out of his philosophy of life. If there is progress in a culture, the progress is above all conceptual, but literature, the science-fiction variety in particular, has nothing to do with that. ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
655:I love the story about the old farmer, ragged and barefooted, who sat on the steps of his tumbledown shack, chewing on a stem of grass. A passerby stopped and asked if he might have a drink of water. Wishing to be sociable, the stranger engaged the farmer in some conversation. “How is your cotton crop this year?” “Ain’t got none,” replied the farmer. “Didn’t you plant any cotton?” asked the passerby. “Nope,” said the farmer, “’fraid of boll weevils.” “Well,” asked the newcomer, “how’s your corn doing?” “Didn’t plant none,” replied the farmer, “’fraid there wasn’t going to be enough rain.” “Well,” asked the inquisitive stranger, “what did you plant?” “Nothing,” said the farmer, “I just played it safe.” A lot of well-intentioned people live by the philosophy of this farmer, and never risk upsetting the apple cart. They would prefer to “play it safe.” These people will never know the thrill of victory, because to win a victory one must risk a failure. C. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
656:The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness. Christianity and Judaism present marriage not as a union inspired and governed by subjective enthusiasm but rather, and more modestly, as a mechanism by which individuals can assume an adult position in society and thence, with the help of a close friend, undertake to nurture and educate the next generation under divine guidance. These limited expectations tend to forestall the suspicion, so familiar to secular partners, that there might have been more intense, angelic or less fraught alternatives available elsewhere. Within the religious ideal, friction, disputes and boredom are signs not of error, but of life proceeding according to plan. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
657:Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal. Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diablism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity--that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
658:Let us now turn for a moment to the word karman which has been cited above. The meanings of the verbal root kar, present also in the Latin creare and the Greek κραίνω [kraino], are to make, do, and effect. And significantly, just as the Latin facere is originally sacra facere, literally “make sacred,” and as the Greek πoιέω = ἱερoπoιέω [poieo = hieropoieo], so karman is originally and very often not merely “work” or “making,” but synonymous with yajna, “sacrifice” and also with vrata, “sacred operation,” “obedience,” “sphere of activity,” “function,” and especially as in the Bhagavad Gita, with dharma, “justice” or “natural law.” In other words, the idea is deeply rooted in our humanity that there is no real distinction of work from holy works, and no necessary opposition of profane to sacred activities. And it is precisely this idea that finds such vivid expression in the well-known Indian philosophy of action, the “Way of Works” (karmamarga) of the Bhagavad Gita. ~ Ananda K Coomaraswamy, #NFDB
659:The rhetoric of ‘law and order’ was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern States to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely ‘rewarding lawbreakers.’
For more than a decade – from the mid 1950s until the late 1960s – conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime. ~ Michelle Alexander,#NFDB
660:This shift in culture has changed us. In the first place, it has made us a bit more materialistic. College students now say they put more value on money and career success. Every year, researchers from UCLA survey a nationwide sample of college freshmen to gauge their values and what they want out of life. In 1966, 80 percent of freshmen said that they were strongly motivated to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. Today, less than half of them say that. In 1966, 42 percent said that becoming rich was an important life goal. By 1990, 74 percent agreed with that statement. Financial security, once seen as a middling value, is now tied as students’ top goal. In 1966, in other words, students felt it was important to at least present themselves as philosophical and meaning-driven people. By 1990, they no longer felt the need to present themselves that way. They felt it perfectly acceptable to say they were primarily interested in money.20 We live in a more individualistic society. If ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
661:In the third century, and in the centuries after the barbarian invasion, western civilization came near to total destruction. It was fortunate that, while theology was almost the sole surviving mental activity, the system that was accepted was not purely superstitious, but preserved, though sometimes deeply buried, doctrines which embodied much of the work of Greek intellect and much of the moral devotion that is common to the Stoics and the Neoplatonists. This made possible the rise of the scholastic philosophy, and later, with the Renaissance, the stimulus derived from the renewed study of Plato, and thence of the other ancients. On the other hand, the philosophy of Plotinus has the defect of encouraging men to look within rather than to look without: when we look within we see nous, which is divine, while when we look without we see the imperfections of the sensible world. This kind of subjectivity was a gradual growth; it is to be found in the doctrines of Protagoras, Socrates, and Plato, as well as ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
662:Instead, the battle is joined at the level of pure abstraction. The issue, the newest Right tells us, is freedom itself, not the doings of the subprime lenders or the ways the bond-rating agencies were compromised over the course of the last decade. Details like that may have crashed the economy, but to the renascent Right they are almost completely irrelevant. What matters is a given politician’s disposition toward free markets and, by extension, toward the common people of the land, whose faithful vicar the market is. Now, there is nothing really novel about the idea that free markets are the very essence of freedom. What is new is the glorification of this idea at the precise moment when free-market theory has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud. The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero. ~ Thomas Frank, #NFDB
663:The percentage of leading scientists who profess not to believe in a personal God tells us little unless we also know on what they base their profession. How much do they know about metaphysics, Christian theology, and intellectual history in relationship to their particular areas of scientific expertise? The intellectual relationship between religion and science is a two-way street. Just as one ought not to place much stock in geological views of a religious believer who has never studied geology, so one ought not to give much credence to the religious views of a scientist who has never studied intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, and theology. The highly specialized character of contemporary academic life makes it perfectly possible to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics, for example, while knowing nothing about the theology of creation, metaphysical univocity, and why they matter for questions pertaining to the reality of God and the character of God's relationship to the natural world. ~ Brad S Gregory, #NFDB
664:The modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration; and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody else, Moslem or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and enforcing them; such as reverence or the error of the Atheist heresy. And then he wound up by taking all this lop-sided illogical deadlock, of the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it the liberality of his own mind. Medieval men thought that if a social system was founded on a certain idea it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really think the same thing, as is clear when communists attack their ideas of property. Only they do not think it so clearly, because they have not really thought out their idea of property. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
665:I maintain that in every special natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with as mathematics; for... science proper, especially of nature, requires a pure portion, lying at the foundation of the empirical, and based upon à priori knowledge of natural things. ...the conception should be constructed. But the cognition of the reason through construction of conceptions is mathematical. A pure philosophy of nature in general, namely, one that only investigates what constitutes a nature in general, may thus be possible without mathematics; but a pure doctrine of nature respecting determinate natural things (corporeal doctrine and mental doctrine), is only possible by means of mathematics; and as in every natural doctrine only so much science proper is to be met with therein as there is cognition à priori, a doctrine of nature can only contain so much science proper as there is in it of applied mathematics. ~ Immanuel Kant, Preface, The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) Tr. Ernest Belfort Bax (1883)., #NFDB
666:The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's "knowing" by his "being", instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his "knowing". ~ Friedrich Engels, #NFDB
667:By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited his condition then better than the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain bounds. The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of the beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world, under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead His dark children home,—this became his comforting dream. ~ W E B Du Bois, #NFDB
668:Tyson emails back: “I’m going to tell you the same thing that I told Henry Louis Gates” (Gates had asked Tyson to appear on his show Finding Your Roots): My philosophy of root-finding may be unorthodox. I just don’t care. And that’s not a passive, but active absence of caring. In the tree of life, any two people in the world share a common ancestor—depending only on how far back you look. So the line we draw to establish family and heritage is entirely arbitrary. When I wonder what I am capable of achieving, I don’t look to family lineage, I look to all human beings. That’s the genetic relationship that matters to me. The genius of Isaac Newton, the courage of Gandhi and MLK, the bravery of Joan of Arc, the athletic feats of Michael Jordan, the oratorical skills of Sir Winston Churchill, the compassion of Mother Teresa. I look to the entire human race for inspiration for what I can be—because I am human. Couldn’t care less if I were a descendant of kings or paupers, saints or sinners, the valorous or cowardly. My life is what I make of it. ~ A J Jacobs, #NFDB
669:Nineteenth-century inventors of the steam engine used a physical theory which today is considered as scientifically false . In fact most of the inventors up to very recent times have been, for the most part, ignorant of the science of their day and have applied theories that have proved to be false. Moreover, even today a physical or chemical theory can change while its application continues untouched. The success of applied science, therefore, is no reason for accepting the infallibility of the scientific theories involved. There should be an intelligent and conscious criticism of science and its implications, both for those involved in the sciences, and most of all for those who are the recipients of the popularized versions of scientific theories. The philosophy of science has in certain cases tried to point to the lack of logical consistency in some scientific definitions and methods. But having surrendered itself to the fruits of the experimental and analytical methods, it cannot itself be an independent judge of modern science. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
670:Previously, the most popular philosophy of science was probably Karl Popper’s falsificationism—this is the old philosophy that the Bayesian revolution is currently dethroning. Karl Popper’s idea that theories can be definitely falsified, but never definitely confirmed, is yet another special case of the Bayesian rules; if P(X|A) ≈ 1—if the theory makes a definite prediction—then observing ¬X very strongly falsifies A. On the other hand, if P(X|A) ≈ 1, and we observe X, this doesn’t definitely confirm the theory; there might be some other condition B such that P(X|B) ≈ 1, in which case observing X doesn’t favor A over B. For observing X to definitely confirm A, we would have to know, not that P(X|A) ≈ 1, but that P(X|¬A) ≈ 0, which is something that we can’t know because we can’t range over all possible alternative explanations. For example, when Einstein’s theory of General Relativity toppled Newton’s incredibly well-confirmed theory of gravity, it turned out that all of Newton’s predictions were just a special case of Einstein’s predictions. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB
671:Geist is Hegel’s counterpart to what figures in Aristotle as the kind of soul that is characteristic of rational animals. It is human beings whom Aristotle defines as rational animals; that corresponds to Hegel’s implicit identification of the philosophy of Geist with the philosophy of the human. On this account, then, Geist is the formally distinctive way of being a living being that characterizes human beings: in Aristotelian terms, the form of a living human being qua living human being.
Kinds of soul in Aristotle’s account are not kinds of substance. Souls are not material substances; the only relevant material substances are living beings. And one would miss the point of Aristotle’s conception of the form of a living being qua living if one conceived souls as immaterial substances. So Geist in particular is not a substance, material or immaterial. The idea of Geist is the idea of a distinctive way of living a life; often it is better to speak of Geistigkeit, as the defining characteristic of that distinctive form of life and thereby of the living beings that live it. ~ John Henry McDowell,#NFDB
672:To The Times. Steeple Aston 19 April 1974 Sir, I hear on my radio Mr Reg Prentice, of the party which I support, saying to a gathering on education the following: ‘The eleven plus must go, so must selection at twelve plus, at sixteen plus, and any other age.’ What can this mean? How are universities to continue? Are we to have engineers without selection of those who understand mathematics, linguists without selection of those who understand grammar? To many teachers such declarations of policy must seem obscure and astonishing, and to imply the adoption of some quite new philosophy of education which has not, so far as I know, been in this context discussed. It is certainly odd that the Labour Party should wish to promote a process of natural unplanned sorting which will favour the children of rich and educated people, leaving other children at a disadvantage. I thought socialism was concerned with the removal of unfair disadvantages. Surely what we need is a careful reconsideration of how to select, not the radical and dangerous abandonment of the principle of selection. Yours faithfully, Iris Murdoch ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
673:The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. We find, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or other. It becomes evident that such violations are not accidental events, they are not results of insufficient knowledge or of inattention which might have been avoided. On the contrary, we see that they are necessary for progress. Indeed, one of the most striking features of recent discussions in the history and philosophy of science is the realization that events and developments, such as the invention of atomism in antiquity, the Copernican Revolution, the rise of modern atomism (kinetic theory; dispersion theory; stereochemistry; quantum theory), the gradual emergence of the wave theory of light, occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound be certain 'obvious' methodological rules, or because they unwittingly broke them. ~ Paul Karl Feyerabend, #NFDB
674:...Linh hồn của độc thần giáo ảnh hưởng mạnh mẽ đến tính cách và văn hóa gốc của Trung Đông và phương Tây: miệt mài đi tìm một sự-thật-duy-nhất, không chấp nhận sự mập mờ, nước đôi vì trên đời chỉ có một Thượng Đế, kinh thánh chỉ có một bản mà tôn giáo của họ giữ là linh thiêng và để sống tốt thì chỉ có một cách là noi theo một hệ thống thực hành đạo đức nhất định [...] Quá trình đi tìm cái sự-thật-duy-nhất ấy khiến khoa học và triết học của họ phát triển rực rỡ, nhưng cũng khiến sự khoan dung với nhau trở thành một điều xa xỉ. Ai cũng tự cho mình và đúng và duy nhất [...] đó là mầm mống của cực đoan".
"...tôi thầm cảm ơn đa thàn giáo đã sinh sôi nảy nở trên đất này, đã trở thành một triết lý sống (philosophy of life) hơn là một tôn giáo, đã thấm vào hệ thống logic tinh thần của xứ sở này từ khi nảy mầm đến khi kết hạt, đã dạy cho con dân phương Đông cả sự tôn kính với thánh thần của mình và cả sự khoan dung với thánh thần của kẻ khác, thậm chí không những khoan dung mà còn rộng cửa chào mời một sự giao thoa giáo lý và đức tin đến mức kết quả của quá trình kết hợp ấy là một hỗn thể không còn phân biệt được biên giới ~ Nguy n Ph ng Mai,#NFDB
675:Here’s why the life of Muhammad [and Jesus] matters: Contrary to what many secularists would have us believe, religions are not entirely determined (or distorted) by the faithful over time. The lives and words of the founders remain central, no matter how long ago they lived. The idea that believers shape religion is derived, instead, from the fashionable 1960s philosophy of deconstructionism, which teaches that written words have no meaning other than that given to them by the reader. Equally important, it follows that if the reader alone finds meaning, there can be no truth (and certainly no religious truth); one person’s meaning is equal to another’s. Ultimately, according to deconstructionism, we all create our own set of “truths,” none better, or worse than any other.
Yet for the religious man or woman on the streets of Chicago, Rome, Jerusalem, Damascus, Calcutta, and Bangkok, the words of Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Krishna, and Buddha mean something far greater than any individual’s rendering of them. And even to the less-than-devout reader, the words of these great religious leaders are clearly not equal in their meaning. ~ Robert Spencer,#NFDB
676:Here’s why the life of Muhammad [and Jesus] matters: Contrary to what many secularists would have us believe, religions are not entirely determined (or distorted) by the faithful over time. The lives and words of the founders remain central, no matter how long ago they lived. The idea that believers shape religion is derived, instead, from the fashionable 1960s philosophy of deconstructionism, which teaches that written words have no meaning other than that given to them by the reader. Equally important, it follows that if the reader alone finds meaning, there can be no truth (and certainly no religious truth); one person’s meaning is equal to another’s. Ultimately, according to deconstructionism, we all create our own set of “truths,” none better, or worse than any other.
Yet for the religious man or woman on the streets of Chicago, Rome, Jerusalem, Damascus, Calcutta, and Bangkok, the words of Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Krishna, and Buddha mean something far greater than any individual’s rendering of them. And even to the less-than-devout reader, the words of these great religious leaders are clearly not equal in their meaning. ~ Robert Spencer,#NFDB
677:Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American generations, took me. Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra - 'Either I can beat him or the police.' I understood it all - the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. This is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket. It was only after you that I understood this love, that I understood the grip of my mother's hand. She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one wold be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of 'race,' imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
678:Why, for example, is it still acceptable to profess the philosophy of a Communist or, if not that, to at least admire the work of Marx? Why is it still acceptable to regard the Marxist doctrine as essentially accurate in its diagnosis of the hypothetical evils of the free-market, democratic West; to still consider that doctrine “progressive,” and fit for the compassionate and proper thinking person? Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union. Sixty million dead in Mao’s China. The horrors of Cambodia’s Killing Fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child’s death in hospital to starvation. No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people, in so many different countries and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically. Is it mere ignorance that allows today’s Marxists to flaunt their continued allegiance – to present it as compassion and care? Or is it instead, envy of the successful, in near-infinite proportions? Or something akin to hatred for mankind itself? How much proof do we need? ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
679:So there are long conversations in cafés about Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus and Raymond Queneau, and all the boys that we were just beginning to get excited about in London when the first French literature filtered across after the Liberation. My God, Leo, there is some very interesting stuff being written in France at present on the philosophical and literary front. I begin to get some glimmering too about ‘existentialism’ the latest philosophy of France – Sartre, out of Husserl, Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Last week I had a very great experience. Jean-Paul Sartre came to Brussels to give a lecture on existentialism, and I met him after the lecture, and on the following day during an interminable café séance. He is small, squints appallingly, is very simple and charming in manner and extremely attractive. What versatility! Philosophy, novels, plays, cinema, journalism! No wonder the stuffy professional philosophers are suspicious. I don’t make much yet of his phenomenology, but his theories on morals, which derive from Kierkegaard, seem to me first rate and just what English philosophy needs to have injected into its veins, to expel the loathsome humours of Ross and Prichard. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
680:That’s what is meant by the tragedy of the commons. A bunch of individuals, acting independently and out of self-interest, may deplete a shared resource even though it hurts everyone in the long run. It applies to corporations that externalize costs such as pollution, but it’s what happens when net users illegally download music and movies, expecting others to pick up the tab. It is in each person’s short-term self-interest to steal the music. Only the sucker pays. But when everyone thinks that way, there’s no one left to pay for the musician, and the music stops altogether. The individualistic act of stealing the music or depleting the resource is a form of compression, robbing from the future to enjoy something in the present at no cost. As long as we live as individuals, the distant future doesn’t really matter so much. The philosophy of the long now would suggest that the only way to see past this immediate, consumer-era self-satisfaction is to look further in the future. Have kids. Once we see that our long-term self-interest is no longer served, we may all, individually, change our behaviors. Even if we are thinking selfishly, prioritizing “me in the long run” isn’t quite so bad as “me right now. ~ Douglas Rushkoff, #NFDB
681:The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confident man, that if we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind...
Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkelian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists, since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God. ~ G K Chesterton,#NFDB
682:Why, for example, is it still acceptable to profess the philosophy of a Communist or, if not that, to at least admire the work of Marx? Why is it still acceptable to regard the Marxist doctrine as essentially accurate in its diagnosis of the hypothetical evils of the free-market, democratic West; to still consider that doctrine “progressive,” and fit for the compassionate and proper thinking person? Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union. Sixty million dead in Mao’s China. The horrors of Cambodia’s Killing Fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child’s death in hospital to starvation. No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people, in so many different countries and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically. Is it mere ignorance that allows today’s Marxists to flaunt their continued allegiance – to present it as compassion and care? Or is it instead, envy of the successful, in near-infinite proportions? Or something akin to hatred for mankind itself? How much proof do we need? ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
683:Looking at the works of art that are considered worthy of preservation in our Museums, and that were once the common objects of the market place, I could not but realise that a society can only be considered truly civilised when it is possible for every man to earn his living by the very work he would rather be doing than anything else in the world, a condition that has only been attained in social orders integrated on the basis of vocation, "svadharma".
At the same time I should like to emphasis that I have never built up a philosophy of my own or wished to establish a new school of thought. Perhaps the greatest thing I have learnt is never to think for myself; I fully agree with Andre Gide that "Toutes choses sont dites deja", and what I have sought is to understand what has been said, while taking no account of the "inferior philosophers". Holding with Heraclitus that the Word is common to all, and that Wisdom is to know the Will whereby all things are steered, I am convinced with Jeremias that the human cultures in all their apparent diversity are but the dialects of one and the same language of the spirit, that there is a "common universe of discourse" transcending the differences of tongues". ~ Ananda K Coomaraswamy,#NFDB
684:In the case of Islam, there are today certainly religious extremists of different kinds, but they do not define the mainstream, or center, of Islam. That center belongs to traditional Islam. And that center is the one against which one should view fanatical religious extremism, on the one side, and the rabid secularist modernism found in most Islamic countries, but especially in such places as Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria, on the other. Traditional Islam is not opposed to what the West wishes to do within its own borders, but to the corrosive influences emanating from modern and postmodern Western culture, now associated so much with what is called globalization, that threaten Islamic values, just as they threaten Christian and Jewish values in the West itself. But the philosophy of defense of traditional Islam has always been to keep within the boundaries of Islamic teachings. Its method of combat has been and remains primarily intellectual and spiritual, and when it has been forced to take recourse to physical action in the form of defense of its home and shelter, its models have been the Amīr ‘Abd al-Qādirs and Imām Shāmils, not the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution or homegrown models of Che Guevara. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
685:This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts—communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently. For our purposes, it provides a specific example of a general approach to integrating depth into your life: the rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar. Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use every day for deep work. In much the same way that maintaining visual indicators of your work progress can reduce the barrier to entry for going deep, eliminating even the simplest scheduling decisions, such as when during the day to do the work, also reduces this barrier. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
686:Turing attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophy of mathematics in Cambridge in 1939 and disagreed strongly with a line of argument that Wittgenstein was pursuing which wanted to allow contradictions to exist in mathematical systems. Wittgenstein argues that he can see why people don't like contradictions outside of mathematics but cannot see what harm they do inside mathematics. Turing is exasperated and points out that such contradictions inside mathematics will lead to disasters outside mathematics: bridges will fall down. Only if there are no applications will the consequences of contradictions be innocuous. Turing eventually gave up attending these lectures. His despair is understandable. The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russel pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the Pope if 2 + 2 = 5. Russel replied immediately that 'if twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5, subtract 3; then 1 = 2. But you and the Pope are 2; therefore you and the Pope are 1'! A contradictory statement is the ultimate Trojan horse. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
687:What I have described as a blind spot is not a mere oversight on Sellars's part. I think it reflects Sellars's attempt to combine two insights: first, that meaning and intentionality come into view only in a context that is normatively organized, and, second, that reality as it is contemplated by the sciences of nature is norm-free. The trouble is that Sellars thinks the norm-free reality disclosed by the natural sciences is the only location for genuine relations to actualities. That is what leads to the idea that placing the mind in nature requires abstracting from aboutness.
Now Aquinas, writing before the rise of modern science, is immune to the attractions of that norm-free conception of nature. And we should not be too quick to regard this as wholly a deficiency in his thinking. (Of course in all kinds of ways it is a deficiency.) There is a live possibility that, at least in one respect, Thomistic philosophy of mind is superior to Sellarsian philosophy of mind, just because Aquinas lacks the distinctively modern conception of nature that underlies Sellars's thinking. Sellars allows his philosophy to be shaped by a conception that is characteristic of his own time, and so misses an opportunity to learn something from the past. ~ John Henry McDowell,#NFDB
688:It's bad enough that a gang of infernal Jews should plant us here, where there's no earthly English interest to serve, and all hell beating up against us, simply because Nosey Zimmern has lent money to half the Cabinet. It's bad enough that an old pawnbroker from Bagdad should make us fight his battles; we can't fight with our right hand cut off. Our one score was Hastings and his victory, which was really somebody else's victory. Tom Travers has to suffer, and so have you." Then, after a moment's silence, he pointed toward the bottomless well and said, in a quieter tone: "I told you that I didn't believe in the philosophy of the Tower of Aladdin. I don't believe in the Empire growing until it reaches the sky; I don't believe in the Union Jack going up and up eternally like the Tower. But if you think I am going to let the Union Jack go down and down eternally, like the bottomless well, down into the blackness of the bottomless pit, down in defeat and derision, amid the jeers of the very Jews who have sucked us dry—no I won't, and that's flat; not if the Chancellor were blackmailed by twenty millionaires with their gutter rags, not if the Prime Minister married twenty Yankee Jewesses, not if Woodville and Carstairs had shares in twenty swindling mines. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
689:The difference could be grouped into categories of mature and immature love. Preferable in almost every way, the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated (and perhaps explains why most people who have known the wilder shores of desire would refuse its painlessness the title of love). Immature love on the other hand (though it has little to do with age) is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature (because absolute) love comes in death, symbolic or real. The climax of mature love comes in marriage, and the attempt to avoid death via routine (the Sunday papers, trouser presses, remote-controlled appliances). For immature love accepts no compromise, and once we refuse compromise, we are on the road to some kind of cataclysm. 6. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
690:However, behind the scene, the Congress party and the government of Indira Gandhi had left no stone unturned to install a Congress government in the state, even well before the inauguration of the new state. This game was not new to the working philosophy of Indira Gandhi. As the President of the INC she had started this game with Kerala. Her major and minor political rivals had later emulated this new domino game, which subverted much of the Constitutional propriety of the intended federal structure of India. I never thought that in a small state like Manipur the big players in Delhi would play such a wild game of political expediency. Manipur was at the vanguard of combating Naga insurgency and coping with the new thrust of militancy initiated by the frustrated and disillusioned youths of the Valley. It required sustained economic development and not political skulduggery. The Congress party normally suffers from claustrophobia once it is denied power by the people. The same trend was noticed in Manipur. The president of the Indian National Congress and lesser party leaders frequented the state to explore the possibility of installing a party government through defection. Their foreplays were fortified by no less an official personality than the Union Home Minister. ~ Maloy Krishna Dhar, #NFDB
691:Galison uses critical opalescence as a metaphor for the merging of technology, science, and philosophy that happened in the minds of Poincare and Einstein in the spring of 1905. Poincare and Einstein were immersed in the technical tools of time signaling, but the tools by themselves did not lead them to their discoveries. They were immersed in the mathematical ideas of electrodynamics, but the ideas by themselves did not lead them to their discoveries. They were also immersed in the philosophy of space and time. Poincare had written a philosophical book, Science and Hypothesis, which Einstein studied, digging deep into the foundations of knowledge and criticizing the Newtonian notions of absolute space and time. But the philosophy by itself did not lead them to their discoveries. What was needed to give birth to the theory of relativity was a critical moment, when tools, ideas, and philosophical reflections jostled together and merged into a new way of thinking. Galison would like to put an end to the argument between Kuhnians and Galisonians. In this book he takes his position squarely in the middle: "Attending to moments of critical opalescence offers a way out of this endless oscillation between thinking of history as ultimately about ideas or fundamentally about material objects. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
692:Not all historians of philosophy have the same goals and attitudes, and I for one see no good reason for disqualifying any of the contenders. Some insist on placing their thinkers in the historical context in which they wrote, which means, for instance, learning a lot of seventeenth-century science if you really want to understand Descartes, and a lot of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political history if you really want to understand Locke or Hume, and always, of course, a lot of the philosophy of their lesser contemporaries as well. Why bother with the also-rans? There’s a good reason. I found I never really appreciated many of the painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries until I visited European museums where I could see room after room full of second-rate paintings of the same genres. If all you ever see is the good stuff—which is all you see in the introductory survey courses, and in the top museums—it’s very hard to see just how wonderful the good stuff is. Do you know the difference between a good library and a great library? A good library has all the good books. A great library has all the books. If you really want to understand a great philosopher, you have to spend some time looking at the less great contemporaries and predecessors that are left in the shadows of the masters. ~ Daniel C Dennett, #NFDB
693:As Lord David Cecil has said: “The jargon of the philosophy of progress taught us to think that the savage and primitive state of man is behind us, we still talk of the present ‘return to barbarism.’ But barbarism is not behind us it is beneath us.” And in the same article he observes: “Christianity has compelled the mind of man, not because it is the most cheering view of human existence, but because it is the truest to the facts.” I think this is true; and it seems to me quite disastrous that the idea should have gotten about that Christianity is an other-worldly, unreal, idealistic kind of religion that suggest that if we are good we shall be happy—or if not, it will all be made up to us in the next existence. On the contrary, it is fiercely and even harshly realistic, insisting that the kingdom of heaven can never be attained in this would except by unceasing toil and struggle and vigilance: that, in fact, we cannot be good and cannot be happy, but that there are certain eternal achievements that make even happiness look like trash. It has been said, I think by Berdyaev, that nothing can prevent the human soul from preferring creativeness to happiness. In this lies man’s substantial likeness to the Divine Christ, who in this world suffers and creates continually, being incarnate in the bonds of matter. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
694:It’s here that some might respond that their knowledge work job cannot possibly become such a source of meaning because their job’s subject is much too mundane. But this is flawed thinking that our consideration of traditional craftsmanship can help correct. In our current culture, we place a lot of emphasis on job description. Our obsession with the advice to “follow your passion” (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by the (flawed) idea that what matters most for your career satisfaction is the specifics of the job you choose. In this way of thinking, there are some rarified jobs that can be a source of satisfaction—perhaps working in a nonprofit or starting a software company—while all others are soulless and bland. The philosophy of Dreyfus and Kelly frees us from such traps. The craftsmen they cite don’t have rarified jobs. Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn’t glamorous. But this doesn’t matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
695:Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
696:Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good--" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
697:The root being there, the fruition comes (in the form of) species, life, and experience of pleasure and pain. The roots, the causes, the Samskaras being there, they manifest and form the effects. The cause dying down becomes the effect; the effect getting subtler becomes the cause of the next effect. A tree bears a seed, which becomes the cause of another tree, and so on. All our works now are the effects of past Samskaras; again, these works becoming Samskaras will be the causes of future actions, and thus we go on. So this aphorism says that the cause being there, the fruit must come, in the form of species of beings: one will be a man, another an angel, another an animal, another a demon. Then there are different effects of Karma in life. One man lives fifty years, another a hundred, another dies in two years, and never attains maturity; all these differences in life are regulated by past Karma. One man is born, as it were, for pleasure; if he buries himself in a forest, pleasure will follow him there. Another man, wherever he goes, is followed by pain; everything becomes painful for him. It is the result of their own past. According to the philosophy of the Yogis, all virtuous actions bring pleasure, and all vicious actions bring pain. Any man who does wicked deeds is sure to reap their fruit in the form of pain. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
698:...pseudo-scientific minds, like those of the scientist or the painter in love with the pictorial, both teaching as they were taught to become architects, practice a kind of building which is inevitably the result of conditioning of the mind instead of enlightenment. By this standard means also, the old conformities are appearing as new but only in another guise, more insidious because they are especially convenient to the standardizations of the modernist plan-factory and wholly ignorant of anything but public expediency. So in our big cities architecture like religion is helpless under the blows of science and the crushing weight of conformity--caused to gravitate to the masquerade in our streets in the name of "modernity." Fearfully concealing lack of initial courage or fundamental preparation or present merit: reactionary. Institutional public influences calling themselves conservative are really no more than the usual political stand-patters or social lid-sitters. As a feature of our cultural life architecture takes a backward direction, becomes less truly radical as our life itself grows more sterile, more conformist. All this in order to be safe?
How soon will "we the people" awake to the fact that the philosophy of natural or intrinsic building we are here calling organic is at one with our freedom--as declared, 1776? ~ Frank Lloyd Wright,#NFDB
699:I cannot give you credit for any philosophy of the kind. Your retrospections must be so totally void of reproach, that the contentment arising from them is not of philosophy, but, what is much better, of innocence. But with me, it is not so. Painful recollections will intrude which cannot, which ought not, to be repelled. I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father, particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family circle; to think meanly of all the rest of the world; to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
700:Southern Literary Messenger, that old Village denizen Edgar Allan Poe had made a different kind of prophetic guess. As an attempt pre-emptively to render redundant most of the nonsense that would be written about Dylan and poetry, it has not been bettered. There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few. In speaking of song-writing, I mean, of course, the composition of brief poems with an eye to their adaptation for music in the vulgar sense. In this ultimate destination of the song proper, lies its essence — its genius. It is the strict reference to music — it is the dependence upon modulated expression — which gives to this branch of letters a character altogether unique, and separates it, in great measure and in a manner not sufficiently considered, from ordinary literature; rendering it independent of merely ordinary proprieties; allowing it, and in fact demanding for it, a wide latitude of Law; absolutely insisting upon a certain wild license and indefinitiveness — an indefinitiveness recognized by every musician who is not a mere fiddler, as an important point in the philosophy of his science — as the soul, indeed, of the sensations derivable from its practice — sensations which bewilder while they enthral — and which would not so enthral if they did not so bewilder. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
701:It was, as Berlin remembered it: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” 2 The passage survives only as a fragment, so its context has long been lost. But the Renaissance scholar Erasmus played around with it, 3 and Berlin couldn’t help doing the same. Might it become a scheme for classifying great writers? If so, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Proust would all have been hedgehogs. Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, and Joyce were obviously foxes. So was Berlin, who distrusted most big things—like logical positivism—but felt fully at ease with smaller ones. 4 Diverted by World War II, Berlin didn’t return to his quadrupeds until 1951, when he used them to frame an essay he was preparing on Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. It appeared two years later as a short book, The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hedgehogs, Berlin explained, “relate everything to a single central vision” through which “all that they say and do has significance.” Foxes, in contrast, “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way.” The distinction was simple but not frivolous: it offered “a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting point for genuine investigation.” It might even reflect “one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. ~ John Lewis Gaddis, #NFDB
702:My room had a balcony where I could watch the setting sun flood the desert floor and burnish the golden slopes of the MacDonnell Ranges beyond – or at least I could if I looked past the more immediate sprawl of a K-Mart plaza across the road. In the two million or more square miles that is the Australian outback, I don’t suppose there is a more unfortunate juxtaposition. Allan was evidently held by a similar thought, for a half hour later when we met out front he was staring at the same scene. ‘I can’t believe we’ve just driven a thousand miles to find a K-Mart,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘You Yanks have a lot to answer for, you know.’ I started to protest, in a sputtering sort of way, but what could I say? He was right. We do. We have created a philosophy of retailing that is totally without aesthetics and totally irresistible. And now we box these places up and ship them to the far corners of the world. Visually, almost every arrestingly regrettable thing in Alice Springs was a product of American enterprise, from people who couldn’t know that they had helped to drain the distinctiveness from an outback town and doubtless wouldn’t see it that way anyway. Nor come to that, I dare say, would most of the shoppers of Alice Springs, who were no doubt delighted to get lots of free parking and a crack at Martha Stewart towels and shower curtains. What a sad and curious age we live in. We ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
703:As with most thoughtful natures, Odo's first disillusionment was to come from discovering not what his God condemned, but what He condoned. Between Cantapresto's coarse philosophy of pleasure and the refined complaisances of his new confessor he felt the distinction to be one rather of taste than of principle; and it seemed to him that the religion of the aristocracy might not unfairly be summed up in the ex-soprano's cynical aphorism: "As respectful children of our Heavenly Father it behoves us not to speak till we are spoken to." Even the religious ceremonies he witnessed did not console him for that chill hour of dawn, when, in the chapel at Donnaz, he had served the mass for Don Gervaso, with a heart trembling at its own unworthiness yet uplifted by the sense of the Divine Presence. In the churches adorned like aristocratic drawing-rooms, of which some Madonna, wreathed in artificial flowers, seemed the amiable and indulgent hostess, and where the florid passionate music of the mass was rendered by the King's opera singers before a throng of chattering cavaliers and ladies, Odo prayed in vain for a reawakening of the old emotion. The sense of sonship was gone. He felt himself an alien in the temple of this affable divinity, and his heart echoed no more than the cry which had once lifted him on wings of praise to the very threshold of the hidden glory — Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae et ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
704:The philosophy of Hobbes, it is true, contains nothing of modern race doctrines, which not only stir up the mob, but in their totalitarian form outline very clearly the forms of organization through which humanity could carry the prerequisite for all race doctrines, that is, the exclusion in principle of the idea of humanity which constitutes the sole regulating idea of international law. With the assumption that foreign politics is necessarily outside of the human contract, engaged in the perpetual war of all against all, which is the law of the "state of nature," Hobbes affords the best possible theoretical foundation for those naturalistic ideologies which hold nations to be tribes, separated from each other by nature, without any connection whatever, unconscious of the solidarity of mankind and having in common only the instinct for self-preservation which man shares with the animal world. If the idea of humanity, of which the most conclusive symbol is the common origin of the human species, is no longer valid, then nothing is more plausible than a theory according to which brown, yellow, or black races are descended from some other species of apes than the white race, and that all together are predestined by nature to war against each other until they have disappeared from the face of the earth. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
705:If you can’t make a good prediction, it is very often harmful to pretend that you can. I suspect that epidemiologists, and others in the medical community, understand this because of their adherence to the Hippocratic oath. Primum non nocere: First, do no harm. Much of the most thoughtful work on the use and abuse of statistical models and the proper role of prediction comes from people in the medical profession.88 That is not to say there is nothing on the line when an economist makes a prediction, or a seismologist does. But because of medicine’s intimate connection with life and death, doctors tend to be appropriately cautious. In their field, stupid models kill people. It has a sobering effect. There is something more to be said, however, about Chip Macal’s idea of “modeling for insights.” The philosophy of this book is that prediction is as much a means as an end. Prediction serves a very central role in hypothesis testing, for instance, and therefore in all of science.89 As the statistician George E. P. Box wrote, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”90 What he meant by that is that all models are simplifications of the universe, as they must necessarily be. As another mathematician said, “The best model of a cat is a cat.”91 Everything else is leaving out some sort of detail. How pertinent that detail might be will depend on exactly what problem we’re trying to solve and on how precise an answer we require. ~ Nate Silver, #NFDB
706:With a view to summon myself to the search for a science of mathematics in general, I asked myself... what precisely was the meaning of this word mathematics, and why arithmetic and geometry only, and not also astronomy, music, optics, mechanics, and so many other sciences, should be considered as forming a part of it; for it is not enough here to know the etymology of the word. In reality the word mathematics meaning nothing but science, those which I have just named have as much right as geometry to be called mathematics; and nevertheless there is no one, however little instructed, who cannot distinguish at once what belongs to mathematics... from what belongs to the other sciences. But... all the sciences which have for their end investigations concerning order and measure, are related to mathematics, it being of small importance whether this measure be sought in numbers, forms, stars, sounds, or any other object; that, accordingly, there ought to exist a general science which should explain all that can be known about order and measure, considered independently of any application to a particular subject, and that, indeed, this science has its own proper name, consecrated by long usage, to wit, mathematics... ~ René Descartes, Rule IV: "Necessity of Method in the Search for Truth," "Rules for the Direction of the Mind," Part I of Discourse Upon Method in The Philosophy of Descartes: In Extracts from His Writing pp. 71-72, Tr. Henry A. P. Torrey., #NFDB
707:To a Calvinist the most important thing was Calvinism; to a Puritan the most important thing was the Puritan creed; and this in itself certainly did not favor the vague sentiments either of emancipation or fraternity. Calvinism took away a man's liberty in the universe; why, then, should it favor his liberty in the State? Puritanism denied free will; why should it be likely to affirm free speech? Why should the Calvinist object to an aristocracy? The Calvinists were an aristocracy; they were the most arrogant and awful of aristocracies by the nature of their own belief: they were the elect. Why should the Puritans dislike a baby being born a nobleman? It was the whole philosophy of the Puritans that a baby is born a celestial nobleman; and he is at birth and before birth a member of the cosmic upper classes. It should have been a small matter to the Puritans to admit that one might be born a king, seeing that they maintained the much more paradoxical position that one might be born a saint. Nor is it easy to see upon their own ideal principles why the Puritans should have disliked despotism or arbitrary power; though it is certainly much more the fact that they did dislike despotism than that they did dislike oligarchy. The first conception of Calvinism is a fierce insistence on the utterly arbitrary nature of power. The King of the Cavaliers was certainly not so purely willful, so sublimely capricious a sultan, as the God of the Puritans. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
708:The natural world gives us many examples of the great effectiveness of this way. The Chinese philosophy of which judo itself is an expression—Taoism—drew attention to the power of water to overcome all obstacles by its gentleness and pliability. It showed how the supple willow survives the tough pine in a snowstorm, for whereas the unyielding branches of the pine accumulate snow until they crack, the springy boughs of the willow bend under its weight, drop the snow, and jump back again. If, when swimming, you are caught in a strong current, it is fatal to resist. You must swim with it and gradually edge to the side. One who falls from a height with stiff limbs will break them, but if he relaxes like a cat he will fall safely. A building without 'give' in its structure will easily collapse in storm or earthquake, and a car without the cushioning of tires and springs will soon come apart on the road. The mind has just the same powers, for it has give and can absorb shocks like water or a cushion. But this giving way to an opposing force is not at all the same thing as running away. A body of water does not run away when you push it; it simply gives at the point of the push and encloses your hand. A shock absorber does not fall down like a bowling-pin when struck; it gives, and yet stays in the same place. To run away is the only defense of something rigid against an overwhelming force. Therefore the good shock absorber has not only 'give,' but also stability or 'weight. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
709:no society before ours has taken aim at sacrificial mechanisms. So, what's revealed by all of this is the tenacity of those mechanisms. If you stamp them out here, they pop up again over there. The value of Foucault's work consists in having shown this. One day, he told me that “we shouldn't invent a philosophy of the victim.” I replied: “No, not a philosophy, I agree—a religion! But it already exists!” Foucault understood the very thing that optimistic rationalism didn't foresee: new forms of “victimization” are constantly emerging from the instruments that were intended to do away with them. It's his pessimism that separates us: unlike him, I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this, or else face utter despair. Today, after the end of ideologies, the only way to embrace this meaning is to rediscover religion. Of course, even as the victimary mechanism keeps being reborn, Christianity is always there to transform and subvert it, like a leavening agent—in the humanist rationalism of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, for example. When Voltaire defended Jean Calas, the persecuted Protestant, he was being more Christian than the Catholic priests who were against him. His mistake was to have had too much faith in his own perfection, to imagine that the correctness of his position was due to his own genius. He couldn't see how much he owed to the past that stretched out behind him. I respect tradition, but I'm not justifying History. MT ~ Ren Girard, #NFDB
710:The Bishop clapped his hands.
‘That’s talking!’ he exclaimed. ‘What an excellent and
really marvellous thing is this materialism! Not every one
who wants it can have it. Ah! when one does have it, one
is no longer a dupe, one does not stupidly allow one’s self
to be exiled like Cato, nor stoned like Stephen, nor burned
alive like Jeanne d’Arc. Those who have succeeded in procuring
this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling
themselves irresponsible, and of thinking that they can devour
everything without uneasiness,—places, sinecures,
dignities, power, whether well or ill acquired, lucrative
recantations, useful treacheries, savory capitulations of
conscience,—and that they shall enter the tomb with their
digestion accomplished. How agreeable that is! I do not say
that with reference to you, senator. Nevertheless, it is impossible
for me to refrain from congratulating you. You
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 57
great lords have, so you say, a philosophy of your own, and
for yourselves, which is exquisite, refined, accessible to the
rich alone, good for all sauces, and which seasons the voluptuousness
of life admirably. This philosophy has been
extracted from the depths, and unearthed by special seekers.
But you are good-natured princes, and you do not think
it a bad thing that belief in the good God should constitute
the philosophy of the people, very much as the goose stuffed
with chestnuts is the truffled turkey of the poor. ~ Victor Hugo,#NFDB
711:The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world. We swim through a sea of people -- a social version of Middle World. We are evolved to second-guess the behavior of others by becoming brilliant, intuitive psychologists. Treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate, but it's a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next. The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal-seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame-worthiness. Personification and the imputing of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans, it's hardly surprising the same modeling software often seizes control when we're trying to think about entities for which it's not appropriate, like Basil Fawlty with his car or like millions of deluded people with the universe as a whole.
If the universe is queerer than we can suppose, is it just because we've been naturally selected to suppose only what we needed to suppose in order to survive in the Pleistocene of Africa? Or are our brains so versatile and expandable that we can train ourselves to break out of the box of our evolution? Or, finally, are there some things in the universe so queer that no philosophy of beings, however godlike, could dream them? Thank you very much. ~ Richard Dawkins,#NFDB
712:Before coming to the Black Wood, I had read as widely in tree lore as possible. As well as the many accounts I encountered of damage to trees and woodland -- of what in German is called Waldsterben, or 'forest-death' -- I also met with and noted down stories of astonishment at woods and trees. Stories of how Chinese woodsmen in the T'ang and S'ung dynasties -- in obedience to the Taoist philosophy of a continuity of nature between humans and other species -- would bow to the trees which they felled, and offer a promise that the tree would be used well, in buildings that would dignify the wood once it had become timber. The story of Xerxes, the Persian king who so loved sycamores that, when marching to war with the Greeks, he halted his army of many thousands of men in order that they might contemplate and admire one outstanding specimen. Thoreau's story of how he felt so attached to the trees in the woods around his home-town of Concord, Massachusetts, that he would call regularly on them, gladly tramping 'eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
When Willa Cather moved to the prairies of Nebraska, she missed the wooded hills of her native Virginia. Pining for trees, she would sometimes travel south 'to our German neighbors, to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew out of a crack in the earth. Trees were so rare in that country that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons'.... ~ Robert Macfarlane,#NFDB
713:Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others. ~ Frederick Douglass,#NFDB
714:In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is called 'the resurrection body ' and 'the glorified body.' The prophet Isaiah said, 'The dead shall live, their bodies shall rise' (Isa. 26:19). St. Paul called it 'the celestial body' or 'spiritual body ' (soma pneumatikon) (I Corinthians 15:40). In Sufism it is called 'the most sacred body ' (wujud al-aqdas) and 'supracelestial body ' (jism asli haqiqi). In Taoism, it is called 'the diamond body,' and those who have attained it are called 'the immortals' and 'the cloudwalkers.' In Tibetan Buddhism it is called 'the light body.' In Tantrism and some schools of yoga, it is called 'the vajra body,' 'the adamantine body,' and 'the divine body.' In Kriya yoga it is called 'the body of bliss.' In Vedanta it is called 'the superconductive body.' In Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, it is called 'the radiant body.' In the alchemical tradition, the Emerald Tablet calls it 'the Glory of the Whole Universe' and 'the golden body.' The alchemist Paracelsus called it 'the astral body.' In the Hermetic Corpus, it is called 'the immortal body ' (soma athanaton). In some mystery schools, it is called 'the solar body.' In Rosicrucianism, it is called 'the diamond body of the temple of God.' In ancient Egypt it was called 'the luminous body or being' (akh). In Old Persia it was called 'the indwelling divine potential' (fravashi or fravarti). In the Mithraic liturgy it was called 'the perfect body ' (soma teilion). In the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, it is called 'the divine body,' composed of supramental substance. In the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, it is called 'the ultrahuman'.
~ ?, http://herebedragons.weebly.com/homo-lumen.html,#NFDB
715:The lobby of the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building was almost finished when she arrived. As if to distract from the minuscule and cramped philosophy of what would transpire on the floors above, the city offered visitors the spacial bounty of the lobby. The ersatz marble was firm underfoot like real marble, sheer, and produced trembling echoes effortlessly. The circle of Doric columns braced the weight above without complaint. The mural, however, was not complete. It started out jauntily enough to Lila Mae’s left. Cheerless Indians holding up a deerskin in front of a fire. The original tenants, sure. A galleon negotiating the tricky channels around the island. Two beaming Indians trading beads to a gang of white men—the infamous sale of the Island. Big moment, have to include that, the first of many dubious transactions in the city’s history. (They didn’t have elevators yet. That’s why the scenes look so flat to Lila Mae: the city is dimensionless.) The mural jumped to the Revolution then, she noticed, skipped over a lot of stuff. The painter seemed to be making it up as he went along, like the men who shaped the city. The Revolution scene was a nice setpiece—the colonists pulling down the statue of King George III. They melted it down for ammunition, if she remembers correctly. It’s always nice when a good mob comes together. The painting ended there. (Someone knocks at the door of her room in 117 Second Avenue, but she doesn’t open her eyes.) Judging from the amount of wall space that remained to Lila Mae’s right, the mural would have to get even more brief in its chronicle of the city’s greatest hits. Either the painter had misjudged how much space he had or the intervening years weren’t that compelling to him. Just the broad strokes, please. ~ Colson Whitehead, #NFDB
716:Singer’s lethal potion is concocted of hundreds of outlandish facts and quotes—he is a tenacious reporter—and a style that barely suppresses his own amusement. It works particularly well on the buccaneers who continue to try the patience of the citizenry, as proved by his profile in The New Yorker of the developer Donald Trump. Noting that Trump “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul,” Singer describes a visit to Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach spa converted by Trump from the 118-room Hispano-Moorish-Venetian mansion built in the 1920s by Marjorie Merriweather Post and E. F. Hutton: Evidently, Trump’s philosophy of wellness is rooted in a belief that prolonged exposure to exceptionally attractive young spa attendants will instill in the male clientele a will to live. Accordingly, he limits his role to a pocket veto of key hiring decisions. While giving me a tour of the main exercise room, where Tony Bennett, who does a couple of gigs at Mar-a-Lago each season and had been designated an “artist-in-residence,” was taking a brisk walk on a treadmill, Trump introduced me to “our resident physician, Dr. Ginger Lee Southall”—a recent chiropractic-college graduate. As Dr. Ginger, out of earshot, manipulated the sore back of a grateful member, I asked Trump where she had done her training. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Baywatch Medical School? Does that sound right? I’ll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger’s photograph, I didn’t really need to look at her résumé or anyone else’s. Are you asking, ‘Did we hire her because she trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years?’ The answer is no. And I’ll tell you why: because by the time she’s spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don’t want to look at her. ~ William Zinsser, #NFDB
717:The Enlightenment emphasized ways of learning that weren’t subservient to human power hierarchies. Instead, Enlightenment thinking celebrates evidence-based scientific method and reasoning. The cultures of sciences and engineering used to embrace Enlightenment epistemology, but now they have been overridden by horribly regressive BUMMER epistemology. You probably know the word “meme” as meaning a BUMMER posting that can go viral. But originally, “meme” suggested a philosophy of thought and meaning. The term was coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins proposed memes as units of culture that compete and are either passed along or not, according to a pseudo-Darwinian selection process. Thus some fashions, ideas, and habits take hold, while others become extinct. The concept of memes provides a way of framing everything non-nerds do—the whole of humanities, culture, arts, and politics—as similar instances of meme competition, mere subroutines of a higher-level algorithm that nerds can master. When the internet took of, Dawkins’s ideas were in vogue, because they flattered techies. There was a ubiquitous genre of internet appreciation from the very beginning in which someone would point out the viral spread of a meme and admire how cute that was. The genre exists to this day. Memes started out as a way of expressing solidarity with a philosophy I used to call cybernetic totalism that still underlies BUMMER. Memes might seem to amplify what you are saying, but that is always an illusion. You might launch an infectious meme about a political figure, and you might be making a great point, but in the larger picture, you are reinforcing the idea that virality is truth. Your point will be undone by whatever other point is more viral. That is by design. The architects of BUMMER were meme believers. ~ Jaron Lanier, #NFDB
718:Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. Set yourself a “stint,” [London wrote 1,000 words nearly every day of his adult life] and see that you do that “stint” each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.
Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers. They are doing things, and their work bears the internal evidence of how it is done. Don’t wait for some good Samaritan to tell you, but dig it out for yourself.
See that your pores are open and your digestion is good. That is, I am confident, the most important rule of all.
Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.
And work. Spell it in capital letters. WORK. WORK all the time. Find out about this earth, this universe; this force and matter, and the spirit that glimmers up through force and matter from the maggot to Godhead. And by all this I mean WORK for a philosophy of life. It does not hurt how wrong your philosophy of life may be, so long as you have one and have it well.
The three great things are: GOOD HEALTH; WORK; and a PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. I may add, nay, must add, a fourth—SINCERITY. Without this, the other three are without avail; with it you may cleave to greatness and sit among the giants."
[Getting Into Print (The Editor magazine, March 1903)] ~ Jack London,#NFDB
719:According to the traditional philosophy of the Magicians, every man is a unique autonomous center of individual consciousness, energy, and will—a soul, in a word. Like a star shining and existing by its own inward light, it pursues its way in the star-spangled heavens, solitary, uninterfered with, except in so far as its heavenly course is gravitationally modified by the presence, near or far, of other stars. Since in the vast stellar spaces seldom are there conflicts between the celestial bodies, unless one happens to stray from its appointed course—a very rare occurrence—so in the realms of humankind there would lie no chaos, little conflict, and no mutual disturbance were each individual content to be grounded in the reality of his own high consciousness, aware of his ideal nature In the his true purpose in life, and eager to pursue the road which he must follow. Because men have strayed from the dynamic sources inhering within themselves and the universe, and have forsaken their true spiritual wills, because they have divorced themselves from the celestial essences, betrayed by a mess of more sickly pottage than ever Jacob did sell to Esau, the world in this day presents a people with so hopeless an aspect, and a humanity impressed with so despondent a mien. Ignorance of the course of the celestial orbit, and the significance of that orbit inscribed in the skies forever, is the root which is at the bottom of universal dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and race-nostalgia. And because of this the living soul cries for help to the dead, and the creature to a silent God. Of all this crying there comes usually—nothing. The lifting up of the hands in supplication brings no inkling of salvation. The frantic gnashing of teeth results but in mute despair and loss of vital energy. Redemption is only from within and is wrought out by the soul itself with suffering and through time, with much endeavor and strain of the spirit. ~ Israel Regardie, #NFDB
720:The idea of progress is contemporary with the age of enlightenment and with the bourgeois revolution. Of
course, certain sources of its inspiration can be found in the seventeenth century; the quarrel between the
Ancients and the Moderns already introduced into European ideology the perfectly absurd conception of
an artistic form of progress. In a more serious fashion, the idea of a science that steadily increases its
conquests can also be derived from Cartesian philosophy. But Turgot, in 1750, is the first person to give a
clear definition of the new faith. His treatise on the progress of the human mind basically recapitulates
Bossuet's universal history. The idea of progress alone is substituted for the divine will. "The total mass
of the human race, by alternating stages of calm and agitation, of good and evil, always marches, though
with dragging footsteps, toward greater and greater perfection." This optimistic statement will furnish the
basic ingredient of the rhetorical observations of Condorcet, the official theorist of progress, which he
linked with the progress of the State and of which he was also the official victim in that the enlightened
State forced him to poison himself. Sorel was perfectly correct in saying that the philosophy of progress
was exactly the philosophy to suit a society eager to enjoy the material prosperity derived from technical
progress. When we are assured that tomorrow, in the natural order of events, will be better than today, we
can enjoy ourselves in peace. Progress, paradoxically, can be used to justify conservatism. A draft drawn
on confidence in the future, it allows the master to have a clear conscience. The slave and those whose
present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future
belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves. ~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
721:In 1967, the second resolution to the cat problem was formulated by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, whose work was pivotal in laying the foundation of quantum mechanics and also building the atomic bomb. He said that only a conscious person can make an observation that collapses the wave function. But who is to say that this person exists? You cannot separate the observer from the observed, so maybe this person is also dead and alive. In other words, there has to be a new wave function that includes both the cat and the observer. To make sure that the observer is alive, you need a second observer to watch the first observer. This second observer is called “Wigner’s friend,” and is necessary to watch the first observer so that all waves collapse. But how do we know that the second observer is alive? The second observer has to be included in a still-larger wave function to make sure he is alive, but this can be continued indefinitely. Since you need an infinite number of “friends” to collapse the previous wave function to make sure they are alive, you need some form of “cosmic consciousness,” or God. Wigner concluded: “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Toward the end of his life, he even became interested in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. In this approach, God or some eternal consciousness watches over all of us, collapsing our wave functions so that we can say we are alive. This interpretation yields the same physical results as the Copenhagen interpretation, so this theory cannot be disproven. But the implication is that consciousness is the fundamental entity in the universe, more fundamental than atoms. The material world may come and go, but consciousness remains as the defining element, which means that consciousness, in some sense, creates reality. The very existence of the atoms we see around us is based on our ability to see and touch them. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
722:Yet it is the Outsider’s belief that life aims at more life, at higher forms of life, something for which the Superman is an inexact poetic symbol (as Dante’s description of the beatific vision is expressed in terms of a poetic symbol); so that, in a sense, Urizen is the most important of the three functions. The fall was necessary, as Hesse realized. Urizen must go forward alone.
The other two must follow him. And as soon as Urizen has gone forward, the Fall has taken place. Evolution towards God is impossible without a Fall. And it is only by this recognition that the poet can ever come to ‘praise in spite of; for if evil is ultimately discord, unresolvable, then the idea of dennoch preisen is a self-contradiction. And yet it must be clearly recognized and underlined that this is not the Hegelian ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world’. Even if the evil is necessary, it remains evil, discord, pain. It remains an Existential fact, not something that proves to be
something else when you hold it in the right light. It is as if there were two opposing armies:
the Hegelian view holds that peace can be secured by proving that there is really no ground for
opposition; in short, they are really friends. The Blakeian view says that the discord is necessary,
but it can never be resolved until one army has. completely exterminated the other. This is the
Existential view, first expressed by Soren Kierkegaard, the Outsider’s view and, incidentally,
the religious view. The whole difference between the Existentialist and the Hegelian viewpoint
is implicit in the comparison between the title of Hegel’s book, The Philosophy of History, and James Joyce’s phrase, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ Blake provided the Existentialist view with a symbolism and mythology. In Blake’s view, harmony is an ultimate aim, but not the primary aim, of life; the primary aim is to live more abundantly at any cost. Harmony can come later. ~ Colin Wilson,#NFDB
723:the omnipresent Trinity :::
In practice three conceptions are necessary before there can be any possibility of Yoga; there must be, as it were, three consenting parties to the effort,-God, Nature and the human soul or, in more abstract language, the Transcendental, the Universal and the Individual. If the individual and Nature are left to themselves, the one is bound to the other and unable to exceed appreciably her lingering march. Something transcendent is needed, free from her and greater, which will act upon us and her, attracting us upward to Itself and securing from her by good grace or by force her consent to the individual ascension. It is this truth which makes necessary to every philosophy of Yoga the conception of the Ishwara, Lord, supreme Soul or supreme Self, towards whom the effort is directed and who gives the illuminating touch and the strength to attain. Equally true is the complementary idea so often enforced by the Yoga of devotion that as the Transcendent is necessary to the individual and sought after by him, so also the individual is necessary in a sense to the Transcendent and sought after by It. If the Bhakta seeks and yearns after Bhagavan, Bhagavan also seeks and yearns after the Bhakta. There can be no Yoga of knowledge without a human seeker of the knowledge, the supreme subject of knowledge and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of knowledge; no Yoga of devotion without the human God-lover, the supreme object of love and delight and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of spiritual, emotional and aesthetic enjoyment; no Yoga of works without the human worker, the supreme Will, Master of all works and sacrifices, and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of power and action. However Monistic maybe our intellectual conception of the highest truth of things, in practice we are compelled to accept this omnipresent Trinity.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga,#NFDB
724:Granny
Here, in her elbow chair, she sits
A soul alert, alive,
A poor old body shrunk and bent The queen-bee of the hive.
But hives of bees and hives of men
Obey their several laws;
No fiercely-loving filial throng
This mother-head adores.
This bringer of world-wealth, whereof
None may compute the worth,
Is possibly of no account
To anyone on earth.
Her cap and spectacles, that mean
Dim eyes and scanty hairs,
The humble symbols of her state The only crown she wears.
Lacking a kingdom and a court,
A relic of the past,
Almost a cumberer of the ground That is our queen at last.
But still not wholly without place,
Nor quite bereft of power;
A useful stopgap - a resource
In many a troubled hour.
She darns the stockings, keeps the house,
The nurseless infant tends,
While the young matrons and the men
Pursue their various ends Too keen-set on their great affairs,
Or little plays and pranks,
The things and people of their world,
To give her thought or thanks -
106
The children on whom all her thought
And time and love were spent
Through half a century of years!
Yet is she well content.
The schooling of those fiery years,
It has not been for nought;
A large philosophy of life
Has self-less service taught.
The outlook from the heights attained
By climbings sore and slow
Discovers worlds of wisdom, hid
From clearest eyes below.
So calmly, in her elbow chair,
Forgotten and alone,
She knits and dreams, and sometimes sighs
But never makes a moan.
Still dwelling with her brood unseen Ghosts of a bygone day The precious daughter in her grave,
The dear son gone astray And others, to whom once she stood
As only light and law,
The near and living, and yet lost,
That need her love no more.
Watching their joyous setting forth
To mingle with their kind,
With scarce a pang, with ne'er a grudge,
At being left behind.
'Let them be young, as I was young,
And happy while they may' . . . .
A dog that waits the night in peace
Since it has had its day.
107
~ Ada Cambridge,#NFDB
725:Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated. But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that there has been in the past, or will be in the future, such a thing as a growth or improvement of the human mind itself, there still remains a very sharp objection to be raised against the modern version of that improvement. The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.
If then, I repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental advance in the construction of a definite philosophy of life. ~ G K Chesterton,#NFDB
726:Incidentally, the same logic that would force one to accept the idea of the production of security by private business as economically the best solution to the problem of consumer satisfaction also forces one, so far as moral-ideological positions are concerned, to abandon the political theory of classical liberalism and take the small but nevertheless decisive step (from there) to the theory of libertarianism, or private property anarchism. Classical liberalism, with Ludwig von Mises as its foremost representative in the twentieth century, advocates a social system based on the nonaggression principle. And this is also what libertarianism advocates. But classical liberalism then wants to have this principle enforced by a monopolistic agency (the government, the state)—an organization, that is, which is not exclusively dependent on voluntary, contractual support by the consumers of its respective services, but instead has the right to unilaterally determine its own income, i.e., the taxes to be imposed on consumers in order to do its job in the area of security production. Now, however plausible this might sound, it should be clear that it is inconsistent. Either the principle of nonaggression is valid, in which case the state as a privileged monopolist is immoral, or business built on and around aggression—the use of force and of noncontractual means of acquiring resources—is valid, in which case one must toss out the first theory. It is impossible to sustain both contentions and not to be inconsistent unless, of course, one could provide a principle that is more fundamental than both the nonaggression principle and the states’ right to aggressive violence and from which both, with the respective limitations regarding the domains in which they are valid, can be logically derived. However, liberalism never provided any such principle, nor will it ever be able to do so, since, to argue in favor of anything presupposes one’s right to be free of aggression. Given the fact then that the principle of nonaggression cannot be argumentatively contested as morally valid without implicitly acknowledging its validity, by force of logic one is committed to abandoning liberalism and accepting instead its more radical child: libertarianism, the philosophy of pure capitalism, which demands that the production of security be undertaken by private business too. ~ Hans Hermann Hoppe, #NFDB
727:I find it hard to talk about myself. I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I? paradox. Sure, no one knows as much pure data about me as me. But when I talk about myself, all sorts of other factors - values, standards, my own limitations as an observer - make me, the narrator, select and eliminate things about me, the narratee. I've always been disturbed by the thought that I'm not painting a very objective picture of myself.
This kind of things doesn't seem to bother most people. Given the chance, people are surprisingly frank when they talk about themselves. "I'm honest and open to a ridiculous degree," they'll say, or "I'm thin-skinned and not the type who gets along easily in the world." Or "I'm very good at sensing others' true feelings." But any number of times I've seen people who say they're easily hurt or hurt other people for no apparent reason. Self-styled honest and open people, without realizing what they're doing, blithely use some self-serving excuse to get what they want. And those "good at sensing others' true feelings" are taken in by the most transparent flattery. It's enough to make me ask the question: how well do really know ourselves?
The more I think about it, the more I'd like to take a rain check on the topic of me. What I'd like to know more about is the objective reality of things outside myself. How important the world outside is to me, how I maintain a sense of equilibrium by coming to terms with it. That's how I'd grasp a clearer sense of who I am.
These are the kind of ideas I had running through my head when I was a teenager. Like a master builder stretches taut his string and lays one brick after another, I constructed this viewpoint - or philosophy of life, to put a bigger spin on it. Logic and speculation played a part in formulating this viewpoint, but for the most part it was based on my own experiences. And speaking of experience, a number of painful episodes taught me that getting this viewpoint of mine across to other people wasn't the easiest thing in the world.
The upshot of all this is that when I was young I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people. No matter who I was dealing with, I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person's attitude so that they wouldn't get any closer. I didn't easily swallow what other people told me. My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life. ~ Haruki Murakami,#NFDB
728:Intellectual Fascism 3/3
To make matters still worse, intellectual fascists frequently demand of themselves, as well as others, perfect competence and universal achievement. If they are excellent mathematicians or dancers, they demand that they be the most accomplished. If they are outstanding scientists or manufacturers, they also must be first-rate painters or writers. If they are fine poets, they not only need to be the finest, but likewise must be great lovers, drawing room wits, and political experts. Naturally, only being human, they fail at many or most of these ventures. And then - O, poetic justice! - they apply to themselves the same excoriations and despisements that they apply to others when they fail to be universal geniuses.
However righteous their denials, therefore - and even though readers who by now are not squirming with guilt are probably screaming with indignation, I will determinedly continue - the typical politico-social "liberals" of our day are fascistic in several significant ways. For they arbitrarily define certain human traits as "good" or "superior"; they automatically exclude most others from any possibility of achieving their "good" standards; they scorn, combat, and in many ways persecute those who do not live up to these capricious goals; and finally, in most instances they more or less fail to live up to their own definitional standards and bring down neurotic self-pity and blame on their own heads.
....
What is the alternative? Assuming that intellectual fascism exists on a wide scale today, and that it does enormous harm and little good to people's relations with themselves and others, what philosophy of living are they to set up in its place? Surely, you may well ask, I am not suggesting an uncritical, sentimental equalitarianism, whereunder everyone would fully accept and hobnob with everyone else and where no one would attempt to excel or perfect himself at anything? No, I am not.
On the contrary, significant human differences (as well as sameness) exists; and they add much variety and zest to living; and that one human may sensibly cultivate the company of another just because this other is different from, and perhaps in certain respects superior to, others. At the same time, "one's worth as a human being is not to be measured in terms of one's popularity, success, achievement, intelligence, or any other such trait, but solely in terms of one's Humanity". ~ Albert Ellis,#NFDB
729:In all conflicts between groups, there are three elements. One: the certitude that our group is morally superior, possibly even chosen by God. All others should follow our example or be at our service. In order to bring peace to the world, we have to impose our set of beliefs upon others, through manipulation, force, and fear, if necessary. Two: a refusal or incapacity to see or admit to any possible errors or faults in our group. The undeniable nature of our own goodness makes us think we are infallible; there can be no wrong in us. Three: a refusal to believe that any other group possesses truth or can contribute anything of value. At best, others may be regarded as ignorant, unenlightened, and possessing only half—truths; at worst, they are seen as destructive, dangerous, and possessed by evil spirits: they need to be overpowered for the good of humanity. Society and cultures are, then, divided into the “good” and the “bad”; the good attributing to themselves the mission to save, to heal, to bring peace to a wicked world, according to their own terms and under their controlling power. Such is the story of all civilizations through the ages as they spread over the earth by invading and colonizing. Differences must be suppressed; “savages” must be civilized. We must prove by all possible means that our culture, our power, our knowledge, and our technology are the best, that our gods are the only gods! This is not just the story of civilizations but also of all wars of religion, inquisitions, censorships, dictatorships; all things, in short, that are ideologies. An ideology is a set of ideas translated into a set of values. Because they are held to be absolutely true, these ideas and values need to be imposed on others if they are not readily accepted. A political system, a school of psychology, and a philosophy of economics can all be ideologies. Even a place of work can be an ideology. Religious sub—groups, sects, are based upon ideological principles. Religions themselves can become ideologies. And ideologues, by their nature, are not open to new ideas or even to debate; they refuse to accept or listen to anyone else’s reality. They refuse to admit any possibility of error or even criticism of their system; they are closed up in their set of ideas, theories, and values. We human beings have a great facility for living illusions, for protecting our self—image with power, for justifying it all by thinking we are the favoured ones of God. ~ Jean Vanier, #NFDB
730:Hitherto all that has given colour to existence has lacked a history: where would one find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law, as also of punishment, has hitherto been completely lacking. Have the different divisions of the day, the consequences of a regular appointment of the times for labour, feast, and repose, ever been made the object of investigation? Do we know the moral effects of the alimentary substances? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The ever-recurring outcry for and against vegetarianism proves that as yet there is no such philosophy!) Have the experiences with regard to communal living, for example, in monasteries, been collected? Has the dialectic of marriage and friendship been set forth? The customs of the learned, of trades-people, of areists, and of mechanics have they already found been found and thought about? There is so much in them to think about! All that up till now has been considered as the "conditions of existence," of human beings, and all reason, passion and superstition in this consideration have they been investigated to the end? The observation alone of the different degrees of development which the human impulses have attained, and could yet attain, according to the different moral climates, would furnish too much work for the most laborious; whole generations, and regular co-operating generations of the learned, would be needed in order to exhaust the points of view and the material here furnished. The same is true of the determining of the reasons for the differences of the moral climates ("on what account does this sun of a fundamental moral judgment and standard of highest value shine here and that sun there?") And there is again a new labour which points out the erroneousness of all these reasons, and determines the entire essence of the moral judgments hitherto made. Supposing all these labours to be accomplished, the most critical of all questions would then come into the foreground: whether science is in a position to provide goals for human action, after it has proved that it can take them away and destroy them and then would be the time for a process of experimenting, in which every kind of heroism could satisfy itself, an experimenting for centuries, which would put into the shade all the great labours and sacrifices of previous history. Science has not as yet built its Cyclopic buildings; but for that also the time will come. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
731:Here’s a sentence in a book I’m reading: ‘We belong, of course, to a generation that’s seen through things, seen how futile everything is, and had the courage to accept futility, and say to ourselves: There’s nothing for it but to enjoy ourselves as best we can.’ Well, I suppose that’s my generation, the one that’s seen the war and its aftermath; and, of course, it is the attitude of quite a crowd; but when you come to think of it, it might have been said by any rather unthinking person in any generation; certainly might have been said by the last generation after religion had got the knock that Darwin gave it. For what does it come to? Suppose you admit having seen through religion and marriage and treaties, and commercial honesty and freedom and ideals of every kind, seen that there’s nothing absolute about them, that they lead of themselves to no definite reward, either in this world or a next which doesn’t exist perhaps, and that the only thing absolute is pleasure and that you mean to have it — are you any farther towards getting pleasure? No! you’re a long way farther off. If everybody’s creed is consciously and crudely ‘grab a good time at all costs,’ everybody is going to grab it at the expense of everybody else, and the devil will take the hindmost, and that’ll be nearly everybody, especially the sort of slackers who naturally hold that creed, so that they, most certainly, aren’t going to get a good time. All those things they’ve so cleverly seen through are only rules of the road devised by men throughout the ages to keep people within bounds, so that we may all have a reasonable chance of getting a good time, instead of the good time going only to the violent, callous, dangerous and able few. All our institutions, religion, marriage, treaties, the law, and the rest, are simply forms of consideration for others necessary to secure consideration for self. Without them we should be a society of feeble motor-bandits and streetwalkers in slavery to a few super-crooks. You can’t, therefore, disbelieve in consideration for others without making an idiot of yourself and spoiling your own chances of a good time. The funny thing is that no matter how we all talk, we recognise that perfectly. People who prate like the fellow in that book don’t act up to their creed when it comes to the point. Even a motor-bandit doesn’t turn King’s evidence. In fact, this new philosophy of ‘having the courage to accept futility and grab a good time’ is simply a shallow bit of thinking; all the same, it seemed quite plausible when I read it. ~ John Galsworthy, #NFDB
732:It caused my opposition to any ideologies—Marxist, Fascist, National Socialist, what you will—because they were incompatible with science in the rational sense of critical analysis. I again refer back to Max Weber as the great thinker who brought that problem to my attention; and I still maintain today that nobody who is an ideologist can be a competent social scientist."
It is extremely difficult to engage in a critical discussion of National Socialist ideas, as I found out when I gave my semester course on “Hitler and the Germans” in 1964 in Munich, because in National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work. A person on this level—which I characterize as the vulgarian and, so far as it becomes socially relevant, as the ochlocratic level—again, is not admissible to the position of a partner in discussion but can only be an object of scientific research.
Because of this attitude I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology. I have in my files documents labeling me a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian—not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long. This list I consider of some importance, because the various characterizations of course always name the pet bête noire of the respective critic and give, therefore, a very good picture of the intellectual destruction and corruption that characterize the contemporary academic world. Understandably, I have never answered such criticisms; critics of this type can become objects of inquiry, but they cannot be partners in a discussion.
Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language—meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts but in fact are unanalyzed topoi or topics. Moreover, anybody who is exposed to this dominant climate of opinion has to cope with the problem that language is a social phenomenon. He cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion, but he has to make them the object of investigation. There is no community of language with the representatives of the dominant ideologies. ~ Eric Voegelin,#NFDB
733:Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey. Now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man’s mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much the safest man to hold them. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
734:Utilitarianism does not teach that people should strive only after sensuous pleasure (though it recognizes that most or at least many people behave in this way). Neither does it indulge in judgments of value. By its recognition that social cooperation is for the immense majority a means for attaining ali their ends, it dispels the notion that society, the state, the nation, or any other social entity is an ultimate end and that individual men are the slaves of that entity. It rejects the philosophies of universalism, collectivism, and totalitarianism. In this sense it is meaningful to call utilitarianism a philosophy of individualism.
The collectivist doctrine fails to recognize that social cooperation is for man a means for the attainment of ali his ends. It assumes that irreconcilable conflict prevails between the interests of the collective and those of individuais, and in this conflict it sides unconditionally with the collective entity. The collective alone has real existence; the individuais' existence is conditioned by that of the collective. The collective is perfect and can do no wrong. Individuais are wretched and refractory; their obstinacy must be curbed by the authority to which God or nature has entrusted the conduct of society's affairs. The powers that be, says the Apostle Paul, are ordained of God. They are ordained by nature or by the superhuman factor that directs the course of ali cosmic events, says the atheist collectivist.
Two questions immediately arise. First: If it were true that the interests of the collective and those of individuais are implacably opposed to one another, how could society function? One may assume that the individuais would be prevented by force of arms from resorting to open rebellion. But it cannot be assumed that their active cooperation could be secured by mere compulsion. A system of production in which the only incentive to work is the fear of punishment cannot last. It was this fact that made slavery disappear as a system of managing production.
Second: If the collective is not a means by which individuais may achieve their ends, if the collective's flowering requires sacrifices by the individuais which are not outweighed by advantages derived from social cooperation, what prompts the advocate of collectivism to assign to the concerns of the collective precedence over the personal wishes of the individuais? Can any argument be advanced for such exaltation of the collective but personal judgments of value?
Of course, everybodys judgments of value are personal. If a man assigns a higher value to the concerns of a collective than to his other concerns, and acts accordingly, that is his affair. So long as the collectivist philosophers proceed in this way, no objection can be raised. But they argue differently. They elevate their personal judgments of value to the dignity of an absolute standard of value. They urge other people to stop valuing according to their own will and to adopt unconditionally the precepts to which collectivism has assigned absolute eternal validity. ~ Ludwig von Mises,#NFDB
735:Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being that they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting that there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering. To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him. Yet how He eludes us! For He is everywhere while He is nowhere, for "where" has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both. He is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent and owes nothing to the worlds His hands have made. Timeless, spaceless, single, lonely, Yet sublimely Three, Thou art grandly, always, only God is Unity! Lone in grandeur, lone in glory, Who shall tell Thy wondrous story? Awful Trinity! FREDERICK W. FABER It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God. Few of us have let our hearts gaze in wonder at the I AM, the self-existent Self back of which no creature can think. Such thoughts are too painful for us. We prefer to think where it will do more good - about how to build a better mousetrap, for instance, or how to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before. And for this we are now paying a too heavy price in the secularlzation of our religion and the decay of our inner lives. Perhaps some sincere but puzzled Christian may at this juncture wish to inquire about the practicality of such concepts as I am trying to set forth here. "What bearing does this have on my life?" he may ask. "What possible meaning can the self-existence of God have for me and others like me in a world such as this and in times such as these?" To this I reply that, because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological. Some knowledge of what kind of God it is that operates the universe is indispensable to a sound philosophy of life and a sane outlook on the world scene. The much-quoted advice of Alexander Pope, "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is man," if followed literally would destroy any possibility of man's ever knowing himself in any but the most superficial way. We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is. For this reason the self-existence of God is not a wisp of dry doctrine, academic and remote; it is in fact as near as our breath and as practical as the latest surgical technique. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
736:Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others...
He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds - or on persons devoted to them - have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.
When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a 'dirty little atheist' he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with 'The Rights of Man' he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But 'The Age of Reason' cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen - a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine.
I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.
Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanimity and sorrow on the attacks of his countrymen. That those attacks have continued down to our day, with scarcely any abatement, is an indication of how strong prejudice, when once aroused, may become. It has been a custom in some quarters to hold up Paine as an example of everything bad.
The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty - who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause - can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands.
{The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925} ~ Thomas A Edison,#NFDB
737:Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Highlight at location 221-228 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:41:32 Those who are introduced to the Quran only through the media, generally have the impression that the Quran is a book of jihad, and jihad to them is an attempt to achieve one’s goal by means of violence. But this idea is based on a misunderstanding. Anyone who reads the Quran for himself will easily appreciate that its message has nothing to do with violence. The Quran is, from beginning to end, a book which promulgates peace and in no way countenances violence. It is true that jihad is one of the teachings of the Quran. But jihad, taken in its correct sense, is the name of peaceful struggle rather than of any kind of violent action. The Quranic concept of jihad is expressed in the following verse, ‘Do greater jihad (i.e strive more strenuously) with the help of this [Quran]’ (25:52). Obviously, the Quran is not a weapon, but a book which gives us an introduction to the divine ideology of peaceful struggle. The method of such a struggle, according to the Quran, is ‘to speak to them a word to reach their very soul’ (4:63). ========== Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Note at location 228 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:41:45 jihad ========== Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Highlight at location 232-235 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:43:12 It is true that there are certain verses in the Quran, which convey injunctions similar to the following, ‘Slay them wherever you find them’ (2:191). Referring to such verses, there are some who attempt to give the impression that Islam is a religion of war and violence. This is totally untrue. Such verses relate, in a restricted sense, to those who have unilaterally attacked the Muslims. The above verse does not convey the general command of Islam. ========== Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Highlight at location 239-244 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:44:16 This division of commands into different categories is a natural one and is found in all religious books. For instance, the Gita, the holy book of the Hindus, pertains to wisdom and moral values. Yet along with this is the exhortation of Krishna to Arjuna, encouraging him to fight (Bhagavad Gita, 3:30). This does not mean that believers in the Gita should wage wars all the time. Mahatma Gandhi, after all, derived his philosophy of non-violence from the same Gita. The exhortation to wage war in the Gita applies only to exceptional cases where circumstances leave no choice. But for general day-to-day existence it gives the same peaceful commands as derived from it by Mahatma Gandhi. ========== Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Highlight at location 244-245 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:44:39 Similarly, Jesus Christ said, ‘Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ (Matthew, 10:34). ========== ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
738:76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract
78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.
83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers
85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth
87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
89. William Wordsworth – Poems
90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria
91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War
93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
94. Lord Byron – Don Juan
95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet
100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times
106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto
109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays
114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger
116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism
117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power
119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method
120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces ~ Mortimer J Adler,#NFDB
739:It will be seen how there can be the idea of a special science, the *critique of pure reason* as it may be called. For reason is the faculty which supplies the *principles* of *a priori* knowledge. Pure reason therefore is that which contains the principles of knowing something entirely *a priori*. An *organon* of pure reason would be the sum total of the principles by which all pure *a priori* knowledge can be acquired and actually established. Exhaustive application of such an organon would give us a system of pure reason. But as this would be a difficult task, and as at present it is still doubtful whether indeed an expansion of our knowledge is possible here at all, we may regard a science that merely judges pure reason, its sources and limits, as the *propaedeutic* to the system of pure reason. In general, it would have to be called only a *critique*, not a *doctrine* of pure reason. Its utility, in regard to speculation, would only be negative, for it would serve only to purge rather than to expand our reason, and, which after all is a considerable gain, would guard reason against errors. I call all knowledge *transcendental* which deals not so much with objects as with our manner of knowing objects insofar as this manner is to be possible *a priori*. A system of such concepts would be called *transcendental philosophy*. But this is still, as a beginning, too great an undertaking. For since such a science must contain completely both analytic and synthetic *a priori* knowledge, it is, as far as our present purpose is concerned, much too comprehensive. We will be satisfied to carry the analysis only so far as is indispensably necessary in order to understand in their whole range the principles of *a priori* synthesis, with which alone we are concerned. This investigation, which properly speaking should be called only a transcendental critique but not a doctrine, is all we are dealing with at present. It is not meant to expand our knowledge but only to correct it, and to become the touchstone of the value, or lack of value, of all *a priori* knowledge. Such a critique is therefore the preparation, as far as possible, for a new organon, or, if this should turn out not to be possible, for a canon at least, according to which, thereafter, the complete system of a philosophy of pure reason, whether it serve as an expansion or merely as a limitation of its knowledge, may be carried out both analytically and synthetically. That such a system is possible, indeed that it need not be so comprehensive as to cut us off from the hope of completing it, may already be gathered from the fact that it would have to deal not with the nature of things, which is inexhaustible, but with the understanding which makes judgments about the nature of things, and with this understanding again only as far as its *a priori* knowledge is concerned. The supply of this *a priori* knowledge cannot be hidden from us, as we need not look for it outside the understanding, and we may suppose this supply to prove sufficiently small for us to record completely, judge as to its value or lack of value and appraise correctly. Still less ought we to expect here a critique of books and systems of pure reason, but only the critique of the faculty of pure reason itself. Only once we are in possession of this critique do we have a reliable touchstone for estimating the philosophical value of old and new works on this subject. Otherwise, an unqualified historian and judge does nothing but pass judgments upon the groundless assertions of others by means of his own, which are equally groundless. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
740:And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this sort.
Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between science and religion' in full blast.
The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but'—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do you find?
Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce. This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism at large.
That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the 'Absolute,' on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it. ~ William James,#NFDB
741:Arts of energy management and of combat are, of course, not confined to the Chinese only. Peoples of different cultures have practised and spread these arts since ancient times. Those who follow the Chinese tradition call these arts chi kung and kungfu (or qigong and gongfu in Romanized Chinese), and those following other traditions call them by other names.
Muslims in various parts of the world have developed arts of energy management and of combat to very high levels. Many practices in Sufism, which is spiritual cultivation in Islamic tradition, are similar to chi kung practices. As in chi kung, Sufi practitioners pay much importance to the training of energy and spirit, called “qi” and “shen” in Chinese, but “nafas” and “roh” in Muslim terms.
When one can free himself from cultural and religious connotations, he will find that the philosophy of Sufism and of chi kung are similar. A Sufi practitioner believes that his own breath, or nafas, is a gift of God, and his ultimate goal in life is to be united with God. Hence, he practises appropriate breathing exercises so that the breath of God flows harmoniously through him, cleansing him of his weakness and sin, which are manifested as illness and pain.
And he practises meditation so that ultimately his personal spirit will return to the universal Spirit of God. In chi kung terms, this returning to God is expressed as “cultivating spirit to return to the Great Void”, which is “lian shen huan shi” in Chinese. Interestingly the breathing and meditation methods in Sufism and in chi kung are quite similar.
Some people, including some Muslims, may think that meditation is unIslamic, and therefore taboo. This is a serious mis-conception. Indeed, Prophet Mohammed himself clearly states that a day of meditation is better than sixty years of worship. As in any religion, there is often a huge conceptual gap between the highest teaching and the common followers. In Buddhism, for example, although the Buddha clearly states that meditation is the essential path to the highest spiritual attainment, most common Buddhists do not have any idea of meditation.
The martial arts of the Muslims were effective and sophisticated. At many points in world history, the Muslims, such as the Arabs, the Persians and the Turks, were formidable warriors. Modern Muslim martial arts are very advanced and are complete by themselves, i.e. they do not need to borrow from outside arts for their force training or combat application — for example, they do not need to borrow from chi kung for internal force training, Western aerobics for stretching, judo and kickboxing for throws and kicks.
[...]
It is reasonable if sceptics ask, “If they are really so advanced, why don't they take part in international full contact fighting competitions and win titles?” The answer is that they hold different values. They are not interested in fighting or titles. At their level, their main concern is spiritual cultivation. Not only they will not be bothered whether you believe in such abilities, generally they are reluctant to let others know of their abilities.
Muslims form a substantial portion of the population in China, and they have contributed an important part in the development of chi kung and kungfu. But because the Chinese generally do not relate one's achievements to one's religion, the contributions of these Chinese Muslim masters did not carry the label “Muslim” with them.
In fact, in China the Muslim places of worship are not called mosques, as in many other countries, but are called temples. Most people cannot tell the difference be ~ Wong Kiew Kit,#NFDB
742:The sensational event of the ancient world was the mobilisation of the underworld against the established order. This enterprise of Christianity had no more to do with religion than Marxist socialism has to do with the solution of the social problem. The notions represented by Jewish Christianity were strictly unthinkable to Roman brains. The ancient world had a liking for clarity. Scientific research was encouraged there. The gods, for the Romans, were familiar images. It is some what difficult to know whether they had any exact idea of the Beyond. For them, eternal life was personified in living beings, and it consisted in a perpetual renewal. Those were conceptions fairly close to those which were current amongst the Japanese and Chinese at the time when the Swastika made its appearance amongst them.
It was necessary for the Jew to appear on the scene and introduce that mad conception of a life that continues into an alleged Beyond! It enables one to regard life as a thing that is negligible here below—since it will flourish later, when it no longer exists. Under cover of a religion, the Jew has introduced intolerance in a sphere in which tolerance formerly prevailed. Amongst the Romans, the cult of the sovereign intelligence was associated with the modesty of a humanity that knew its limits, to the point of consecrating altars to the unknown god.
The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world—in order to ruin it—re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It's the same sleight-of-hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx.
Peace can result only from a natural order. The condition of this order is that there is a hierarchy amongst nations. The most capable nations must necessarily take the lead. In this order, the subordinate nations get the greater profit, being protected by the more capable nations.
It is Jewry that always destroys this order. It constantly provokes the revolt of the weak against the strong, of bestiality against intelligence, of quantity against quality. It took fourteen centuries for Christianity to reach the peak of savagery and stupidity. We would therefore be wrong to sin by excess of confidence and proclaim our definite victory over Bolshevism. The more we render the Jew incapable of harming us, the more we shall protect ourselves from this danger. The Jew plays in nature the rôle of a catalysing element. A people that is rid of its Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order.
In 1925 I wrote in Mein Kampf (and also in an unpublished work) that world Jewry saw in Japan an opponent beyond its reach. The racial instinct is so developed amongst the Japanese therefore compelled to act from outside. It would be to the considered interests of England and the United States to come to an understanding with Japan, but the Jew will strive to prevent such an understanding. I gave this warning in vain. A question arises. Does the Jew act consciously and by calculation, or is he driven on by his instinct? I cannot answer that question.
The intellectual élite of Europe (whether professors of faculties, high officials, or whatever else) never understood anything of this problem. The élite has been stuffed with false ideas, and on these it lives. It propagates a science that causes the greatest possible damage. Stunted men have the philosophy of stunted men. They love neither strength nor health, and they regard weakness and sickness as supreme values.
Since it's the function that creates the organ, entrust the world for a few centuries to a German professor—and you'll soon have a mankind of cretins, made up of men with big heads set upon meagre bodies. ~ Adolf Hitler,#NFDB
743:Sunlight On The Sea
[The Philosophy of a Feast]
Make merry, comrades, eat and drink
(The sunlight flickers on the sea),
The garlands gleam, the glasses clink,
The grape juice mantles fair and free,
The lamps are trimm'd, although the light
Of day still lingers on the sky ;
We sit between the day and night,
And push the wine-flask merrily
I see you feasting round me still,
All gay of heart and strong of limb ;
Make merry, friends, your glasses fill,
The lights are growing dim.
I miss the voice of one I've heard
(The sunlight sinks upon the sea),
He sang as blythe as any bird,
And shook the rafters with his glee ;
But times have changed with him, I wot,
By fickle fortune cross'd and flung ;
Far stouter heart than mine he's got
If now he sings as then he sung.
Yet some must swim when others sink,
And some must sink when others swim ;
Make merry, comrades, eat and drink,
The lights are growing dim.
I miss the face of one I've loved—
(The sunlight settles on the sea ;)
Long since to distant climes he roved ;
He had his faults, and so have we ;
His name was mentioned here this day,
And it was coupled with a sneer ;
I heard, nor had I aught to say,
Though once I held his memory dear.
Who cares, 'mid wines and fruits and flowers,
Though death or danger compass him,
He had his faults, and we have ours,
247
The lights are growing dim.
I miss the form of one I know—
(The sunlight wanes upon the sea)
'Tis not so very long ago ;
We drank his health with three-times-three,
And we were gay when he was here ;
And he is gone, and we are gay.
Where has he gone ? or far or near ?
Good sooth, 'twere somewhat hard to say.
You glance aside, you doubtless think
My homily a foolish whim,
'Twill soon be ended, eat and drink,
The lights are growing dim.
The fruit is ripe, the wine is red ;
(The sunlight fades upon the sea.)
To us the absent are the dead,
The dead to us must absent be.
We, too, the absent ranks must joinn ;
And friends will censure and forget :
There's metal base in every coin ;
Men vanish, leaving traces yet
Of evil and of good behind,
Since false notes taint the skylark's hymn,
And dross still lurks in gold refined—
The lights are growing dim.
We eat and drink or ere we die,
(The sunlight flushes on the sea.)
Three hundred soldiers feasted high
An hour before Thermopylae ;
Leonidas pour'd out the wine,
And shouted ere he drain'd the cup,
'Ho ! comrades, let us gaily dine—
This night with Pluto we shall sup ;'
And if they leant upon a reed,
And if their reed was slight and slim,
There's something good in Spartan creed—
The lights are growing dim.
Make merry, comrades, eat and drink,
248
(The sunlight flashes on the sea ;)
My spirit is rejoiced to think
That even as they were so are we ;
For they, like us, were mortals vain,
The slaves to earthly passions wild,
Who slept with heaps of Persians slain
For winding-sheets around them piled.
The dead man's deeds are living still—
My Festive speech is somewhat grim—
Their good obliterates their ill—
The lights are growing dim.
We eat and drink, we come and go,
(The sunlight dies upon the open sea.)
I speak in riddles. Is it so ?
My riddles need not mar your glee ;
For I will neither bid you share
My thoughts, nor will I bid you shun,
Though I should see in yonder chair
Th' Egyptian's muffled skeleton.
One toast with me, your glasses fill,
Aye, fill them level with the brim,
De mortuis, nisi bonum, nil!
The lights are growing dim.
~ Adam Lindsay Gordon,#NFDB
744:I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine's books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.
I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man...
Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters - seldom in any school of writing.
Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object.
...we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration:
'The world is my country; to do good my religion.'
Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in 'The Rights of Man', and that genius busy at his favorite task - liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, 'The Rights of Man' yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke's effort in his 'Reflections'.
Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him.
'Tom Paine is quite right,' said Pitt, the Prime Minister, 'but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.'
Here we see the progressive quality of Paine's genius at its best. 'The Rights of Man' amplified and reasserted what already had been said in 'Common Sense', with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France.
So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre's enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument.
But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of 'The Age of Reason' and now turned his time to the latter part.
Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events 'The Age of Reason' appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle - a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking.
{The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925} ~ Thomas A Edison,#NFDB
745:Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.'
But it is hardly strange.
Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind.
We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen.
Washington himself appreciated Paine at his true worth. Franklin knew him for a great patriot and clear thinker. He was a friend and confidant of Jefferson, and the two must often have debated the academic and practical phases of liberty.
I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it.
Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring. Therefore time must balance the scales. The Declaration and the Constitution expressed in form Paine's theory of political rights. He worked in Philadelphia at the time that the first document was written, and occupied a position of intimate contact with the nation's leaders when they framed the Constitution.
Certainly we may believe that Washington had a considerable voice in the Constitution. We know that Jefferson had much to do with the document. Franklin also had a hand and probably was responsible in even larger measure for the Declaration. But all of these men had communed with Paine. Their views were intimately understood and closely correlated. There is no doubt whatever that the two great documents of American liberty reflect the philosophy of Paine.
...Then Paine wrote 'Common Sense,' an anonymous tract which immediately stirred the fires of liberty. It flashed from hand to hand throughout the Colonies. One copy reached the New York Assembly, in session at Albany, and a night meeting was voted to answer this unknown writer with his clarion call to liberty. The Assembly met, but could find no suitable answer. Tom Paine had inscribed a document which never has been answered adversely, and never can be, so long as man esteems his priceless possession.
In 'Common Sense' Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again. It must be remembered that 'Common Sense' preceded the declaration and affirmed the very principles that went into the national doctrine of liberty. But that affirmation was made with more vigor, more of the fire of the patriot and was exactly suited to the hour... Certainly [the Revolution] could not be forestalled, once he had spoken.
{The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925} ~ Thomas A Edison,#NFDB
746:Jubilate Agno: Fragment B, Part 2
LET PETER rejoice with the MOON FISH who keeps up the life in the waters by
night.
Let Andrew rejoice with the Whale, who is array'd in beauteous blue and is a
combination of bulk and activity.
Let James rejoice with the Skuttle-Fish, who foils his foe by the effusion of his
ink.
Let John rejoice with Nautilus who spreads his sail and plies his oar, and the Lord
is his pilot.
Let Philip rejoice with Boca, which is a fish that can speak.
Let Bartholomew rejoice with the Eel, who is pure in proportion to where he is
found and how he is used.
Let Thomas rejoice with the Sword-Fish, whose aim is perpetual and strength
insuperable.
Let Matthew rejoice with Uranoscopus, whose eyes are lifted up to God.
Let James the less, rejoice with the Haddock, who brought the piece of money for
the Lord and Peter.
Let Jude bless with the Bream, who is of melancholy from his depth and serenity.
Let Simon rejoice with the Sprat, who is pure and innumerable.
Let Matthias rejoice with the Flying-Fish, who has a part with the birds, and is
sublimity in his conceit.
Let Stephen rejoice with Remora -- The Lord remove all obstacles to his glory.
Let Paul rejoice with the Scale, who is pleasant and faithful!, like God's good
ENGLISHMAN.
Let Agrippa, which is Agricola, rejoice with Elops, who is a choice fish.
56
Let Joseph rejoice with the Turbut, whose capture makes the poor fisher-man
sing.
Let Mary rejoice with the Maid -- blessed be the name of the immaculate
CONCEPTION.
Let John, the Baptist, rejoice with the Salmon -- blessed be the name of the Lord
Jesus for infant Baptism.
Let Mark rejoice with the Mullet, who is John Dore, God be gracious to him and
his family.
Let Barnabus rejoice with the Herring -- God be gracious to the Lord's fishery.
Let Cleopas rejoice with the Mackerel, who cometh in a shoal after a leader.
Let Abiud of the Lord's line rejoice with Murex, who is good and of a precious
tincture.
Let Eliakim rejoice with the Shad, who is contemned in his abundance.
Let Azor rejoice with the Flounder, who is both of the sea and of the river,
Let Sadoc rejoice with the Bleak, who playeth upon the surface in the Sun.
Let Achim rejoice with the Miller's Thumb, who is a delicious morsel for the water
fowl.
Let Eliud rejoice with Cinaedus, who is a fish yellow all over.
Let Eleazar rejoice with the Grampus, who is a pompous spouter.
Let Matthan rejoice with the Shark, who is supported by multitudes of small
value.
Let Jacob rejoice with the Gold Fish, who is an eye-trap.
Let Jairus rejoice with the Silver Fish, who is bright and lively.
Let Lazarus rejoice with Torpedo, who chills the life of the assailant through his
staff.
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Let Mary Magdalen rejoice with the Place, whose goodness and purity are of the
Lord's making.
Let Simon the leper rejoice with the Eel-pout, who is a rarity on account of his
subtlety.
Let Alpheus rejoice with the Whiting, whom God hath bless'd in multitudes, and
his days are as the days of PURIM.
Let Onesimus rejoice with the Cod -- blessed be the name of the Lord Jesus for a
miraculous draught of men.
Let Joses rejoice with the Sturgeon, who saw his maker in the body and obtained
grace.
Let Theophilus rejoice with the Folio, who hath teeth, like the teeth of a saw.
Let Bartimeus rejoice with the Quaviver -- God be gracious to the eyes of him,
who prayeth for the blind.
Let CHRISTOPHER, who is Simon of Cyrene, rejoice with the Rough -- God be
gracious to the CAM and to DAVID CAM and his seed for ever.
Let Timeus rejoice with the Ling -- God keep the English Sailors clear of French
bribery.
Let Salome rejoice with the Mermaid, who hath the countenance and a portion of
human reason.
Let Zacharias rejoice with the Gudgeon, who improves in his growth till he is
mistaken.
Let Campanus rejoice with the Lobster -- God be gracious to all the CAMPBELLs
especially John.
Let Martha rejoice with the Skallop -- the Lord revive the exercise and excellence
of the Needle.
Let Mary rejoice with the Carp -- the ponds of Fairlawn and the garden bless for
the master.
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Let Zebedee rejoice with the Tench -- God accept the good son for his parents
also.
Let Joseph of Arimathea rejoice with the Barbel -- a good coffin and a tombstone without grudging!
Let Elizabeth rejoice with the Crab -- it is good, at times, to go back.
Let Simeon rejoice with the Oyster, who hath the life without locomotion.
Let Jona rejoice with the Wilk -- Wilks, Wilkie, and Wilkinson bless the name of
the Lord Jesus.
Let Nicodemus rejoice with the Muscle, for so he hath provided for the poor.
Let Gamaliel rejoice with the Cockle -- I will rejoice in the remembrance of
mercy.
Let Agabus rejoice with the Smelt -- The Lord make me serviceable to the
HOWARDS.
Let Rhoda rejoice with the Sea-Cat, who is pleasantry and purity.
Let Elmodam rejoice with the Chubb, who is wary of the bait and thrives in his
circumspection.
Let Jorim rejoice with the Roach -- God bless my throat and keep me from things
stranggled.
Let Addi rejoice with the Dace -- It is good to angle with meditation.
Let Luke rejoice with the Trout -- Blessed be Jesus in Aa, in Dee and in Isis.
Let Cosam rejoice with the Perch, who is a little tyrant, because he is not liable to
that, which he inflicts.
Let Levi rejoice with the Pike -- God be merciful to all dumb creatures in respect
of pain.
Let Melchi rejoice with the Char, who cheweth the cud.
Let Joanna rejoice with the Anchovy -- I beheld and lo! 'a great multitude!
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Let Neri rejoice with the Keeling Fish, who is also called the Stock Fish.
Let Janna rejoice with the Pilchard -- the Lord restore the seed of Abishai.
Let Esli rejoice with the Soal, who is flat and spackles for the increase of motion.
Let Nagge rejoice with the Perriwinkle -- 'for the rain it raineth every day.'
Let Anna rejoice with the Porpus, who is a joyous fish and of good omen.
Let Phanuel rejoice with the Shrimp, which is the childrens fishery.
Let Chuza rejoice with the Sea-Bear, who is full of sagacity and prank.
Let Susanna rejoice with the Lamprey, who is an eel with a title.
Let Candace rejoice with the Craw-fish -- How hath the Christian minister
renowned the Queen.
Let The Eunuch rejoice with the Thorn-Back -- It is good to be discovered reading
the BIBLE.
Let Simon the Pharisee rejoice with the Grigg -- the Lord bring up Issachar and
Dan.
Let Simon the converted Sorcerer rejoice with the Dab quoth Daniel.
Let Joanna, of the Lord's line, rejoice with the Minnow, who is multiplied against
the oppressor.
Let Jonas rejoice with the Sea-Devil, who hath a good name from his Maker.
Let Alexander rejoice with the Tunny -- the worse the time the better the
eternity.
Let Rufus rejoice with the Needle-fish, who is very good in his element.
Let Matthat rejoice with the Trumpet-fish -- God revive the blowing of the
TRUMPETS.
Let Mary, the mother of James, rejoice with the Sea-Mouse -- it is good to be at
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peace.
Let Prochorus rejoice with Epodes, who is a kind of fish with Ovid who is at peace
in the Lord.
Let Timotheus rejoice with the Dolphin, who is of benevolence.
Let Nicanor rejoice with the Skeat -- Blessed be the name of the Lord Jesus in
fish and in the Shewbread, which ought to be continually on the altar, now more
than ever, and the want of it is the Abomination of Desolation spoken of by
Daniel.
Let Timon rejoice with Crusion -- The Shew-Bread in the first place is gratitude to
God to shew who is bread, whence it is, and that there is enough and to spare.
Let Parmenas rejoice with the Mixon -- Secondly it is to prevent the last
extremity, for it is lawful that rejected hunger may take it.
Let Dorcas rejoice with Dracunculus -- blessed be the name of the Lord Jesus in
the Grotto.
Let Tychicus rejoice with Scolopendra, who quits himself of the hook by voiding
his intrails.
Let Trophimus rejoice with the Sea-Horse, who shoud have been to Tychicus the
father of Yorkshiremen.
Let Tryphena rejoice with Fluta -- Saturday is the Sabbath for the mouth of God
hath spoken it.
Let Tryphosa rejoice with Acarne -- With such preparation the Lord's Jubile is
better kept.
Let Simon the Tanner rejoice with Alausa -- Five days are sufficient for the
purposes of husbandry.
Let Simeon Niger rejoice with the Loach -- The blacks are the seed of Cain.
Let Lucius rejoice with Corias -- Some of Cain's seed was preserved in the loins
of Ham at the flood.
Let Manaen rejoice with Donax. My DEGREE is good even here, in the Lord I have
61
a better.
Let Sergius Paulus rejoice with Dentex -- Blessed be the name Jesus for my
teeth.
Let Silas rejoice with the Cabot -- the philosophy of the times ev'n now is vain
deceit.
Let Barsabas rejoice with Cammarus -- Newton is ignorant for if a man consult
not the WORD how should he understand the WORK? -Let Lydia rejoice with Attilus -- Blessed be the name of him which eat the fish
and honey comb.
Let Jason rejoice with Alopecias, who is subtlety without offence.
Let Dionysius rejoice with Alabes who is peculiar to the Nile.
Let Damaris rejoice with Anthias -- The fountain of the Nile is known to the
Eastern people who drink it.
Let Apollos rejoice with Astacus, but St Paul is the Agent for England.
Let Justus rejoice with Crispus in a Salmon-Trout -- the Lord look on the soul of
Richard Atwood.
Let Crispus rejoice with Leviathan -- God be gracious to the soul of HOBBES, who
was no atheist, but a servant of Christ, and died in the Lord -- I wronged him
God forgive me.
Let Aquila rejoice with Beemoth who is Enoch no fish but a stupendous creeping
Thing.
Let Priscilla rejoice with Cythera. As earth increases by Beemoth so the sea
likewise enlarges.
Let Tyrannus rejoice with Cephalus who hath a great head.
Let Gaius rejoice with the Water-Tortoise -- Paul and Tychicus were in England
with Agricola my father.
Let Aristarchus rejoice with Cynoglossus -- The Lord was at Glastonbury in the
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body and blessed the thorn.
Let Alexander rejoice with the Sea-Urchin -- The Lord was at Bristol and blessed
the waters there.
Let Sopater rejoice with Elacate -- The waters of Bath were blessed by St
Matthias.
Let Secundus rejoice with Echeneis who is the sea-lamprey.
Let Eutychus rejoice with Cnide -- Fish and honeycomb are blessed to eat after a
recovery. -Let Mnason rejoice with Vulvula a sort of fish -- Good words are of God, the cant
from the Devil.
Let Claudius Lysias rejoice with Coracinus who is black and peculiar to Nile.
Let Bernice rejoice with Corophium which is a kind of crab.
Let Phebe rejoice with Echinometra who is a beautiful shellfish red and green.
Let Epenetus rejoice with Erythrinus who is red with a white belly.
Let Andronicus rejoice with Esox, the Lax, a great fish of the Rhine.
Let Junia rejoice with the Faber-Fish -- Broil'd fish and honeycomb may be taken
for the sacrament.
Let Amplias rejoice with Garus, who is a kind of Lobster.
Let Urbane rejoice with Glanis, who is a crafty fish who bites away the bait and
saves himself.
Let Stachys rejoice with Glauciscus, who is good for Women's milk.
Let Apelles rejoice with Glaucus -- behold the seed of the brave and ingenious
how they are saved!
Let Aristobulus rejoice with Glycymerides who is pure and sweet.
Let Herodion rejoice with Holothuria which are prickly fishes.
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Let Narcissus rejoice with Hordeia -- I will magnify the Lord who multiplied the
fish.
Let Persis rejoice with Liparis -- I will magnify the Lord who multiplied the barley
loaves.
Let Rufus rejoice with Icthyocolla of whose skin a water-glue is made.
Let Asyncritus rejoice with Labrus who is a voracious fish.
Let Phlegon rejoice with the Sea-Lizard -- Bless Jesus THOMAS BOWLBY and all
the seed of Reuben.
Let Hermas rejoice with Lamyrus who is of things creeping in the sea.
Let Patrobas rejoice with Lepas, all shells are precious.
Let Hermes rejoice with Lepus, who is a venomous fish.
Let Philologus rejoice with Ligarius -- shells are all parries to the adversary.
Let Julia rejoice with the Sleeve-Fish -- Blessed be Jesus for all the TAYLERS.
Let Nereus rejoice with the Calamary -- God give success to our fleets.
Let Olympas rejoice with the Sea-Lantern, which glows upon the waters.
Let Sosipater rejoice with Cornuta. There are fish for the Sea-Night-Birds that
glow at bottom.
Let Lucius rejoice with the Cackrel Fish. God be gracious to JMs FLETCHER who
has my tackling.
Let Tertius rejoice with Maia which is a kind of crab.
Let Erastus rejoice with Melandry which is the largest Tunny.
Let Quartus rejoice with Mena. God be gracious to the immortal soul of poor
Carte, who was barbarously and cowardly murder'd -- the Lord prevent the
dealers in clandestine death.
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Let Sosthenes rejoice with the Winkle -- all shells like the parts of the body are
good kept for those parts.
Let Chloe rejoice with the Limpin -- There is a way to the terrestrial Paradise
upon the knees.
Let Carpus rejoice with the Frog-Fish -- A man cannot die upon his knees.
Let Stephanas rejoice with Mormyra who is a fish of divers colours.
Let Fortunatus rejoice with the Burret -- it is good to be born when things are
crossed.
Let Lois rejoice with the Angel-Fish -- There is a fish that swims in the fluid
Empyrean.
Let Achaicus rejoice with the Fat-Back -- The Lord invites his fishers to the WEST
INDIES.
Let Sylvanus rejoice with the Black-Fish -- Oliver Cromwell himself was the
murderer in the Mask.
Let Titus rejoice with Mys -- O Tite siquid ego adjuero curamve levasso!
Let Euodias rejoice with Myrcus -- There is a perfumed fish I will offer him for a
sweet savour to the Lord.
Let Syntyche rejoice with Myax -- There are shells in the earth which were left by
the FLOOD.
Let Clement rejoice with Ophidion -- There are shells again in earth at sympathy
with those in sea.
Let Epaphroditus rejoice with Opthalmias -- The Lord increase the Cambridge
collection of fossils.
Let Epaphras rejoice with Orphus -- God be gracious to the immortal soul of Dr
Woodward.
Let Justus rejoice with Pagrus -- God be gracious to the immortal soul of Dr
Middleton.
65
Let Nymphas rejoice with Fagurus -- God bless Charles Mason and all Trinity
College.
Let Archippus rejoice with Nerita whose shell swimmeth.
Let Eunice rejoice with Oculata who is of the Lizard kind.
Let Onesephorus rejoice with Orca, who is a great fish.
Let Eubulus rejoice with Ostrum the scarlet -- God be gracious to Gordon and
Groat.
Let Pudens rejoice with Polypus -- The Lord restore my virgin!
Let Linus rejoice with Ozsena who is a kind of Polype -- God be gracious to Lyne
and Anguish.
Let Claudia rejoice with Pascer -- the purest creatures minister to wantoness by
unthankfulness.
Let Artemas rejoice with Pastinaca who is a fish with a sting.
Let Zenas rejoice with Pecten -- The Lord obliterate the laws of man!
Let Philemon rejoice with Pelagia -- The laws and judgement are impudence and
blindness.
Let Apphia rejoice with Pelamis -- The Lord Jesus is man's judgement.
Let Demetrius rejoice with Peloris, who is greatest of Shell-Fishes.
Let Antipas rejoice with Pentadactylus -- A papist hath no sentiment God bless
CHURCHILL.
***
FOR I pray the Lord JESUS that cured the LUNATICK to be merciful to all my
brethren and sisters in these houses.
For they work me with their harping-irons, which is a barbarous instrument,
because I am more unguarded than others.
66
For the blessing of God hath been on my epistles, which I have written for the
benefit of others.
For I bless God that the CHURCH of ENGLAND is one of the SEVEN ev'n the
candlestick of the Lord.
For the ENGLISH TONGUE shall be the language of the WEST.
For I pray Almighty CHRIST to bless the MAGDALEN HOUSE and to forward a
National purification.
For I have the blessing of God in the three POINTS of manhood, of the pen, of
the sword, and of chivalry.
For I am inquisitive in the Lord, and defend the philosophy of the scripture
against vain deceit.
For the nets come down from the eyes of the Lord to fish up men to their
salvation.
For I have a greater compass both of mirth and melancholy than another.
For I bless the Lord JESUS in the innumerables, and for ever and ever.
For I am redoubted, and redoubtable in the Lord, as is THOMAS BECKET my
father.
For I have had the grace to GO BACK, which is my blessing unto prosperity.
For I paid for my seat in St PAUL's, when I was six years old, and took
possession against the evil day.
For I am descended from the steward of the island -- blessed be the name of the
Lord Jesus king of England.
For the poor gentleman is the first object of the Lord's charity and he is the most
pitied who hath lost the most.
For I am in twelve HARDSHIPS, but he that was born of a virgin shall deliver me
out of all.
For I am safe, as to my head, from the female dancer and her admirers.
67
For I pray for CHICHISTER to give the glory to God, and to keep the adversary at
bay.
For I am making to the shore day by day, the Lord Jesus take me.
For I bless the Lord JESUS upon RAMSGATE PIER -- the Lord forward the building
of harbours.
For I bless the Lord JESUS for his very seed, which is in my body.
For I pray for R and his family, I pray for Mr Becher, and I bean for the Lord
JESUS.
For I pray to God for Nore, for the Trinity house, for all light-houses, beacons and
buoys.
For I bless God that I am not in a dungeon, but am allowed the light of the Sun.
For I pray God for the PYGMIES against their feathered adversaries, as a deed of
charity.
For I pray God for all those, who have defiled themselves in matters
inconvenient.
For I pray God be gracious to CORNELIUS MATTHEWS name and connection.
For I am under the same accusation with my Saviour -- -for they said, he is
besides himself.
For I pray God for the introduction of new creatures into this island.
For I pray God for the ostriches of Salisbury Plain, the beavers of the Medway
and silver fish of Thames.
For Charity is cold in the multitude of possessions, and the rich are covetous of
their crumbs.
For I pray to be accepted as a dog without offence, which is best of all.
For I wish to God and desire towards the most High, which is my policy.
68
For the tides are the life of God in the ocean, and he sends his angel to trouble
the great DEEP.
For he hath fixed the earth upon arches and pillars, and the flames of hell flow
under it.
For the grosser the particles the nearer to the sink, and the nearer to purity, the
quicker the gravitation.
For MATTER is the dust of the Earth, every atom of which is the life.
For MOTION is as the quantity of life direct, and that which hath not motion, is
resistance.
For Resistance is not of GOD, but he -- hath built his works upon it.
For the Centripetal and Centrifugal forces are GOD SUSTAINING and DIRECTING.
For Elasticity is the temper of matter to recover its place with vehemence.
For Attraction is the earning of parts, which have a similitude in the life.
For the Life of God is in the Loadstone, and there is a magnet, which pointeth
due EAST.
For the Glory of God is always in the East, but cannot be seen for the cloud of the
crucifixion.
For due East is the way to Paradise, which man knoweth not by reason of his fall.
For the Longitude is (nevertheless) attainable by steering angularly
notwithstanding.
For Eternity is a creature and is built upon Eternity ¥ê¥á¥ó¥á¥â¥ï¥ë¥ç ¥å¥g¥é
¥ó¥ç ¥ä¥é¥á¥â¥ï¥ë¥ç .
For Fire is a mixed nature of body and spirit, and the body is fed by that which
hath not life.
For Fire is exasperated by the Adversary, who is Death, unto the detriment of
69
man.
For an happy Conjecture is a miraculous cast by the Lord Jesus.
For a bad Conjecture is a draught of stud and mud.
For there is a Fire which is blandishing, and which is of God direct.
For Fire is a substance and distinct, and purifyeth ev'n in hell.
For the Shears is the first of the mechanical powers, and to be used on the
knees.
For if Adam had used this instrument right, he would not have fallen.
For the power of the Shears Is direct as the life.
For the power of the WEDGE is direct as it's altitude by communication of
Almighty God.
For the Skrew, Axle and Wheel, Pulleys, the Lever and Inclined Plane are known
in the Schools.
For the Centre is not known but by the application of the members to matter.
For I have shown the Vis Inerti©¡ to be false, and such is all nonsense.
For the Centre is the hold of the Spirit upon the matter in hand.
For FRICTION is inevitable because the Universe is FULL of God's works.
For the PERPETUAL MOTION is in all the works of Almighty GOD.
For it is not so in the engines of man, which are made of dead materials, neither
indeed can be.
For the Moment of bodies, as it is used, is a false term -- bless God ye Speakers
on the Fifth of November.
For Time and Weight are by their several estimates.
For I bless GOD in the discovery of the LONGITUDE direct by the means of
70
GLADWICK.
For the motion of the PENDULUM is the longest in that it parries resistance.
For the WEDDING GARMENTS of all men are prepared in the SUN against the day
of acceptation.
For the Wedding Garments of all women are prepared in the MOON against the
day of their purification.
For CHASTITY is the key of knowledge as in Esdras, Sr Isaac Newton and now,
God be praised, in me.
For Newton nevertheless is more of error than of the truth, but I am of the
WORD of GOD.
For WATER, is not of solid constituents, but is dissolved from precious stones
above.
For the life remains in its dissolvent state, and that in great power.
For WATER is condensed by the Lord's FROST, tho' not by the FLORENTINE
experiment.
For GLADWICK is a substance growing on hills in the East, candied by the sun,
and of diverse colours.
For it is neither stone nor metal but a new creature, soft to the ax, but hard to
the hammer.
For it answers sundry uses, but particularly it supplies the place of Glass.
For it giveth a benign light without the fragility, malignity or mischief of Glass.
For it attracteth all the colours of the GREAT BOW which is fixed in the EAST.
For the FOUNTAINS and SPRINGS are the life of the waters working up to God.
For they are in SYMPATHY with the waters above the Heavens, which are solid.
For the Fountains, springs and rivers are all of them from the sea, whose water is
filtrated and purified by the earth.
71
For there is Water above the visible surface in a spiritualizing state, which cannot
be seen but by application of a CAPILLARY TUBE.
For the ASCENT of VAPOURS is the return of thanksgiving from all humid bodies.
For the RAIN WATER kept in a reservoir at any altitude, suppose of a thousand
feet, will make a fountain from a spout of ten feet of the same height.
For it will ascend in a stream two thirds of the way and afterwards prank itself
into ten thousand agreeable forms.
For the SEA is a seventh of the Earth -- the spirit of the Lord by Esdras.
For MERCURY is affected by the AIR because it is of a similar subtlety.
For the rising in the BAROMETER is not effected by pressure but by sympathy.
For it cannot be seperated from the creature with which it is intimately and
eternally connected.
For where it is stinted of air there it will adhere together and stretch on the
reverse.
For it works by ballancing according to the hold of the spirit.
For QUICK-SILVER is spiritual and so is the AIR to all intents and purposes.
For the AIR-PUMP weakens and dispirits but cannot wholly exhaust.
For SUCKTION is the withdrawing of the life, but life will follow as fast as it can.
For there is infinite provision to keep up the life in all the parts of Creation.
For the AIR is contaminated by curses and evil language.
For poysonous creatures catch some of it and retain it or ere it goes to the
adversary.
For IRELAND was without these creatures, till of late, because of the simplicity of
the people.
72
For the AIR. is purified by prayer which is made aloud and with all our might.
For loud prayer is good for weak lungs and for a vitiated throat.
For SOUND is propagated in the spirit and in all directions.
For the VOICE of a figure compleat in all its parts.
For a man speaks HIMSELF from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet.
For a LION roars HIMSELF compleat from head to tail.
For all these things are seen in the spirit which makes the beauty of prayer.
For all whispers and unmusical sounds in general are of the Adversary.
For 'I will hiss saith the Lord' is God's denunciation of death.
For applause or the clapping of the hands is the natural action of a man on the
descent of the glory of God.
For EARTH which is an intelligence hath a voice and a propensity to speak in all
her parts.
For ECHO is the soul of the voice exerting itself in hollow places.
For ECHO cannot act but when she can parry the adversary.
For ECHO is greatest in Churches and where she can assist in prayer.
For a good voice hath its Echo with it and it is attainable by much supplication.
For the FOICE is from the body and the spirit -- and is a a body and a spirit.
For the prayers of good men are therefore visible to second-sighted persons.
For HARPSICHORDS are best strung with gold wire.
For HARPS and VIOLS are best strung with Indian weed.
For the GERMAN FLUTE is an indirect -- the common flute good, bless the Lord
Jesus BENJIMIN HALLET.
73
For the feast of TRUMPETS should be kept up, that being the most direct and
acceptable of all instruments.
For the TRUMPET of God is a blessed intelligence and so are all the instruments
in HEAVEN.
For GOD the father Almighty plays upon the HARP of stupendous magnitude and
melody.
For innumerable Angels fly out at every touch and his tune is a work of creation.
For at that time malignity ceases and the devils themselves are at peace.
For this time is perceptible to man by a remarkable stillness and serenity of soul.
For the ¨¡olian harp is improveable into regularity.
For when it is so improved it will be known to be the SHAWM.
For it woud be better if the LITURGY were musically performed.
For the strings of the SHAWM were upon a cylinder which turned to the wind.
For this was spiritual musick altogether, as the wind is a spirit.
For there is nothing but it may be played upon in delight.
For the flames of fire may lie blown thro musical pipes.
For it is so higher up in the vast empyrean.
For is so real as that which is spiritual.
For an IGNIS FATUUS is either the fool's conceit or a blast from the adversary.
For SHELL-FIRE or ELECTRICAL is the quick air when it is caught.
For GLASS is worked in the fire till it partakes of its nature.
For the electrical fire is easily obtain'd by the working of glass.
74
For all spirits are of fire and the air is a very benign one.
For the MAN in VACUO is a flat conceit of preposterous folly.
For the breath of our nostrils is an electrical spirit.
For an electrical spirit may be exasperated into a malignant fire.
For it is good to quicken in paralytic cases being the life applied unto death,
For the method of philosophizing is in a posture of Adoration.
For the School-Doctrine of Thunder and Lightning is a Diabolical Hypothesis.
For it is taking the nitre from the lower regions and directing it against the
Infinite of Heights.
For THUNDER is the voice of God direct in verse and musick.
For LIGHTNING is a glance of the glory of God.
For the Brimstone that is found at the times of thunder and lightning is worked
up by the Adversary.
For the voice is always for infinite good which he strives to impede.
For the Devil can work coals into shapes to afflict the minds of those that will not
pray.
For the coffin and the cradle and the purse are all against a man.
For the coffin is for the dead and death came by disobedience.
For the cradle is for weakness and the child of man was originally strong from the
womb.
For the purse is for money and money is dead matter with the stamp of human
vanity.
For the adversary frequently sends these particular images out of the fire to
those whom they concern.
75
For the coffin is for me because I have nothing to do with it.
For the cradle is for me because the old Dragon attacked me in it and overcame
in Christ.
For the purse is for me because I have neither money nor human friends.
For LIGHT is propagated at all distances in an instant because it is actuated by
the divine conception.
For the Satellites of the planet prove nothing in this matter but the glory of
Almighty God.
For the SHADE is of death and from the adversary.
For Solomon said vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities all is vanity.
For Jesus says verity of verities, verity of verities all is verity.
For Solomon said THOU FOOL in malice from his own vanity.
For the Lord reviled not all in hardship and temptation unutterable.
For Fire hath this property that it reduces a thing till finally it is not.
For all the filth wicked of men shall be done away by fire in Eternity.
For the furnace itself shall come up at the last according to Abraham's vision.
For the Convex Heaven of shall work about on that great event.
For the ANTARTICK POLE is not yet but shall answer in the Consummation.
For the devil hath most power in winter, because darkness prevails.
For the Longing of Women is the operation of the Devil upon their conceptions.
For the marking of their children is from the same cause both of which are to be
parried by prayer.
For the laws of King James the first against Witchcraft were wise, had it been of
man to make laws.
76
For there are witches and wizards even now who are spoken to by their familiars.
For the visitation of their familiars is prevented by the Lord's incarnation.
For to conceive with intense diligence against one's neighbour is a branch of
witchcraft.
For to use pollution, exact and cross things and at the same time to think against
a man is the crime direct.
For prayer with musick is good for persons so exacted upon.
For before the NATIVITY is the dead of the winter and after it the quick.
For the sin against the HOLY GHOST is INGRATITUDE.
For stuff'd guts make no musick; strain them strong and you shall have sweet
melody.
For the SHADOW is of death, which is the Devil, who can make false and faint
images of the works of Almighty God.
For every man beareth death about him ever since the transgression of Adam,
but in perfect light there is no shadow.
For all Wrath is Fire, which the adversary blows upon and exasperates.
For SHADOW is a fair Word from God, which is not returnable till the furnace
comes up.
For the ECLIPSE is of the adversary -- blessed be the name of Jesus for Whisson
of Trinity.
For the shadow is his and the penumbra is his and his the perplexity of the the
phenomenon.
For the eclipses happen at times when the light is defective.
For the more the light is defective, the more the powers of darkness prevail.
77
For deficiencies happen by the luminaries crossing one another.
For the SUN is an intelligence and an angel of the human form.
For the MOON is an intelligence and an angel in shape like a woman.
For they are together in the spirit every night like man and wife.
For Justice is infinitely beneath Mercy in nature and office.
For the Devil himself may be just in accusation and punishment.
For HELL is without eternity from the presence of Almighty God.
For Volcanos and burning mountains are where the adversary hath most power.
For the angel GRATITUDE is my wife -- God bring me to her or her to me.
For the propagation of light is quick as the divine Conception.
For FROST is damp and unwholsome air candied to fall to the best advantage.
For I am the Lord's News-Writer -- the scribe-evangelist -- Widow Mitchel, Gun
and Grange bless the Lord Jesus.
For Adversity above all other is to be deserted of the grace of God.
For in the divine Idea this Eternity is compleat and the Word is a making many
more.
For there is a forlorn hope ev'n for impenitent sinners because the furnace itself
must be the crown of Eternity.
For my hope is beyond Eternity in the bosom of God my saviour.
For by the grace of God I am the Reviver of ADORATION amongst ENGLISH-MEN.
For being desert-ed is to have desert in the sight of God and intitles one to the
Lord's merit.
For things that are not in the sight of men are thro' God of infinite concern.
78
For envious men have exceeding subtlety quippe qui in -- videant.
For avaricious men are exceeding subtle like the soul seperated from the body.
For their attention is on a sinking object which perishes.
For they can go beyond the children of light in matters of their own misery.
For Snow is the dew candied and cherishes.
For TIMES and SEASONS are the Lord's -- Man is no CHRONOLOGER.
For there is a CIRCULATION of the SAP in all vegetables.
For SOOT is the dross of Fire.
For the CLAPPING of the hands is naught unless it be to the glory of God.
For God will descend in visible glory when men begin to applaud him.
For all STAGE-Playing is Hypocrisy and the Devil is the master of their revels.
For the INNATATION of corpuscles is solved by the Gold-beater's hammer -- God
be gracious to Christopher Peacock and to all my God-Children.
For the PRECESSION of the Equinoxes is improving nature -- something being
gained every where for the glory of God perpetually.
For the souls of the departed are embodied in clouds and purged by the Sun.
For the LONGITUDE may be discovered by attending the motions of the Sun.
Way 2d.
For you must consider the Sun as dodging, which he does to parry observation.
For he must be taken with an Astrolabe, and considered respecting the point he
left.
For you must do this upon your knees and that will secure your point.
For I bless God that I dwell within the sound of Success, and that it is well with
79
ENGLAND this blessed day. NATIVITY of our LORD N.S. 1759.
~ Christopher Smart,#NFDB
20 Integral Yoga
16 Philosophy
15 Psychology
13 Occultism
11 Yoga
5 Christianity
2 Science
2 Hinduism
1 Sufism
1 Integral Theory
1 Fiction
1 Alchemy
35 Sri Aurobindo
13 Carl Jung
8 Aldous Huxley
7 Plato
6 Swami Vivekananda
6 Nolini Kanta Gupta
4 The Mother
3 Sri Ramakrishna
3 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
3 Jordan Peterson
3 Aleister Crowley
3 A B Purani
2 Satprem
2 Patanjali
2 James George Frazer
2 George Van Vrekhem
12 The Synthesis Of Yoga
8 The Perennial Philosophy
6 The Life Divine
6 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
5 The Secret Doctrine
5 The Practice of Psycho therapy
4 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
3 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
3 Mysterium Coniunctionis
3 Maps of Meaning
3 Magick Without Tears
3 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
2 The Golden Bough
2 Talks
2 Raja-Yoga
2 Preparing for the Miraculous
2 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
2 Letters On Yoga II
2 Letters On Poetry And Art
2 Isha Upanishad
2 Essays On The Gita
2 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
2 Essays Divine And Human
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
2 Bhakti-Yoga
0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is this truth which makes necessary to every Philosophy of Yoga the conception of the Ishwara, Lord, supreme Soul or supreme Self, towards whom the effort is directed and who gives the illuminating touch and the strength to attain. Equally true is the complementary idea so often enforced by the Yoga of devotion that as the Transcendent is necessary to the individual and sought after by him, so also the individual is necessary in a sense to the Transcendent and sought after by It. If the
Bhakta seeks and yearns after Bhagavan, Bhagavan also seeks and yearns after the Bhakta.1 There can be no Yoga of knowledge without a human seeker of the knowledge, the supreme subject of knowledge and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of knowledge; no Yoga of devotion without the human God-lover, the supreme object of love and delight and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of spiritual, emotional and aesthetic enjoyment; no Yoga of works without the human worker, the supreme Will, Master of all works and sacrifices, and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of power and action. However Monistic may be our intellectual conception of the highest truth of things, in practice we are compelled to accept this omnipresent Trinity.
0 1961-11-05, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
He was a pastor at Lille, in France, for perhaps ten years; he was quite a practicing Christian, but he dropped it all as soon as he began to study occultism. He had first specialized in theological philosophy in order to pass the pastoral examinations, studying all the modem Philosophy of Europe (he had a rather remarkable metaphysical brain). Then I met him in connection with Theon and the Cosmic Review, and I led him into occult knowledge. Afterwards, there were all sorts of uninteresting stories. He became a lawyer during the early period of our relationship and I learned Law along with him I could even have passed the exam! Then the divorce stories began: he divorced his wife; they had three children and he wanted to keep them, but to do so he had to be legally married, so he asked me to marry himand I said yes. I have always been totally indifferent to these things. Anyway, when I met him I knew who he was and I decided to convert him the whole story revolves around that.
As a matter of fact, the books he wrote (especially the first one, The Living Ether) were based on my knowledge; he put my knowledge into French and beautiful French, I must say! I would tell him my experiences and he would write them down. Later he wrote The Gods (it was incomplete, one-sided). Then he became a lawyer and entered politics (he was a first-class orator and fired his audiences with enthusiasm) and was sent to Pondicherry to help a certain candidate who couldnt manage his election campaign single-handed. And since Richard was interested in occultism and spirituality, he took this opportunity to seek a Master, a yogi. When he arrived, instead of involving himself in politics, the first thing he did was announce, I am seeking a yogi. Someone said to him, Youre incredibly lucky! The yogi has just arrived. It was Sri Aurobindo, who was told, Theres a Frenchman asking to see you. Sri Aurobindo wasnt particularly pleased but he found the coincidence rather interesting and received him. This was in 1910.
02.06 - Vansittartism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Germany is considered now, and naturally with great reason, as the arch criminal among nations. Such megalomania, such lust for wanton cruelty, such wild sadism, such abnormal velleities no people, it is said, have ever evinced anywhere on the face of the earth: the manner and the extent of it all are appalling. Hitler is not the malady; removal of the Fuehrer will not cure Germany. The man is only a sign and a symbol. The whole nation is corrupt to the core: it has been inoculated with a virus that cannot be eradicated. The peculiar German character that confronts and bewilders us now, is not a thing of today or even of yesterday; it has been there since Tacitus remarked it. Even Germans themselves know it very well; the best among them have always repudiated their mother country. Certainly there were peoples and nations that acted at times most barbarously and inhumanly. The classical example of the Spanish Terror in America is there. But all pales into insignificance when compared to the German achievement and ideal in this respect. For here is a people violent and cruel, not simply because it is their character to be so and they delight in being so, but because it forms the bedrock of their Philosophy of life, their weltanschauung.
This is the very core of the matter. Germany stands for a Philosophy of life, for a definite mode of human values. That philosophy was slowly developed, elaborated by the German mind, in various degrees and in various ways through various thinkers and theorists and moralists and statesmen, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. The conception of the State as propounded even by her great philosophers as something self-existent, sacrosanct and almost divineaugust and grim, one has to addis profoundly significant of the type of the subconscient dynamic in the nation: it strangely reminds one of the state organised by the bee, the ant or the termite. Hitler has only precipitated the idea, given it a concrete, physical and dynamic form. That philosophy in its outlook has been culturally anti-Latin, religiously anti-Christian. Germany cherishes always in her heart the memory of the day when her hero Arminius routed the Roman legions of Varus. Germany stands for a mode of human consciousness that is not in line with the major current of its evolutionary growth: she harks back to something primeval, infra-rational, infra-human.
Such is the position taken up by Lord Vansittart who has given his name to the new ideology of anti-Germanism. Vansittartism (at least in its extreme variety) has very little hope for the mending of Germany, it practically asks for its ending.
05.06 - Physics or philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Physical Science in the nineteenth century did indeed develop or presuppose a Philosophy of its own; it had, that is to say, a definite outlook on the fundamental quality of things and the nature of the universe. Those were days of its youthful self-confidence and unbending assurance. The view was, as is well-known, materialistic and deterministic. That is to say, all observation and experiment, according to it, demonstrated and posited:
First, that this universe is made up of particles that push and pull each other, the particles having certain constant values, such as in respect of mass and volume. secondly, that the laws governing the relations among the particles, in other words, their push and pull, are laws of simple mechanics; they are fixed and definite and give us determinable and mensurable quantities called co-ordinatesby which one can ascertain the pattern or configuration of things at a given moment and deduce from that the pattern or configuration of things at any other moment: the chain that hangs things together is fixed and uniform and continuous and is not broken anywhere.
06.02 - The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A huge Philosophy of Nothingness.
In him Nirvana lives and speaks and acts
1.00 - Introduction to Alchemy of Happiness, #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
"Ghazzali," says Tholuck, "if ever any man have deserved the name, was truly a divine, and he may justly he placed on a level with Origen, so remarkable was he for learning and ingenuity, and gifted with such a rare faculty for the skillful and worthy exposition of doctrine. All that is good, noble and sublime, which his great soul had compassed, he bestowed upon Mohammedanism; and he adorned the doctrines of the Koran with so much piety and learning, that, in the form given them by him, they seem in my opinion worthy the assent of Christians. Whatsoever was most excellent in the Philosophy of Aristotle or in the Soofi mysticism, he discreetly adapted to the Mohammedan theology. From every school, he sought the [8] means of shedding light and honor upon religion; while his sincere piety and lofty conscientiousness imparted to all his writings a sacred majesty. He was the first of Mohammedan divines." (Bibliotheca Sacra, vi, 233).
Sale, in the preliminary discourse to his translation of the Koran, shows that he had discovered the peculiar traits of Ghazzali's mind; for wherever he gives an explanation of the Mussulman creed, peculiarly consonant to universal reason and opposed to superstition, it will be found that he quotes from him.1
1.00 - Preface, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
BASED on the versicle in the Song of Songs, " Thy plants are an orchard of Pomegranates ", a book entitled Pardis Rimonim came to be written by Rabbi Moses Cordovero in the sixteenth century. By some authorities this philosopher is considered as the greatest lamp in post-Zoharic days of that spiritual Menorah, the Qabalah, which, with so rare a grace and so profuse an irradiation of the Supernal Light, illuminated the literature and religious Philosophy of the Jewish people as well as their immediate and subsequent neighbours in the Dias- pora. The English equivalent of Pardis Rimonim - A Garden of Pomegranates - I have adopted as the title of my own modest work, although I am forced to confess that this latter has but little connection either in actual fact or in historicity with that of Cordovero. In the golden harvest of purely spiritual intimations which the Holy Qabalah brings, I truly feel that a veritable garden of the soul may be builded ; a garden of immense magnitude and lofty significance, wherein may be discovered by each one of us all manner and kind of exotic fruit and gracious flower of exquisite colour. The pomegranate, may I add, has always been for mystics everywhere a favourable object for recon- dite symbolism. The garden or orchard has likewise pro- duced in that book named The Book of Splendour an almost inexhaustible treasury of spiritual imagery of superb and magnificent taste.
This book goes forth then in the hope that, as a modern writer has put it:
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
It appears from the above estimate, that my food alone cost me in money about twenty-seven cents a week. It was, for nearly two years after this, rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses, and salt, and my drink water. It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the Philosophy of India.
To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, as I have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a comparative statement like this.
1.01 - Historical Survey, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Qabalistic research. The first-named (an Aristotelean) made a really noble attempt to reconcile Qabalah with the academic Philosophy of his day, and wrote a treatise which is an excellent compendium of the Qabalah.
Mirandola and Reuchlin were Christians who took up a study of the Qabalah with the ulterior motive of obtaining a suitable weapon wherewith to convert Jews to Chris- tianity. Some Jews were so misguided and sadly bewildered by the mangling of texts and distorted inter- pretations which ensued that they actually forsook
1.01 - Prayer, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
next chapter: 1.02 - The Philosophy of Ishvara
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The Philosophy of the Upanishads reappears, developed and enriched, in the Bhagavad-Gita and was finally systematized, in the ninth century of our era, by Shankara. Shankaras teaching (simultaneously theoretical and practical, as is that of all true exponents of the Perennial Philosophy) is summarized in his versified treatise, Viveka-Chudarnani (The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom). All the following passages are taken from this conveniently brief and untechnical work.
The Atman is that by which the universe is pervaded, but which nothing pervades; which causes all things to shine, but which all things cannot make to shine.
--
Here it may be remarked that the cult of unity on the political level is only an idolatrous ersatz for the genuine religion of unity on the personal and spiritual levels. Totalitarian regimes justify their existence by means of a Philosophy of political monism, according to which the state is God on earth, unification under the heel of the divine state is salvation, and all means to such unification, however intrinsically wicked, are right and may be used without scruple. This political monism leads in practice to excessive privilege and power for the few and oppression for the many, to discontent at home and war abroad. But excessive privilege and power are standing temptations to pride, greed, vanity and cruelty; oppression results in fear and envy; war breeds hatred, misery and despair. All such negative emotions are fatal to the spiritual life. Only the pure in heart and poor in spirit can come to the unitive knowledge of God. Hence, the attempt to impose more unity upon societies than their individual members are ready for makes it psychologically almost impossible for those individuals to realize their unity with the divine Ground and with one another.
Among the Christians and the Sufis, to whose writings we now return, the concern is primarily with the human mind and its divine essence.
1.01 - The King of the Wood, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
elaborated its first crude Philosophy of life. Accordingly, if we
can show that a barbarous custom, like that of the priesthood of
--
the summer flowers. Such fables contain a deeper Philosophy of the
relation of the life of man to the life of nature--a sad philosophy
10.24 - Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But man in the strength of his ignorance and arrogance does not recognise this Goddess. Human power, we have said, is a reflection, a shadow of the Divine Power but most often it is a deformed, a perverted Divine Power. Man is full of his egoistic vital self-confidence: he believes it is his own will that is realising all, all which is achieved here; whatever he has creater it is through the might of his own merit and whatever new creations will be done in the future will be through the Grace of his own genius. A mighty vital selfhood obscures his consciousness and he sees nothing else, understands nothing else beyond the reach of that limited vision. This is the Rakshasa, this is the Asura in man. Here is his Philosophy of life:
I climb, a claimant to the throne of heaven.||123.33||
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
There exists clear psychological precedent for the Philosophy of the early Jews (and the later Christians)
in the Mesopotamian and Egyptian schools of metaphysical speculation in their rituals, images and acts of
1.02 - SADHANA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
According to the Philosophy of the Yogis all virtuous actions
bring pleasure, and all vicious actions bring pain. Any man
--
The system of Yoga is built entirely on the Philosophy of the
Sankhyas, as I told you in some of the previous lectures, and
1.02 - The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
is the fundamental tenet of the Philosophy of the Arya.
These statements were found in his notes, now published
--
Friedrich Nietzsche, with his Philosophy of the Um
wertung aller Werte (revaluation of all values) and the ber
1.02 - The Philosophy of Ishvara, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
object:1.02 - The Philosophy of Ishvara
author class:Swami Vivekananda
--
THE Philosophy of ISHVARA
Who is Ishvara? Janmdyasya yatah "From whom is the birth, continuation, and dissolution of the universe," He is Ishvara "the Eternal, the Pure, the Ever-Free, the Almighty, the AllKnowing, the All-Merciful, the Teacher of all teachers"; and above all, Sa Ishvarah anirvachaniyapremasvarupah "He the Lord is, of His own nature, inexpressible Love." These certainly are the definitions of a Personal God. Are there then two Gods the "Not this, not this," the Sat-chit-nanda, the Existence-Knowledge-Bliss of the philosopher, and this God of Love of the Bhakta? No, it is the same Sat-chit-ananda who is also the God of Love, the impersonal and personal in one. It has always to be understood that the Personal God worshipped by the Bhakta is not separate or different from the Brahman. All is Brahman, the One without a second; only the Brahman, as unity or absolute, is too much of an abstraction to be loved and worshipped; so the Bhakta chooses the relative aspect of Brahman, that is, Ishvara, the Supreme Ruler. To use a simile: Brahman is as the clay or substance out of which an infinite variety of articles are fashioned. As clay, they are all one; but form or manifestation differentiates them. Before every one of them was made, they all existed potentially in the clay, and, of course, they are identical substantially; but when formed, and so long as the form remains, they are separate and different; the clay-mouse can never become a clay-elephant, because, as manifestations, form alone makes them what they are, though as unformed clay they are all one.
1.02 - The Pit, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
THE Philosophy of the Qabalah is essentially esoteric. Yet the practical methods of esoteric and secular investigations are essentially identical
-continual and persistent experimentation, the endeavour to eliminate chance and error, and the effort to ascertain the constants and variables of the equations investigated.
1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
terminology, that he was an unconscious exponent, 359 for example, of the Philosophy of Rousseau:
With what simplicity I should have demonstrated that man is by nature good, and that only our
--
dawning of such understanding meant the beginnings of a mature and healthy Philosophy of life, on his
part. Such a philosophy was outlined in explicit detail by Friedrich Nietzsche despite his theoretically
--
This is the Philosophy of apprenticeship useful for conceptualizing the necessary relationship between
subordination to a potent historically-constructed social institution and the eventual development of true
--
contrast, to be found in the Philosophy of the apprenticeship: each individual must voluntarily subjugate
him or herself to a master a wise king whose goal is not so much maintenance and protection of his
1.03 - Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
ence and natural Philosophy of the ancients. It is, in fact, so
much that we are absolutely incapable of saying how the world
1.03 - Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of The Gita, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
3 It is not indispensable for the Karmayoga to accept implicitly all the Philosophy of the Gita. We may regard it, if we like, as a statement of psychological experience useful as a practical basis for the Yoga; here it is perfectly valid and in entire consonance with a high and wide experience. For this reason I have thought it well to state it here, as far as possible in the language of modern thought, omitting all that belongs to metaphysics rather than to psychology.
* *
1.03 - The Sephiros, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Let us now approach the exegesis of the Philosophy of the
Qabalah in its various aspects. First we shall deal more fully with the ten Sephirothal ideas, giving the student in a later chapter examples of the mode of treatment which he himself will then be able to follow in studying the attribu- tions of all the Paths.
--
Spirit or the Purusha of the Sankhyan Philosophy of India, by which is implied the basic reality underlying all mani- festations of Consciousness. In Blavatsky's system,
Chokmah would be what is there named Mahat or " Cosmic
1.03 - YIBHOOTI PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
highest Philosophy of the Yogi is based upon this fact, that the
PuruSa is pure and perfect, and is the only simple that
1.04 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
which to base our Philosophy of life.
Let us now take a further step.
1.04 - The Aims of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
for I have no ready made Philosophy of life to hand out to them. In the
majority of my cases the resources of the conscious mind are exhausted (or,
1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
with relevant matter concerning their pronunciation which seems never to have been systematically presented before in treatises on the Number Philosophy of the Qabalah.
R- A
1.052 - Yoga Practice - A Series of Positive Steps, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
This Philosophy of the twofold character of an object is vastly emphasised in the Tantra Shastra, where nothing in this world is to be regarded as evil, unnecessary, useless or meaningless everything has a meaning of its own. And, the seed of this philosophy is recognised in a sutra of Patanjali himself: bhogpavargrtham dyam (II.18). The drisya, or the object, is for two purposes: for our enjoyment and bondage, and, under different conditions, also for our freedom.
Thus, a thing in this world is neither good nor bad. We cannot make any remark about any object in this world wholly, unlimitedly or unconditionally; all remarks about things are conditional. Things are useful, helpful and contri butory to the freedom of the soul under a given set of circumstances, but they are the opposite under a different set of circumstances. Not knowing this fact, the mind flitters from one thing to another thing. This is the character of what is known as rajas the principle of diversity and distraction. The remedy for this illness of distraction of the mind is austerity, or self-restraint. The great goal of yoga that has been described all this time will remain merely a will-o-the-wisp and will not be accessible to the mind if the condition necessary for the entry of consciousness into the supreme goal of yoga namely, freedom from distraction is not fulfilled.
--
These are various silly things which come in the way of our yoga practice because the extent of trouble that they can create will come to our notice only when we actually touch them, or interfere with them, or try to avoid them. As long as we are friendly with things, they also look friendly, but when we try to avoid them, we will see their reactions are of a different type altogether. It is very necessary to use tact even in avoiding the unnecessary things; otherwise, there can be a resentment on the part of those things. This is the Philosophy of moderation the via media and the golden mean of philosophy and yoga where the self that is redundant, external and related has to be made subservient to the ultimate goal which is the Absolute Self.
The social self is easier to control than the personal self, known as the bodily self. We cannot easily control our body, because that has a greater intimacy with our pure state or consciousness than the intimacy that is exhibited by external relations like family members, etc. We may for a few days forget the existence of the members of the family, but we cannot forget for a few days that we have a body; that is a greater difficulty. So, the withdrawal of consciousness from attachment has to be done by degrees, as I mentioned, and the problems have to be gradually thinned out by the coming back of consciousness from its external relationships, stage by stage, taking every step with fixity so that it may not be retraced, and missing not a single link in this chain of steps taken. We should not take jumps in this practice of self-restraint, because every little item is an important item and one single link that we missed may create trouble one day. There may be small desires which do not look very big or troublesome, but they can become troublesome if they are completely ignored, because there is nothing in this world which can be regarded as wholly unimportant. Everything has some importance or the other; and if the time comes, it can help us, or it can trouble us.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
in practice, imagination, and Philosophy of the spirit of denial is eternal rejection of the redeeming
unknown, and the adoption of rigid self-identification. Myths of the hostile brothers like those of the
--
then all will become subject to the Philosophy of expedience. In the long term, adoption of such a policy
leads to development of rigid, weak personality (or social environment) or intrapsychic dissociation and
--
Nietzsche, F. (1966). Beyond good and evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the future (W. Kaufmann, Trans.).
New York: Vintage Books.
--
Vaihinger, H. (1924). The Philosophy of as if: A system of the theoretical, practical, and religious
fictions of mankind (C.K. Ogden, Trans.). New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company.
1.05 - THE MASTER AND KESHAB, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTIER: "The jnanis, who adhere to the non-dualistic Philosophy of Vedanta, say that the acts of creation, preservation, and destruction, the universe itself and all its living beings, are the manifestations of akti, the Divine Power. If you reason it out, you will realize that all these are as illusory as a dream. Brahman alone is the Reality, and all else is unreal. Even this very akti is unsubstantial, like a dream.
"But though you reason all your life, unless you are established in samdhi, you cannot go beyond the jurisdiction of akti. Even when you say, 'I am meditating', or 'I am contemplating', still you are moving in the realm of akti, within Its power.
1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
twined with the hea then literature and Philosophy of
the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Renaissance brought
1.06 - MORTIFICATION, NON-ATTACHMENT, RIGHT LIVELIHOOD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Because it was German and spelt with a K, Kultur was an object, during the first World War, of derisive contempt. All this has now been changed. In Russia, Literature, Art and Science have become the three persons of a new humanistic Trinity. Nor is the cult of Culture confined to the Soviet Union. It is practised by a majority of intellectuals in the capitalist democracies. Clever, hard-boiled journalists, who write about everything else with the condescending cynicism of people who know all about God, Man and the Universe, and have seen through the whole absurd caboodle, fairly fall over themselves when it comes to Culture. With an earnestness and enthusiasm that are, in the circumstances, unutterably ludicrous, they invite us to share their positively religious emotions in the face of High Art, as represented by the latest murals or civic centres; they insist that so long as Mrs. X. goes on writing her inimitable novels and Mr. Y. his more than Coleridgean criticism, the world, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, makes sense. The same overvaluation of Culture, the same belief that Art and Literature are ends in themselves and can flourish in isolation from a reasonable and realistic Philosophy of life, have even invaded the schools and colleges. Among advanced educationists there are many people who seem to think that all will be well, so long as adolescents are permitted to express themselves, and small children are encouraged to be creative in the art class. But, alas, plasticine and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books. The following criticisms of education were made more than two and a half centuries ago; but they are as relevant today as they were in the seventeenth century.
He knoweth nothing as he ought to know, who thinks he knoweth anything without seeing its place and the manner how it relateth to God, angels and men, and to all the creatures in earth, heaven and hell, time and eternity.
1.06 - Psycho therapy and a Philosophy of Life, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
object:1.06 - Psycho therapy and a Philosophy of Life
author class:Carl Jung
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PSYCHO THERAPY AND A Philosophy of LIFE 1
[175]
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or wholly unrealized prejudices regarding ones Philosophy of life. With
this development psycho therapy stirred up a hornets nest of the first
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to a discussion of his Philosophy of life, both with himself and with his
partner. There are of course forced answers and solutions, but in principle
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As the most complex of psychic structures, a mans Philosophy of life
forms the counterpole to the physiologically conditioned psyche, and, as
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always and inevitably coupled with something like a Philosophy of life,
however archaic, unclear, and hazy this may be. Instinct stimulates
1.07 - Medicine and Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
clear inkling of this and was the first to set forth an explicit Philosophy of
the unconscious. Today he would undoubtedly have been a
1.07 - The Literal Qabalah (continued), #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
" It is beyond a doubt that the resemblance is quite a matter of accident. . . . The Philosophy of Salomon Ibn
Gabirol, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Philonism, and other systems have all left indelible traces (i.e. on the evolution of the Qabalah). But Christianity, be it remembered, besides being a debtor to Judaism, is a debtor to these sources as well ; so that what appears to be Christian may be, in reality, Jewish ; a development of the original material by an unbroken succession of Jewish minds. . . . But it is beyond dispute that the Christian Trinity and the trinities of the ten Sefirot lie in quite distinct planes."
1.07 - The Three Schools of Magick 2, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Adepts of the White School regard their brethren of the Black very much as the aristocratic English Sahib (of the days when England was a nation) regarded the benighted Hindu. Nietzsche expresses the Philosophy of this School to that extent with considerable accuracy and vigour. The man who denounces life merely defines himself as the man who is unequal to it. The brave man rejoices in giving and taking hard knocks, and the brave man is joyous. The Scandinavian idea of Valhalla may be primitive, but it is manly. A heaven of popular concert, like the Christian; of unconscious repose, like the Buddhist; or even of sensual enjoyment, like the Moslem, excites his nausea and contempt. He understands that the only joy worth while is the joy of continual victory, and victory itself would become as tame as croquet if it were not spiced by equally continual defeat.
The purest documents of the White School are found in the Sacred Books of Thelema. The doctrine is given in excellent perfection both in the book of the Heart Girt with the Serpent and the book of Lapis Lazuli. A single passage is adequate to explain the formula.
1.08 - Psycho therapy Today, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
mans Philosophy of life is directly connected with the well-being of the
psyche can be seen from the fact that his mental attitude, his way of
1.08 - RELIGION AND TEMPERAMENT, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Traditionally Christian good manners outlawed all expressions of pleasure in the satisfaction of physical appetites. You may love a screeching owl, but you must not love a roasted fowlsuch was the rhyme on which children were brought up in the nurseries of only fifty years ago. Today the young unceasingly proclaim how much they love and adore different kinds of food and drink; adolescents and adults talk about the thrills they derive from the stimulation of their sexuality. The popular Philosophy of life has ceased to be based on the classics of devotion and the rules of aristocratic good breeding, and is now moulded by the writers of advertising copy, whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extraverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell. Technological progress is in part the product of the somatotonic revolution, in part the producer and sustainer of that revolution. The extraverted attention results in technological discoveries. (Significantly enough, a high degree of material civilization has always been associated with the large-scale and officially sanctioned practice of polytheism.) In their turn, technological discoveries have resulted in mass production; and mass production, it is obvious, cannot be kept going at full blast except by persuading the whole population to accept the somatotonic Weltanschauung and act accordingly.
Like technological progress, with which it is so closely associated in so many ways, modern war is at once a cause and a result of the somatotonic revolution. Nazi education, which was specifically education for war, had two principal aims: to encourage the manifestation of somatotonia in those most richly endowed with that component of personality, and to make the rest of the population feel ashamed of its relaxed amiability or its inward-looking sensitiveness and tendency towards self-restraint and tender-mindedness. During the war the enemies of Nazism have been compelled, of course, to borrow from the Nazis educational philosophy. All over the world millions of young men and even of young women are being systematically educated to be tough and to value toughness beyond every other moral quality. With this system of somatotonic ethics is associated the idolatrous and polytheistic theology of nationalisma pseudo-religion far stronger at the present time for evil and division than is Christianity, or any other monotheistic religion, for unification and good. In the past most societies tried systematically to discourage somatotonia. This was a measure of self-defense; they did not want to be physically destroyed by the power-loving aggressiveness of their most active minority, and they did not want to be spiritually blinded by an excess of extraversion. During the last few years all this has been changed. What, we may apprehensively wonder, will be the result of the current world-wide reversal of an immemorial social policy? Time alone will show.
1.10 - Concentration - Its Practice, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
The roots, the causes, the Samskaras being there, they manifest and form the effects. The cause dying down becomes the effect; the effect getting subtler becomes the cause of the next effect. A tree bears a seed, which becomes the cause of another tree, and so on. All our works now are the effects of past Samskaras; again, these works becoming Samskaras will be the causes of future actions, and thus we go on. So this aphorism says that the cause being there, the fruit must come, in the form of species of beings: one will be a man, another an angel, another an animal, another a demon. Then there are different effects of Karma in life. One man lives fifty years, another a hundred, another dies in two years, and never attains maturity; all these differences in life are regulated by past Karma. One man is born, as it were, for pleasure; if he buries himself in a forest, pleasure will follow him there. Another man, wherever he goes, is followed by pain; everything becomes painful for him. It is the result of their own past. According to the Philosophy of the Yogis, all virtuous actions bring pleasure, and all vicious actions bring pain. Any man who does wicked deeds is sure to reap their fruit in the form of pain.
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The system of Yoga is built entirely on the Philosophy of the Snkhyas, as I told you before, and here again I shall remind you of the cosmology of the Sankhya philosophy. According to the Sankhyas, nature is both the material and the efficient cause of the universe. In nature there are three sorts of materials, the Sattva, the Rajas, and the Tamas. The Tamas material is all that is dark, all that is ignorant and heavy. The Rajas is activity. The Sattva is calmness, light. Nature, before creation, is called by them Avyakta, undefined, or indiscrete; that is, in which there is no distinction of form or name, a state in which these three materials are held in perfect balance. Then the balance is disturbed, the three materials begin to mingle in various fashions, and the result is the universe. In every man, also, these three materials exist. When the Sattva material prevails, knowledge comes; when Rajas, activity; and when Tamas, darkness, lassitude, idleness, and ignorance. According to the Sankhya theory, the highest manifestation of nature, consisting of the three materials, is what they call Mahat or intelligence, universal intelligence, of which each human intellect is a part. In the Sankhya psychology there is a sharp distinction between Manas, the mind function, and the function of the Buddhi, intellect. The mind function is simply to collect and carry impressions and present them to the Buddhi, the individual Mahat, which determines upon it. Out of Mahat comes egoism, out of which again come the fine materials. The fine materials combine and become the gross materials outside the external universe. The claim of the Sankhya philosophy is that beginning with the intellect down to a block of stone, all is the product of one substance, different only as finer to grosser states of existence. The finer is the cause, and the grosser is the effect. According to the Sankhya philosophy, beyond the whole of nature is the Purusha, which is not material at all. Purusha is not at all similar to anything else, either Buddhi, or mind, or the Tanmatras, or the gross materials. It is not akin to any one of these, it is entirely separate, entirely different in its nature, and from this they argue that the Purusha must be immortal, because it is not the result of combination. That which is not the result of combination cannot die. The Purushas or souls are infinite in number.
Now we shall understand the aphorism that the states of the qualities are defined, undefined, indicated only, and signess. By the "defined" are meant the gross elements, which we can sense. By the "undefined" are meant the very fine materials, the Tanmatras, which cannot be sensed by ordinary men. If you practise Yoga, however, says Patanjali, after a while your perceptions will become so fine that you will actually see the Tanmatras. For instance, you have heard how every man has a certain light about him; every living being emits a certain light, and this, he says, can be seen by the Yogi. We do not all see it, but we all throw out these Tanmatras, just as a flower continuously sends out fine particles which enable us to smell it. Every day of our lives we throw out a mass of good or evil, and everywhere we go the atmosphere is full of these materials. That is how there came to the human mind, unconsciously, the idea of building temples and churches. Why should man build churches in which to worship God? Why not worship Him anywhere? Even if he did not know the reason, man found that the place where people worshipped God became full of good Tanmatras. Every day people go there, and the more they go the holier they get, and the holier that place becomes. If any man who has not much Sattva in him goes there, the place will influence him and arouse his Sattva quality. Here, therefore, is the significance of all temples and holy places, but you must remember that their holiness depends on holy people congregating there. The difficulty with man is that he forgets the original meaning, and puts the cart before the horse. It was men who made these places holy, and then the effect became the cause and made men holy. If the wicked only were to go there, it would become as bad as any other place. It is not the building, but the people that make a church, and that is what we always forget. That is why sages and holy persons, who have much of this Sattva quality, can send it out and exert a tremendous influence day and night on their surroundings. A man may become so pure that his purity will become tangible. Whosoever comes in contact with him becomes pure.
1.11 - Powers, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
The misery that we suffer comes from ignorance, from non-discrimination between the real and the unreal. We all take the bad for the good, the dream for the reality. Soul is the only reality, and we have forgotten it. Body is an unreal dream, and we think we are all bodies. This non-discrimination is the cause of misery. It is caused by ignorance. When discrimination comes, it brings strength, and then alone can we avoid all these various ideas of body, heavens, and gods. This ignorance arises through differentiating by species, sign, and place. For instance, take a cow. The cow is differentiated from the dog by species. Even with the cows alone how do we make the distinction between one cow and another? By signs. If two objects are exactly similar, they can be distinguished if they are in different places. When objects are so mixed up that even these differential will not help us, the power of discrimination acquired by the above-mentioned practice will give us the ability to distinguish them. The highest Philosophy of the Yogi is based upon this fact, that the Purusha is pure and perfect, and is the only "simple" that exists in this universe. The body and mind are compounds, and yet we are ever identifying ourselves with them This is the great mistake that the distinction has been lost. When this power of discrimination has been attained, man sees that everything in this world, mental and physical, is a compound, and, as such, cannot be the Purusha.
1.12 - The Sacred Marriage, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the glamour shed round these rites by the poetry and Philosophy of
later ages there still looms, like a distant landscape through a
1.12 - TIME AND ETERNITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Such was the conclusion to which the most celebrated of Indian converts was forced after some years of association with his fellow Christians. There are many honourable exceptions, of course; but the rule even among learned Protestants and Catholics is a certain blandly bumptious provincialism which, if it did not constitute such a grave offence against charity and truth, would be just uproariously funny. A hundred years ago, hardly anything was known of Sanskrit, Pali or Chinese. The ignorance of European scholars was sufficient reason for their provincialism. Today, when more or less adequate translations are available in plenty, there is not only no reason for it, there is no excuse. And yet most European and American authors of books about religion and metaphysics write as though nobody had ever thought about these subjects, except the Jews, the Greeks and the Christians of the Mediterranean basin and western Europe. This display of what, in the twentieth century, is an entirely voluntary and deliberate ignorance is not only absurd and discreditable; it is also socially dangerous. Like any other form of imperialism, theological imperialism is a menace to permanent world peace. The reign of violence will never come to an end until, first, most human beings accept the same, true Philosophy of life; until, second, this Perennial Philosophy is recognized as the highest factor common to all the world religions; until, third, the adherents of every religion renounce the idolatrous time-philosophies, with which, in their own particular faith, the Perennial Philosophy of eternity has been overlaid; until, fourth, there is a world-wide rejection of all the political pseudo-religions, which place mans supreme good in future time and therefore justify and commend the commission of every sort of present iniquity as a means to that end. If these conditions are not fulfilled, no amount of political planning, no economic blue-prints however ingeniously drawn, can prevent the recrudescence of war and revolution.
next chapter: 1.13 - SALVATION, DELIVERANCE, ENLIGHTENMENT
1.13 - THE MASTER AND M., #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
In the early afternoon the Master sat up on the small couch in his room. M. prostrated himself before him and sat on the floor. The Master was talking to him on the Philosophy of Vednta.
Householders and Non-dualism
1.14 - The Principle of Divine Works, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Gita's Philosophy of divine works. The liberated man is he who has exalted himself into the divine nature and according to that divine nature must be his actions. But what is the divine nature?
It is not entirely and solely that of the Akshara, the immobile,
1.15 - Index, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
Psycho therapy and a Philosophy of Life (1943)
Medicine and Psycho therapy (1945)
1.16 - Man, A Transitional Being, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
such as The Life Divine, his fundamental "philosophical" work and spiritual vision of evolution; The Synthesis of Yoga, in which he describes the various stages and experiences of the integral yoga, and surveys all the past and present yogic disciplines; the Essays on the Gita, which expounds his Philosophy of action; The Secret of the Veda, with a study of the origins of language; and The Ideal of Human Unity and The Human Cycle, which approach evolution from its sociological and psychological standpoints and examine the future possibilities of human societies. He had found
301
1.2.08 - Faith, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Guru, in the existence of things other than are written in the Philosophy of Haeckel or Huxley or Bertr and Russell, because if these things are not true, there is no meaning in the Yoga.
Faith
1.20 - Equality and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
"Equal-visioned everywhere, he sees the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self. He who sees Me everywhere and all and each in Me, is never lost to Me nor I to him. He who has reached oneness and loves Me in all beings, that Yogin, howsoever he lives and acts, is living and acting in Me. O Arjuna, he who sees all equally everywhere as himself, whether it be happiness or suffering, I hold him to be the supreme Yogin." That is the old Vedantic knowledge of the Upanishads which the Gita holds up constantly before us; but it is its superiority to other later formulations of it that it turns persistently this knowledge into a great practical Philosophy of divine living. Always it insists on the relation between this knowledge of oneness and Karmayoga, and therefore on the knowledge of oneness as the basis of a liberated action in the world. Whenever it speaks of knowledge, it turns at once to speak of equality which is its result; whenever it speaks of equality, it turns to speak too of the knowledge which is its basis. The equality it enjoins does not begin and end in a static condition of the soul useful only for self-liberation; it is always a basis of works. The peace of the Brahman in the liberated soul is the foundation; the large, free, equal, worldwide action of the Lord in the liberated nature radiates the power which proceeds from that peace; these two made one synthesise divine works and God-knowledge.
We see at once what a profound extension we get here for the ideas which otherwise the Gita has in common with other systems of philosophic, ethical or religious living. Endurance, philosophic indifference, resignation are, we have said, the foundation of three kinds of equality; but the Gita's truth of knowledge not only gathers them all up together, but gives them an infinitely profound, a magnificently ample significance.
1.21 - IDOLATRY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The many varieties of higher idolatry may be classed under three main heads: technological, political and moral. Technological idolatry is the most ingenuous and primitive of the three; for its devotees, like those of the lower idolatry, believe that their redemption and liberation depend upon material objectsin this case gadgets. Technological idolatry is the religion whose doctrines are promulgated, explicitly or by implication, in the advertisement pages of our newspapers and magazines the source, we may add parenthetically, from which millions of men, women and children in the capitalistic countries derive their working Philosophy of life. In Soviet Russia too, technological idolatry was strenuously preached, becoming, during the years of that countrys industrialization, a kind of state religion. So whole-hearted is the modern faith in technological idols that (despite all the lessons of mechanized warfare) it is impossible to discover in the popular thinking of our time any trace of the ancient and profoundly realistic doctrine of hubris and inevitable nemesis. There is a very general belief that, where gadgets are concerned, we can get something for nothingcan enjoy all the advantages of an elaborate, top-heavy and constantly advancing technology without having to pay for them by any compensating disadvantages.
Only a little less ingenuous are the political idolaters. For the worship of redemptive gadgets these have substituted the worship of redemptive social and economic organizations. Impose the right kind of organizations upon human beings, and all their problems, from sin and unhappiness to nationalism and war, will automatically disappear. Most political idolaters are also technological idolatersand this in spite of the fact that the two pseudo-religions are finally incompatible, since technological progress at its present rate makes nonsense of any political blue-print, however ingeniously drawn, within a matter, not of generations, but of years and sometimes even of months. Further, the human being is, unfortunately, a creature endowed with free will; and if, for any reason, individuals do not choose to make it work, even the best organization will not produce the results it was intended to produce.
1.22 - The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Our normal conduct of life, whether the individual or the social, is actually governed by the balance between two complementary powers,first, an implicit will central to the life and inherent in the main power of its action and, secondly, whatever modifying will can come in from the Idea in mind for man is a mental being and operate through our as yet imperfect mental instruments to give this life force a conscious orientation and a conscious method. Life normally finds its own centre in our vital and physical being, in its cravings and its needs, in its demand for persistence, growth, expansion, enjoyment, in its reachings after all kinds of power and possession and activity and splendour and largeness. The first self-direction of this Life-Force, its first orderings of method are instinctive and either entirely or very largely subconscient and magnificently automatic: the ease, spontaneity, fine normality, beauty, self-satisfaction, abundant vital energy and power of the subhuman life of Nature up to the animal is due to its entire obedience to this instinctive and automatic urge. It is a vague sense of this truth and of the very different and in this respect inferior character of human life that makes the thinker, when dissatisfied with our present conditions, speak of a life according to Nature as the remedy for all our ills. An attempt to find such a rule in the essential nature of man has inspired many revolutionary conceptions of ethics and society and individual self-development down to the latest of the kind, the strangely inspired vitalistic Philosophy of Nietzsche. The common defect of these conceptions is to miss the true character of man and the true law of his being, his Dharma.
Nietzsches idea that to develop the superman out of our present very unsatisfactory manhood is our real business, is in itself an absolutely sound teaching. His formulation of our aim, to become ourselves, to exceed ourselves, implying, as it does, that man has not yet found all his true self, his true nature by which he can successfully and spontaneously live, could not be bettered. But then the question of questions is there, what is our self, and what is our real nature? What is that which is growing in us, but into which we have not yet grown? It is something divine, is the answer, a divinity Olympian, Apollonian, Dionysiac, which the reasoning and consciously willing animal, man, is labouring more or less obscurely to become. Certainly, it is all that; but in what shall we find the seed of that divinity and what is the poise in which the superman, once self-found, can abide and be secure from lapse into this lower and imperfect manhood? Is it the intellect and will, the double-aspected buddhi of the Indian psychological system? But this is at present a thing so perplexed, so divided against itself, so uncertain of everything it gains, up to a certain point indeed magically creative and efficient but, when all has been said and done, in the end so splendidly futile, so at war with and yet so dependent upon and subservient to our lower nature, that even if in it there lies concealed some seed of the entire divinity, it can hardly itself be the seed and at any rate gives us no such secure and divine poise as we are seeking. Therefore we say, not the intellect and will, but that supreme thing in us yet higher than the Reason, the spirit, here concealed behind the coatings of our lower nature, is the secret seed of the divinity and will be, when discovered and delivered, luminous above the mind, the wide ground upon which a divine life of the human being can be with security founded.
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Such a period was the recent materialistic age, when the intellect of man seemed decided to study thoroughly Life and Matter, to admit only that, to recognise mind only as an instrument of Life and Matter, and to devote all its knowledge to a tremendous expansion of the vital and physical life, its practicality, its efficiency, its comfort and the splendid ordering of its instincts of production, possession and enjoyment. That was the character of the materialistic, commercial, economic age of mankind, a period in which the ethical mind persisted painfully, but with decreasing self-confidence, an increasing self-questioning and a tendency to yield up the fortress of the moral law to the life-instinct, the aesthetic instinct and intelligence flourished as a rather glaring exotic ornament, a sort of rare orchid in the button-hole of the vital man, and reason became the magnificent servant of Life and Matter. The titanic development of the vital Life which followed, is ending as the Titans always end; it lit its own funeral pyre in the conflagration of a world-war, its natural upshot, a struggle between the most efficient and civilised nations for the possession and enjoyment of the world, of its wealth, its markets, its available spaces, an inflated and plethoric commercial expansion, largeness of imperial size and rule. For that is what the great war signified and was in its real origin, because that was the secret or the open intention of all pre-war diplomacy and international politics; and if a nobler idea was awakened at least for a time, it was only under the scourge of Death and before the terrifying spectre of a gigantic mutual destruction. Even so the awakening was by no means complete, nor everywhere quite sincere, but it was there and it was struggling towards birth even in Germany, once the great protagonist of the vitalistic Philosophy of life. In that awakening lay some hope of better things. But for the moment at least the vitalistic aim has once more raised its head in a new form and the hope has dimmed in a darkness and welter in which only the eye of faith can see chaos preparing a new cosmos.
The first result of this imperfect awakening seemed likely to be a return to an older ideal, with a will to use the reason and the ethical mind better and more largely in the ordering of individual, of national and of international life. But such an attempt, though well enough as a first step, cannot be the real and final solution; if our effort ends there, we shall not arrive. The solution lies, we have said, in an awakening to our real, because our highest self and nature,that hidden self which we are not yet, but have to become and which is not the strong and enlightened vital Will hymned by Nietzsche, but a spiritual self and spiritual nature that will use the mental being which we already are, but the mental being spiritualised, and transform by a spiritual ideality the aim and action of our vital and physical nature. For this is the formula of man in his highest potentiality, and safety lies in tending towards our highest and not in resting content with an inferior potentiality. To follow after the highest in us may seem to be to live dangerously, to use again one of Nietzsches inspired expressions, but by that danger comes victory and security. To rest in or follow after an inferior potentiality may seem safe, rational, comfortable, easy, but it ends badly, in some futility or in a mere circling, down the abyss or in a stagnant morass. Our right and natural road is towards the summits.
1.240 - Talks 2, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Later Sri Bhagavan continued: The intricate maze of Philosophy of different schools is said to clarify matters and reveal the Truth.
But in fact they create confusion where no confusion need exist.
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D.: Is there that difference in the Philosophy of Sankara and Gaudapada which the learned Professor wants us to believe?
M.: The difference is only in our imagination.
1.24 - RITUAL, SYMBOL, SACRAMENT, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
It is hardly necessary to add that this process of conscious sacramentalization can be applied only to such actions as are not intrinsically evil. Somewhat unfortunately, the Gita was not originally published as an independent work, but as a theological digression within an epic poem; and since, like most epics, the Mahabharata is largely concerned with the exploits of warriors, it is primarily in relation to warfare that the Gitas advice to act with non-attachment and for Gods sake only is given. Now, war is accompanied and followed, among other things, by a widespread dissemination of anger and hatred, pride, cruelty and fear. But, it may be asked, is it possible (the Nature of Things being what it is) to sacramentalize actions, whose psychological by-products are so completely God-eclipsing as are these passions? The Buddha of the Pali scriptures would certainly have answered this question in the negative. So would the Lao Tzu of the Tao Teh King. So would the Christ of the Synoptic Gospels. The Krishna of the Gita (who is also, by a kind of literary accident, the Krishna of the Mahabharata) gives an affirmative answer. But this affirmative answer, it should be remembered, is hedged around with limiting conditions. Non-attached slaughter is recommended only to those, who are warriors by caste, and to whom warfare is a duty and vocation. But what is duty or dharma for the Kshatriya is adharma and forbidden to the Brahman; nor is it any part of the normal vocation or caste duty of the mercantile and labouring classes. Any confusion of castes, any assumption by one man of another mans vocation and duties of state, is always, say the Hindus, a moral evil and a menace to social stability. Thus, it is the business of the Brahmans to fit themselves to be seers, so that they may be able to explain to their fellow men the nature of the universe, of mans last end and of the way to liberation. When solthers or administrators, or usurers, or manufacturers or workers usurp the functions of the Brahmans and formulate a Philosophy of life in accordance with their variously distorted notions of the universe, then society is thrown into confusion. Similarly, confusion reigns when the Brahman, the man of non-coercive spiritual authority, assumes the coercive power of the Kshatriya, or when the Kshatriyas job of ruling is usurped by bankers and stock jobbers, or finally when the warrior castes dharma of fighting is imposed, by conscription, on Brahman, Vaisya and Sudra alike. The history of Europe during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance is largely a history of the social confusions that arises when large numbers of those who should be seers abandon spiritual authority in favour of money and political power. And contemporary history is the hideous record of what happens when political bosses, businessmen or class-conscious proletarians assume the Brahmans function of formulating a Philosophy of life; when usurers dictate policy and debate the issues of war and peace; and when the warriors caste duty is imposed on all and sundry, regardless of psycho-physical make-up and vocation.
next chapter: 1.25 - SPIRITUAL EXERCISES
1.27 - CONTEMPLATION, ACTION AND SOCIAL UTILITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
IN ALL the historic formulations of the Perennial Philosophy it is axiomatic that the end of human life is contemplation, or the direct and intuitive awareness of God; that action is the means to that end; that a society is good to the extent that it renders contemplation possible for its members; and that the existence of at least a minority of contemplatives is necessary for the well-being of any society. In the popular Philosophy of our own time it goes without saying that the end of human life is action; that contemplation (above all in its lower forms of discursive thought) is the means to that end; that a society is good to the extent that the actions of its members make for progress in technology and organization (a progress which is assumed to be causally related to ethical and cultural advance); and that a minority of contemplatives is perfectly useless and perhaps even harmful to the community which tolerates it. To expatiate further on the modern Weltanschauung is unnecessary; explicitly or by implication it is set forth on every page of the advertising sections of every newspaper and magazine. The extracts that follow have been chosen in order to illustrate the older, truer, less familiar theses of the Perennial Philosophy.
Work is for the purification of the mind, not for the perception of Reality. The realization of Truth is brought about by discrimination, and not in the least by ten millions of acts.
1.27 - On holy solitude of body and soul., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
54. Those who are thoroughly versed in secular philosophy are indeed rare; but I affirm that those who have a divine knowledge of the Philosophy of true solitude are still more rare.
55. He who has not yet known God is unfit for solitude and exposes himself to many dangers. Solitude chokes the inexperienced; not having tasted the sweetness of God, they waste time in being taken captive, robbed, made despondent and subjected to distractions.
1.28 - Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
8:In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light. Even, it is by the projection of this luminous Overmind corona that the diffusion of a diminished light in the Ignorance and the throwing of that contrary shadow which swallows up in itself all light, the Inconscience, became at all possible. For Supermind transmits to Overmind all its realities, but leaves it to formulate them in a movement and according to an awareness of things which is still a vision of Truth and yet at the same time a first parent of the Ignorance. A line divides Supermind and Overmind which permits a free transmission, allows the lower Power to derive from the higher Power all it holds or sees, but automatically compels a transitional change in the passage. The integrality of the Supermind keeps always the essential truth of things, the total truth and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without being limited by them: but although it knows their oneness, can realise it in a spiritual cognition, yet its dynamic movement, even while relying on that for its security, is not directly determined by it. Overmind Energy proceeds through an illimitable capacity of separation and combination of the powers and aspects of the integral and indivisible all-comprehending Unity. It takes each Aspect or Power and gives to it an independent action in which it acquires a full separate importance and is able to work out, we might say, its own world of creation. Purusha and Prakriti, Conscious Soul and executive Force of Nature, are in the supramental harmony a two-aspected single truth, being and dynamis of the Reality; there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the other. In Overmind we have the origin of the cleavage, the trenchant distinction made by the Philosophy of the Sankhyas in which they appear as two independent entities, Prakriti able to dominate Purusha and cloud its freedom and power, reducing it to a witness and recipient of her forms and actions, Purusha able to return to its separate existence and abide in a free self-sovereignty by rejection of her original overclouding material principle. So with the other aspects or powers of the Divine Reality, One and Many, Divine Personality and Divine Impersonality, and the rest; each is still an aspect and power of the one Reality, but each is empowered to act as an independent entity in the whole, arrive at the fullness of the possibilities of its separate expression and develop the dynamic consequences of that separateness. At the same time in Overmind this separateness is still founded on the basis of an implicit underlying unity; all possibilities of combination and relation between the separated Powers and Aspects, all interchanges and mutualities of their energies are freely organised and their actuality always possible.
9:If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others. There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony. As with the One Existence, so with its Consciousness and Force. The One Consciousness is separated into many independent forms of consciousness and knowledge; each follows out its own line of truth which it has to realise. The one total and manysided Real-Idea is split up into its many sides; each becomes an independent Idea-Force with the power to realise itself. The one Consciousness-Force is liberated into its million forces, and each of these forces has the right to fulfil itself or to assume, if needed, a hegemony and take up for its own utility the other forces. So too the Delight of Existence is loosed out into all manner of delights and each can carry in itself its independent fullness or sovereign extreme. Overmind thus gives to the One Existence-Consciousness-Bliss the character of a teeming of infinite possibilities which can be developed into a multitude of worlds or thrown together into one world in which the endlessly variable outcome of their play is the determinant of the creation, of its process, its course and its consequence.
1.300 - 1.400 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Later Sri Bhagavan continued: The intricate maze of Philosophy of different schools is said to clarify matters and reveal the Truth.
But in fact they create confusion where no confusion need exist.
--
D.: Is there that difference in the Philosophy of Sankara and Gaudapada which the learned Professor wants us to believe?
M.: The difference is only in our imagination.
1.35 - The Tao 2, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
During my solitary wanderings among the mountainous wastes of Yun Nan, the spiritual atmosphere of China penetrated my consciousness, thanks to the absence of any intellectual impertinences from the organ of knowledge. The Tao Teh King revealed its simplicity and sublimity to my soul, little by little, as the conditions of my physical, no less than of my spiritual life, penetrated the sanctuaries of my spirit. The Philosophy of Lao Tze communicated itself to me, in despite of the persistent efforts of my mind to compel it to conform with my preconceived notions of what the text must mean. This process, having thus taken root in my innermost intuition during those tremendous months of wandering Yun Nan, grew continually throughout succeeding years. Whenever I found myself able once more to withdraw myself from the dissipations and distractions which contact with civilization forces upon a man, no matter how vigorously he may struggle against their insolence, to the sacred solitude of he desert, whether among the sierras of Spain or the sands of the Sahara, I found that the Philosophy of Lao Tze resumed its sway upon my soul, subtler and stronger on each successive occasion.
But neither Europe nor Africa can show any such desolation as America. The proudest, stubbornest, bitterest peasant of deserted Spain, the most primitive and superstitious Arab of the remotest oases, are a little more than kin and never less than kind at their worst; whereas in the United States one is almost always conscious of an instinctive lack of sympathy and understanding with even the most charming and cultured people. It was therefore during my exile in America that the doctrines of Lao Tze developed most rapidly in my soul, ever forcing their way outwards until I felt it imperious, nay inevitable, to express them in terms of conscious thought.
1.63 - Fear, a Bad Astral Vision, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
We tracked the cause: it was frustration. Good: then we must counter it. How? Only (in the last event) by getting the mind firmly fixed in the complete Philosophy of Thelema. There is no such thing as frustration. Every step is a step on the Path. It is simply not true that you were being baulked. The height of your irritation is a direct measure of the intensity of your Energy. Again, you soon come to laugh at yourself for your impatience. Probably (you surmise) your trouble is exactly that: you are pushing too hard. Your mind runs back to AL I, 44; you realize (again!) that any result actually spoils the Truth and Beauty of the Act of Will; it is almost a burden; even an insult. Rather as if I risked my life to save yours, and you tipped me half-a- crown! Here's that The Book of Lies popping out its ugly mug again: "Thou has become the Way." This is why the Ankh or "Key of Life" is a sandal-strap, borne in the hand of every God as a mark of his Godhead: a God is one who goes. (If I remember rightly, Plato derives "" from a verb meaning "to run", and is heartily abused by scholars for so doing. But perhaps the dreary old sophist was not far wrong, for once.) What you need to do, then, is to knit all these ideas into a very close pattern; to make of them a consecrated Talisman. Then, when rage takes you, it can be thrown upon the fire to stifle it: to thrust against the Demon, to disintegrate him. The great point is to have this weapon very firmly constructed, very complete. Your rage will pass in one of those two ways, which are one: Rapture and Laughter.
I want you to go over this apparatus very carefully; to analyse the argument, to make sure that there are no loose ends, to keep it keen and polished and well-oiled, ever ready for immediate use: not only against rage, but against any hampering or depressing line of thought.
1955-11-16 - The significance of numbers - Numbers, astrology, true knowledge - Divines Love flowers for Kali puja - Desire, aspiration and progress - Determining ones approach to the Divine - Liberation is obtained through austerities - ..., #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But look here! Let us take an altogether ordinary example which is very partial and very superficial. You are born in India. Being born in India you are born with a certain religious and philosophic attitude. But if for some reason or other you want to free yourself from this atavism and influence, if you begin to follow, study, practise the religion or Philosophy of another country, you can change the conditions of your inner development. It is a little more difficult, that is, it asks for a greater effort for liberation, but it is very far from being impossible. In fact there are many people who do it, who love to free themselves from what comes to them from their present birth; by some sort of special taste they like to seek elsewhere what they think they wont be able to find at home. And in this way you change the consequences of your birth completely.
Now you may tell me that this taste for the new or the unknown can come to you from a former life; this is probable. But it depends on what dominates in your being: whether it is the result of former psychic lives and psychic resolutions or whether it is the immediate consequence of your present constitution.
1956-08-15 - Protection, purification, fear - Atmosphere at the Ashram on Darshan days - Darshan messages - Significance of 15-08 - State of surrender - Divine Grace always all-powerful - Assumption of Virgin Mary - SA message of 1947-08-15, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Wu Wei: a novel based upon the Philosophy of Lao Tse, by Henri Borel (Librairie Fischbacher, 33 rue de Seine, Paris).
The message broadcast by All India Radio, Trichinopoly, on 14 August 1947, the eve of the Independence of India.
1958-09-24 - Living the truth - Words and experience, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
E.g., the Yoga Philosophy of Patanjali.
***
1f.lovecraft - The Hound, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Integral Yoga
diverting novelty and appeal. Only the sombre Philosophy of the
Decadents could hold us, and this we found potent only by increasing
2.00 - BIBLIOGRAPHY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
DEUSSEN, PAUL. The Philosophy of the Upanishads (London, 1906).
DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE. On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology. Translated with an introduction by C. E. Rolt (London, 1920).
2.01 - On Books, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
Disciple: The Continental scientists have refused to build a Philosophy of science. They say that it is not their business to explain, but to lay bare the process. Eddington in his Gifford Lectures (1934) said that ultimately it is the human mind, the subjective element, which accepts one conclusion out of a number of possible conclusions. Scientific conclusion does not always depend upon objective reality but upon subjective interpretation. For example, 8 x 2 is equal to 16 and not 61 it is the mind that accepts this truth.
Sri Aurobindo: In this case it is the accumulated experience or, you may say, invariable experience, that gives the sense of certainty.
2.02 - Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the Philosophy of the Sankhyas we find developed most thoroughly the metaphysical idea of Purusha-Prakriti.
7 The Sankhya philosophy stresses this personal aspect, makes the Purusha many, plural, and assigns universality to Nature; in this view each soul is an independent existence although all souls experience a common universal Nature.
2.02 - The Ishavasyopanishad with a commentary in English, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Integral Yoga
whole Philosophy of ethics; all else is practical arrangement and
balancing of forces, economising of energies for the purposes of
2.03 - Karmayogin A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Integral Yoga
few phrases the Vedantic Philosophy of God and Cosmos as a
necessary preliminary to the formation of a true and permanent
2.03 - THE ENIGMA OF BOLOGNA, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[95] As is clear from the title of his book, Allegoria peripatetica de generatione, amicitia, et privatione in Aristotelicum Aenigma Elia Lelia Crispis,250 Fortunius Licetus reads the whole Philosophy of Aristotle into the monument. He mentions the report that it was sculptured in stone, formerly set in a high position on the walls of St. Peters, but he does not say that he saw it with his own eyes, for in his day it was no longer in existence, if ever it existed at all. He thinks the inscription contains the summation of a serious philosophical theory about the origin of mundane things, a theory that was scientifico-moralis or ethico-physica. It is the authors intention to combine in a way to be marvelled at the attri butes of generation, friendship, and privation.251 That is why, he says, the monument is a true treasure-house.
[96] After reviewing a number of earlier authors who had devoted themselves to the same theme, Licetus mentions the work of Joannes Casparius Gevartius,252 who propounded the theory that the inscription described the nature of Love. This author cites the comic poet Alexis in Athenaeus:
2.04 - Positive Aspects of the Mother-Complex, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
god of revelation, and in the unofficial nature Philosophy of the
early Middle Ages he is nothing less than the world-creating
2.05 - The Cosmic Illusion; Mind, Dream and Hallucination, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Reality or an original Non-Existence. In India the Philosophy of world-negation has been given formulations of supreme power
432
--
But there is too a higher mental and spiritual basis for the Philosophy of world-negation and here we are on more solid ground: for it can be contended that the world is in its very nature an illusion and no reasoning from the features and circumstances of an Illusion could justify it or raise it into a Reality,
- there is only one Reality, the transcendent, the supracosmic: no divine fulfilment, even if our life were to grow into the life of gods, could nullify or cancel the original unreality which is its fundamental character; for that fulfilment would be only the bright side of an Illusion. Or even if not absolutely an illusion, it would be a reality of an inferior order and must come to an end by the soul's recognition that the Brahman alone is true, that there is nothing but the transcendent and immutable Absolute. If this is the one Truth, then all ground is cut away from under our feet; the divine Manifestation, the victory of the soul in Matter, its mastery over existence, the divine life in Nature would itself be a falsehood or at least something not altogether real imposed for a time on the sole true Reality. But here all turns on the mind's conception or the mental being's experience of Reality and how far that conception is valid or how far that experience is imperative, - even if it is a spiritual experience, how far it is absolutely conclusive, solely imperative.
2.06 - Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In a second possible answer on the illusionist basis to the problem, in the Philosophy of Shankara which may be described as a qualified Illusionism, an answer which is presented with a force and comprehensiveness that are extraordinarily impressive, we make a first step towards this solution. For this philosophy affirms a qualified reality for Maya; it characterises it indeed as an ineffable and unaccountable mystery, but at the same time it does present us with a rational solution, at first sight thoroughly satisfactory, of the opposition which afflicts our mind; it accounts for our sense of the persistent and pressing reality of the universe and our sense of the inconclusiveness, insufficiency, vanity, evanescence, a certain unreality of life and phenomena. For we find a distinction made between two orders of reality, transcendental and pragmatic, absolute and phenomenal, eternal and temporal, - the former the reality of the pure being of Brahman, absolute and supracosmic and eternal, the latter the reality of Brahman in Maya, cosmic, temporal and relative. Here we get a reality for ourselves and the universe: for the individual self is really Brahman; it is Brahman who within the field of Maya seems phenomenally to be subjected to her as the individual and in the end releases the relative and phenomenal individual into his eternal and true being. In the temporal field of relativities our experience of the Brahman who has become all beings, the Eternal who has become universal and individual, is also valid; it is indeed a middle step of the movement in Maya towards liberation from Maya. The universe too and its experiences are real for the consciousness in Time and that consciousness is real. But the question of the nature and extent of this reality at once arises: for the universe and
472
--
In the Philosophy of Shankara one feels the presence of a conflict, an opposition which this powerful intellect has stated with full force and masterfully arranged rather than solved with
478
2.08 - ALICE IN WONDERLAND, #God Exists, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
Ideas precede reality: this one sentence is the entire Philosophy of Plato. The reality of the objective universe is subsequent to the idea of the universe. Here we have an echo of the great Philosophy of Vedanta that the Hiranyagarbha (cosmic intelligence) is prior to the cosmos of physical appearance. The Panchadasi, The Upanishads and the other systems of Vedantic thinking tell us that in Hiranyagarbha the world does not exist in a concrete form as it appears, that is only an idea cosmically manifested by Isvara (God) who is even subtler than the idea. Isvara is only a possibility of the very idea that there should be a thing called the universe. So, Isvara is subtler than the idea which is Hiranyagarbha, and Virat is supposed to be the animating consciousness behind the so-called physicality of creation. So, even in the Vedantic Philosophy, there is the same doctrine of idea preceding concrete existence. But we can never believe this.
My idea that there is a desk in front of me cannot be said to be harder in its concreteness than the desk itself. I have an idea that there is a little table in front of me. Is the table more real or the idea that the table is there more real? Any man with common-sense will say that the idea is subsequent to the existence of the object called table and the idea is not preceding the object. Because there is a table, you think there is a table. You have an idea that there is an object. So, the idea that there is an object is the consequence of the existence of the object. So, the idea of God must be subsequent and not precedent.
2.1.02 - Nature The World-Manifestation, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A Philosophy of change?1 But what is change? In ordinary parlance change means passage from one condition to another and that would seem to imply passage from one status to another status. The shoot changes into a tree, passes from the status of
These notes were written apropos of Bergson's " Philosophy of change"; "you" below would refer to a proponent of this philosophy.
2.11 - The Modes of the Self, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And yet, so complex is the Maya of the Infinite, there is a sense in which the view of all as parts of the whole, waves of the sea or even as in a sense separate entities becomes a necessary part of the integral Truth and the integral Knowledge. For if the Self is always one in all, yet we see that for the purposes at least of the cyclic manifestation it expresses itself in perpetual soul-forms which preside over the movements of our personality through the worlds and the aeons. This persistent soul-existence is the real Individuality which stands behind the constant mutations of the thing we call our personality. It is not a limited ego but a thing in itself infinite; it is in truth the Infinite itself consenting from one plane of its being to reflect itself in a perpetual soul-experience. This is the truth which underlies the Sankhya theory of many Purushas, many essential, infinite, free and impersonal souls reflecting the movements of a single cosmic energy. It stands also, in a different way, behind the very different Philosophy of qualified Monism which arose as a protest against the metaphysical excesses of Buddhistic Nihilism and illusionist Adwaita. The old semi-Buddhistic, semi-Sankhya theory which saw only the Quiescent and nothing else in the world except a constant combination of the five elements and the three modes of inconscient Energy lighting up their false activity by the consciousness of the Quiescent in which it is reflected, is not the whole truth of the Brahman. We are not a mere mass of changing mind-stuff, life-stuff, body-stuff taking different forms of mind and life and body from birth to birth, so that at no time is there any real self or conscious reason of existence behind all the flux or none except that Quiescent who cares for none of these things. There is a real and stable power of our being behind the constant mutation of our mental, vital and physical personality, and this we have to know and preserve in order that the Infinite may manifest Himself through it according to His will in whatever range and for whatever purpose of His eternal cosmic activity.
And if we regard existence from the standpoint of the possible eternal and infinite relations of this One from whom all things proceed, these Many of whom the One is the essence and the origin and this Energy, Power, or Nature through which the relations of the One and the Many are maintained, we shall see a certain justification even for the dualist philosophies and religions which seem to deny most energetically the unity of beings and to make an unbridgeable differentiation between the Lord and His creatures. If in their grosser forms these religions aim only at the ignorant joys of the lower heavens, yet there is a far higher and profounder sense in which we may appreciate the cry of the devotee poet when in a homely and vigorous metaphor he claimed the right of the soul to enjoy for ever the ecstasy of its embrace of the Supreme. "I do not want to become sugar," he wrote, "I want to eat sugar." However strongly we found ourselves on the essential identity of the one Self in all, we need not regard that cry as the mere aspiration of a certain kind of spiritual sensuousness or the rejection by an attached and ignorant soul of the pure and high austerity of the supreme Truth. On the contrary, it aims in its positive part at a deep and mysterious truth of Being which no human language can utter, of which human reason can give no adequate account, to which the heart has the key and which no pride of the soul of knowledge insisting on its own pure austerity can abolish. But that belongs properly to the summit of the path of Devotion and there we shall have again to return to it.
2.14 - The Passive and the Active Brahman, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The basis of this status of consciousness is the mind's exclusive realisation of pure self-existence in which consciousness is at rest, inactive, widely concentrated ill pure self-awareness of being, not active and originative of any kind of becoming. Its aspect of knowledge is at rest in the awareness of undifferentiated identity; its aspect of force and will is at rest in the awareness of unmodifiable immutability. And yet it is aware of names and forms, it is aware of movement; but this movement does not seem to proceed from the Self, but to go on by some inherent power of its own and only to be reflected in the Self. In other words, the mental being has put away from himself by exclusive concentration the dynamic aspect of consciousness, has taken refuge in the static and built a wall of non-communication between the two; between the passive and the active Brahman a gulf has been created and they stand on either side of it, the one visible to the other but with no contact, no touch of sympathy, no sense of unity between them. Therefore to the passive Self all conscious being seems to be passive in its nature, all activity seems to be non-conscious in itself and mechanical (jada) in its movement. The realisation of this status is the basis of the ancient Sankhya philosophy which taught that the Purusha or Conscious-Soul is a passive, inactive, immutable entity, prakriti or the Nature-Soul including even the mind and the understanding active, mutable, mechanical, but reflected in the Purusha which identifies itself with what is reflected in it and lends to it its own light of consciousness. When the Purusha learns not to identify himself, then prakriti begins to fall away from its impulse of movement and returns towards equilibrium and rest. The Vedantic view of the same status led to the Philosophy of the inactive Self or Brahman as the one reality and of all the rest as name and form imposed on it by a false activity of mental illusion which has to be removed by right knowledge of the immutable Self and refusal of the imposition387a. The two views really differ only in their language and their viewpoint; substantially, they are the same intellectual generalisation from the same spiritual experience.
If we rest here, there are only two possible attitudes toward the world. Either we must remain as mere inactive witnesses of the world-play or act in it mechanically without any participation of the conscious self and by mere play of the organs of sense and motor-action387b. In the former choice what we do is to approach as completely as possible to the inactivity of the passive and silent Brahman. We have stilled our mind and silenced the activity of the thought and the disturbances of the heart, we have arrived at an entire inner peace and indifference; we attempt now to still the mechanical action of the life and body, to reduce it to the most meagre minimum possible so that It may eventually cease entirely and for ever. This, the final aim of the ascetic Yoga which refuses life, is evidently not our aim. By the alternative choice we can have an activity perfect enough in outward appearance along with an entire inner passivity, peace, mental silence, indifference and cessation of the emotions, absence of choice in the will.
2.16 - The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Therefore we accept the truth on which the philosophies of the supracosmic Absolute take their stand; Illusionism itself, even if we contest its ultimate conclusions, can still be accepted as the way in which the soul in mind, the mental being, has to see things in a spiritual-pragmatic experience when it cuts itself off from the Becoming in order to approach and enter into the Absolute. But also, since the Becoming is real and is inevitable in the very self-power of the Infinite and Eternal, this too is not a complete Philosophy of existence. It is possible for the soul in the Becoming to know itself as the Being and possess the Becoming, to know itself as Infinite in essence but also as the Infinite self-expressed in the finite, the timeless Eternal regarding itself and its works in the founding status and the developing motion of Time-eternity. This realisation is the culmination of the Becoming; it is the fulfilment of the Being in its dynamic reality. This too then must be part of the total truth of things, for it alone gives a full spiritual significance to the universe and justifies the soul in manifestation; an explanation of things that deprives cosmic and individual existence of all significance cannot be the whole explanation or the solution it proposes the sole true issue.
The next affirmation which we put forward is that the fundamental reality of the Absolute is to our spiritual perception a Divine Existence, Consciousness and Delight of Being which is a supracosmic Reality, self-existent, but also the secret truth underlying the whole manifestation; for the fundamental truth of Being must necessarily be the fundamental truth of Becoming.
2.1.7.07 - On the Verse and Structure of the Poem, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the new form it will be a sort of poetic Philosophy of the Spirit and of Life much profounder in its substance and vaster in its scope than was intended in the original poem. I am trying of course to keep it at a very high level of inspiration, but in so large a plan covering most subjects of philosophical thought and vision and many aspects of spiritual experience there is bound to be much variation of tone: but that is, I think, necessary for the richness and completeness of the treatment.
1946
2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
When I came to Baroda from England I found out what the Congress was at that time and formed a contempt for it. Then I came in touch with Deshpande, Tilak, Madhav Rao and others. Deshpande got me to write a series in the Indu Prakash (of which he was an editor). There I strongly criticised the Congress for its moderate policy. The articles were so fiery that M. G. Ranade, the great Maharashtrian leader, asked the proprietor of the paper (through Deshpande) not to allow such seditious things to appear in the paper, otherwise he might be arrested and imprisoned. Deshpande approached me with the news and requested me to write something less violent. I then began to write about the Philosophy of politics, leaving aside the practical part of politics. But I soon got disgusted with it.
Along with Tilak, Madhav Rao, Deshmukh and Joshi (who became a moderate later) we were planning to work on more extreme lines than the Congress. We brought Jatin Banerji from Bengal and put him in the Baroda army. Our idea was to drive moderates from the Congress and capture it.
2.17 - The Soul and Nature, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The first of these principles in importance is the duality -- which resolves itself into a unity -- of Purusha and prakriti of which we have had occasion to speak in the Yoga of Works, but which is of equal importance for the Yoga of knowledge. This division was made most clearly by the old Indian philosophies; but it bases itself upon the eternal fact of practical duality in unity upon which the world-manifestation is founded. It is given different names according to our view of the universe. The Vedantins spoke of the Self and Maya, meaning according to their predilections by the Self the Immutable and by Maya the power the Self has of imposing on itself the cosmic illusion, or by the Self the Divine Being and by Maya the nature of conscious-being and the conscious-force by which the Divine embodies himself in soul-forms and forms of things. Others spoke of Ishwara and shakti, the Lord and His force. His cosmic power. The analytic Philosophy of the Sankhyas affirmed their eternal duality without any possibility of oneness, accepting only relations of union and separation by which the cosmic action of prakriti begins, proceeds or ceases for the Purusha; for the Purusha is an inactive conscious existence, -it is the Soul the same in itself and immutable forever, -- prakriti the active force of Nature which by its motion creates and maintains and by its sinking into rest dissolves the phenomenon of the cosmos. Leaving aside these philosophical distinctions, we come to the original psychological experience from which all really take their start, that there are two elements in the existence of living beings, of human beings at least if not of all cosmos, -- a dual being. Nature and the soul.
This duality is self-evident. Without any philosophy at all, by the mere force of experience it is what we can all perceive, although we may not take the trouble to define. Even the most thoroughgoing materialism which denies the soul or resolves it into a more or less illusory result of natural phenomena acting upon some ill-explained phenomenon of the physical brain which we call consciousness or the mind, but which is really no more than a sort of complexity of nervous spasms, cannot get rid of the practical fact of this duality. It does not matter at all how it came about; the fact is not only there, it determines our whole existence, it is the one fact which is really important to us as human beings with a will and an intelligence and a subjective existence which makes all our happiness and our suffering. The whole problem of life resolves itself into this one question, -- "What are we to do with this soul and nature set face to face with each other, this Nature, this personal and cosmic activity, which tries to impress itself upon the soul, to possess, control, determine it, and this soul which feels that in some mysterious way it has a freedom, a control over itself, a responsibility for what it is and does, and tries therefore to turn upon Nature, its own and the world's, and to control, possess, enjoy, or even, it may be, reject and escape from her?" In order to answer that question we have to know, -- to know what the soul can do, to know what it call do with itself, to know too what it can do with Nature and the world. The whole of human philosophy, religion, science is really nothing but an attempt to get at the right data upon which it will be possible to answer the question and solve, as satisfactorily as our knowledge will allow, the problem of our existence.
2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
So also in the political Philosophy of Europe you find that if they accept democracy, it is only democracy all the rest is opposed to it. If monarchy, then it is only monarchy. That is what happened in Greece. They fought for democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, and in the end they were conquered by the Romans.
Disciple: Then what is the truth in all these attempts at political organisation?
2.2.01 - The Problem of Consciousness, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Science has discovered Evolution; Religion and Philosophy have discovered something of that which is involved and evolves in this cosmic Existence. But the two discoveries have refused to shed light upon each other; each has shut itself up in its own formulas. This is because each is a creation and activity of Mind, Science of the concretising experimental mind, Philosophy of the abstracting intellectual mind, Religion of the dynamic spiritual mind. But Mind is bound always by its partial formulations of the Truth; Mind grasps formulas or images but is itself grasped by its own creations, it cannot get free from them or go beyond them. But the mind's concepts and formulas are only fragmentary representations of Truth or pointers or abstract schemas and images, not her very self and reality. Either a deeper inner soul-vision or a higher overmental or supramental consciousness is needed to discover Truth in her very face and body.
The Problem of Consciousness
2.20 - The Philosophy of Rebirth, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:2.20 - The Philosophy of Rebirth
class:chapter
2.27 - Hathayoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To speak of the processes of Hathayoga as scientific may seem strange to those who associate the idea of science only with the superficial phenomena of the physical universe apart from all that is behind them; but they are equally based on definite experience of laws and their workings and give, when rightly practised, their well-tested results. In fact, Hathayoga is, in its own way, a system of knowledge; but while the proper Yoga of knowledge is a Philosophy of being put into spiritual practice, a psychological system, this is a science of being, a psycho-physical system. Both produce physical, psychic and spiritual results; but because they stand at different poles of the same truth, to one the psycho-physical results are of small importance, the pure psychic and spiritual alone matter, and even the pure psychic are only accessories of the spiritual which absorb all the attention; m the other the physical is of Immense importance, the psychical a considerable fruit, the spiritual the highest and consummating result, but it seems for a long time a thing postponed and remote, so great arid absorbing is the attention which the body demands. It must not be forgotten, however, that both do arrive at the same end. Hathayoga, also, is a path, though by a long, difficult and meticulous movement, dunhkam aptume, to the Supreme.
All Yoga proceeds in its method by three principles of practice; first, purification, that is to say, the removal of all aberrations, disorders, obstructions brought about by the mixed and irregular action of the energy of being in our physical, moral and mental system; secondly, concentration, that is to say, the bringing to its full intensity and the mastered and self-directed employment of that energy of being in us for a definite end; thirdly, liberation, that is to say, the release of our being from the narrow and painful knots of the individualised energy in a false and limited play, which at present are the law of our nature. The enjoyment of our liberated being which brings us into unity or union with the Supreme, is the consummation; it is that for which Yoga is done. Three indispensable steps and the high, open and infinite levels to which they mount; and in all its practice Hathayoga keeps these in view.
2.2.9.02 - Plato, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Not from Indian books something of the Philosophy of India got through by means of Pythagoras and others. But I think Plato got most of these things from intuition.
8 October 1933
3.01 - The Mercurial Fountain, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
methods and Philosophy of alchemy. These are not warranted by the nature
of matter as known to the old masters; they can only derive from the
3.05 - SAL, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[273] The quaternity of the self appears in Ezekiels vision as the true psychological foundation of the God-concept. God uses it as his vehicle. It is possible for the psychologist to verify the structure of this foundation, but beyond that the theologian has the last word. In order to clear up any misunderstandings, especially from the theological side, I would like to emphasize yet again that it is not the business of science to draw conclusions which go beyond the bounds of our empirical knowledge. I do not feel the slightest need to put the self in place of God, as short-sighted critics have often accused me of doing. If Indian philosophers equate the atman with the concept of God and many Westerners copy them, this is simply their subjective opinion and not science. A consensus generalis on this point would in itself be yet another fact which, for the empirical psychologist, is as well worth considering as the remarkable view of many theologians that religious statements have nothing to do with the psyche. Similarly, it is characteristic of the mystical Philosophy of the alchemists that the Mercurial serpent is enthroned on the chariot. He is a living spirit who uses as his chariot the body that consists of the four elements. In this sense the chariot is the symbol of earthly life. A Georgian fairytale closes with the verses:
I have dragged a cart up the mountain,
3.1.03 - A Realistic Adwaita, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There is possible a realistic as well as an illusionist Adwaita. The Philosophy of The Life Divine is such a realistic Adwaita. The world is a manifestation of the Real and therefore is itself real. The reality is the infinite and eternal Divine, infinite and eternal Being, Consciousness-Force and Bliss. This Divine by his power has created the world or rather manifested it in his own infinite Being. But here in the material world or at its basis he has hidden himself in what seem to be his opposites, Non-Being, Inconscience and Insentience. This is what we nowadays call the Inconscient which seems to have created the material universe by its inconscient Energy; but this is only an appearance, for we find in the end that all the dispositions of the world can only have been arranged by the working of a supreme secret intelligence. The Being which is hidden in what seems to be an inconscient void emerges in the world first in Matter, then in Life, then in Mind and finally as the Spirit. The apparently inconscient Energy which creates is in fact the Consciousness-Force of the Divine and its aspect of consciousness, secret in Matter, begins to emerge in Life, finds something more of itself in Mind and finds its true self in a spiritual consciousness and finally a supramental consciousness through which we become aware of the Reality, enter into it and unite ourselves with it. This is what we call evolution which is an evolution of consciousness and an evolution of the Spirit in things and only outwardly an evolution of species. Thus also, the delight of existence emerges from the original insentience first in the contrary forms of pleasure and pain and then has to find itself in the bliss of the Spirit or as it is called in the Upanishads, the bliss of the Brahman. That is the central idea in the explanation of the universe put forward in The Life Divine.
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32.07 - The God of the Scientist, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We do not know how many have given due regard to this remarkable fact that the rational mind of modern times, inspired by the spirit of science which has turned towards spirituality for whatever reason, is often attracted to the pure Vedanta or the Buddhistic Philosophy of India. The chief reason for this appears to me to be this that the truth and the essence of religion are looked upon as anthropomorphic by the scientist. The scientist can hardly accept this position. For, the very speciality of the scientific procedure is to keep aside the human factor from human knowledge. A particular knowledge bears the stamp of the knower, but science aims at knowledge independent of its knower. Now the scientific attitude from its summit declares, I do not know the unknown and the unknowable that is beyond. This learned ignorance which is called agnosticism, and is, in a little altered form, known as scepticism - that is the legitimate consummation of scientific rationalism. But when one looks upon this unknown and unknowable with religious reverence, one says, "Therefrom speech returns baffled along with the mind." This is verily the Brahman, beyond speech and mind; and its other name is then Nihil.. Mind can understand mind or its absence or disintegration. It is extremely difficult for it to comprehend anything that is apart from these two extreme terms. It is not so difficult for the rational mind to accept the spiritual doctrine of 'not this, not this'; but the other aspects of spirituality - the truth about divine Forms and Incarnations, about Purushottama, the supreme Being, even the transmigration of the soul, - all these are senseless enigmas to reason-bound mind. The triune principle of Existence, Consciousness and Bliss of the Vedanta is such a general, neutral and indefinite principle that it seems to be intuited and felt by the pure intellect when it climbs up to its acme. In other words, at the highest level of the brain, as it were, there takes place the first revelation of spirituality, a glow and reflection amounting to the perception of a formless infinite, whose true nature is separately or simultaneously an existence, consciousness and bliss or a non-Being pregnant with all the essence of Being.
The scientific intellect has thus reached a certain theism and the poet and the artist also have reached similar levels through different ways of approach. The aesthetic taste of the artist, the sense of intense delight in the beauty of the cosmic creation is not born of the intellect but is allied to it, and falls within the category of the mind - it is a thing that belongs to this side of the boundary of consciousness, which we have to cross to attain to the true spiritual world. The twilight consciousness is, as it were, on the border-line; it belongs in its rhythm, gesture, gait and expression still to this shore-land rather than the other, howsoever may the artist aspire for the shore beyond. No doubt, I speak of the creations of artists in general. There are rare artists whose creation embodies genuine spiritual experience and realisation. But that is a different matter - it concerns the purely spiritual art. Ordinary works of art do not belong to that category and derive their inspiration from a different source. With regard to philosophy something similar might be said. Most of the Indian philosophies, such as the philosophies of Shankara, Ramanuja, the sage Kapila and Patanjali are but intellectual expressions of different spiritual visions and realisations. If it be so, then is it not possible for science also to become a vehicle or expression of spiritual realisations? This may not have materialised up till now; generally or to a large degree perhaps an attempt of the kind was made in the line that is known as occultism, and which was called alchemy by the ancients, but the effort ended in a spurious system of rites and ceremonies. No doubt this knowledge, even at its best, falls short of the Higher Knowledge, Para Vidya; still there was a time when the Inferior Knowledge, Apara Vidya, was accepted as a stepping-stone to the Higher. "Exceeding death by Avidya (Ignorance) one has to enjoy immortality through Vidya (Knowledge)" - "Avidyaya mrtyum tirtva vidyaya amrtam asnute."
33.16 - Soviet Gymnasts, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The round of sports and athletics over, the Soviet gymnasts expressed a desire to know more about us. That is, about the aims and ideals of the Ashram, the spiritual disciplines we follow and their rationale. You know, officially and in the world's eye the Soviet Union is atheistic and follows a materialist Philosophy of life. God, soul, the beyond, or the higher worlds, in these things the new Russians of today have no faith, none. Their entire stress or sraddhais on this world, this life, on the physical-vital-mental being whom they call Man.
It was arranged that I should talk to the gymnasts. Following civilised traditions, this was to be a post-prandial session; that is, the conversation was to follow a rather sumptuous dinner: food before philosophy, as they say. But, no. The Soviet gymnasts were strict dietitians, extremely cautious and restrained in their food habit. When finally we met there were ten or twelve of them, three or four girls and the rest young men. Only the leader seemed slightly elderly. Their knowledge of English was almost nil. Russian was all they knew. When they used to train the Ashram children, funny situations would arise - for they had to express themselves mainly, sometimes vainly, through wordless hints and gestures. Anyway, one of the girls knew English fairly well and she acted as interpreter. Of her more later.
3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
In the lower left-hand corner, C. P. Snow's Two Cultures, Literary and Scientific, are shown modified and assembled into a new form of what Walter Lippmann has called The Public Philosophy.41 Namely, the Public Philosophy of our new, emergent culture, Higher Industrial Civilization; Human Period 7 of the Periodic Table of Human Cultures, Figure IV-4.55 This Public Philosophy emerges as a result of certain quite precise modifications of our traditional scientific and literary cultures, as also of the conflict-biased Marxist theory and practice, diagrammed in Plain Truth--And Redirection of the Cold War.23
These changes are already in process of occurring: first because of the new concepts and methods of Unified Science, represented by the three nested braces; and second, because of compatible new concepts emerging in the major components of the Literary culture: one component embodied in the Division of Humanities, the other in the School of Business (or better of Management), and represented by the long parallel braces.
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That is the nature of the new Public Philosophy. The result, however, is transformation of both capitalism and socialism into a new system, Social Capitalism, coherently developed in Switzerl and from 1925 to the present.23 (See pages 192-195.) This is the system called for by the Public Philosophy of Higher Industrialism. The old capitalism's legitimacy was lost because--this has been mapped geometrically--its dominant value premise changed from positive to neutral, and later to negative, as described in Ch. V. Social Capital's dominant value-premise however is clearly and unequivocally positive. That is what gives it legitimacy. The new philosophy which Kristol and Madden call for is, of course, essential. It is, however, the Public Philosophy of Higher Industrial Civilization which results from the transformation of capitalism and of socialism into Social Capitalism.
"We need a discipline rather than a vision," Madden continues. Unified Science is actually both: it began as a vision-Descartes' dreams, Bacon's Novum Organum, Leibniz' Universal Characteristicl2; perhaps even the sudden picture of the Periodic coordinate system as I walked on Riverside Drive in New York City. Then it developed into the discipline expounded in this book.
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If these resources are granted, not only the solutions above, but those to scores of other problems called for in Clash of Culture will emerge cumulatively, and will transform this culture clash into constructive orientation: in terms of Figure IV-11 it will change the multiversity's ad hoc improvisation into rational assembly of "Compatible background theories, coherently mapped into the Periodic coordinate system," resulting in "A single, dynamic, holistic, evolving discipline: the Public Philosophy. This is, and will become more clearly, the Public Philosophy of the Space Age."34
Figure IV-11 is a detail-less plan at whose center is a merely synoptic indication of the New University's controller, the New University Council. The point however is, as Stafford Beer emphasizes with heavy type, that PLANNING IS HOMOLOGOUS WITH ORGANIZATION.53 It takes a cybernetic system like the New University, conducted by generalists and organized specialists (Figure VI-12 below), to grasp and deal with whole cybernetic systems. To understand cybernetic systems requires systems-theoretically structured minds and institutions of higher learning. (Hence the invisibility of Unified Science to otherwise excellent scientists.)
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17. Early in 1954 when I was in London, I asked Dr. Toynbee telephonically whether he would approve of an attempt on my part to geometrize his basic socio-political categories. He cordially approved and wished me success. I began with Geometric Coding of Political Philosophies, proceeded, in collaboration with H. G. Cassidy, with Plain Truth-And Redirection of the Cold War, (See below, Note 23) and continue in the present work, with others under way. (See: Haskell, Edward F. "Geometric Coding of Political Philosophies," Proceedings of the Second International Congress of the Philosophy of Science, Vol. IV. Philosophy and Science-History of Philosophy. Editions du Griffon, Neuchatel, Switz., 1955.)
18. I am supported in this belief by Dr. Baltzell's strong endorsement of my position during a heated discussion following a lecture I gave in Philadelphia in 1968.
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34. Haskell, Edward, "Unified Science: The Public Philosophy of the Space Age," Connecticut Review, Board of Trustees for the Connecticut State Colleges, Hartford, Conn., 1969.
35. People displaying this mentality are called Generalists. See The Moral Society--A Rational Alternative to Death by John David Garcia. ( Julian Press, New York, 1971.)
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Unified Science's absolutes are permanent. So future shock--the fear that permanence is dead--has lost its sting.8 Jonas' book, from which I have been quoting, bears a predictive sub-title: Toward A Philosophy of Biology. In its Epilogue, he defines the objective toward which his work is directed, and clearly points the road by which it has here been reached: "Ontology as the ground of ethics was the original tenet of philosophy. Their divorce, which is the divorce of the `objective' and `subjective' realms, is the modern destiny. Their reunion can be affected, if at all, only from the `objective' end, that is to say, through a revision of the idea of nature. And it is becoming, rather than abiding, nature which would hold out any such promise."
Unified Science is a profound revision of most peoples' idea of nature; and it is stated in terms precisely of process, of becoming. The insight which Jonas then shows us is prophetic: "From the immanent direction of its total evolution there may be elicited a destination of man by whose terms the person, in the act of fulfilling himself, would at the same time realize a concern of universal substance." Unified Science proclaims this immanent direction to be increasing organization; and its destination, ectropy's highest region, to be . "Hence," Jonas continues, "would result a principle of ethics which is ultimately grounded neither in the autonomy of the self nor in the needs of the community, but in an objective assignment by the nature of things (what theology used to call the ordo creationis) such as could still be kept faith with by the last of a dying mankind in his solitude." p. 283.2 Some call this principle Omega, others call it God.
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My prediction has always been, and is, that we will make it to the top! In 1942 I announced The Religious Force of Unified Science.11 Then--after Lippmann had formulated the more general concept, public philosophy (1959), and Unified Science had fully emerged--the position became clear and specific: Unified Science: The Public Philosophy of the Space Age.12,13 How do we know that Unified Science, and it alone, can be our public philosophy? This is the Age of Sciences; and more particularly, of systems-theoretic sciences; and Unified Science coordinates sciences in terms of general systems theory.14 Being systems science, it admits empirical data. Being unified, it admits them from all disciplines and fields of experience. (Some of its multiple inputs are specified on the left-hand side of Figure IV-11, Proposed Transformation of Multiversity into University.) Being steered by a coordinate system whose axes represent the General System's work component and controller (Figures II-10 and chart), it orders all these data relative to all their theoretically possible coactions, and these relative to the world's ultimate absolutes, and . Ordering all knowledge and experience relative to and , it shows clearly the universe's strongly positive value-bias. Showing a positive value-bias, it corresponds unequivocally to the positive value-premise of all the great religions.15 And having done this, Unified Science has come Full Circle: it supports, and is supported by, the public philosophies of all the great Literate civilizations, past and present, and the majority of our own civilization's people.l6 And doing this in the language and idiom of science, it bears our civilization's signs of legitimacy and seals of truth.
Is this not reversal of what Toynbee called schizm of the soul? Is it not reversal of the disaster which causes, and results from, the schizm of the body politic, schizm of the body ecologic, and disintegration of civilization? Toynbee calls schizm-reversal transfiguration and palingenesia.16 In The Public Philosophy,9 Walter Lippmann describes what, for our civilization, palingenesia would be: "A convincing demonstration . . . that the principles of the good society are not, in Sartre's phrase, invented and chosen--that the conditions which are to be met if there is to be a good society are there, outside our wishes, where they can be discovered by rational inquiry, and developed and adapted and refined by rational discussion." He then concludes as follows:
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What is the form which this mandate must today assume ? In our Scientific-Industrial civilization, the title of being right which binds men's consciences bears the sign of logical consistency and the seal of empirical validation. Some of the sciences' traditional terms of discourse have now, I believe, been altered in the manner which Lippmann advocates, producing the result he intuited and expressed more movingly than any scientist. However, belonging to the Literate Culture as he does, he could point out but could not himself lead the way into the Promised Land. The recreation of public philosophy in our society must be led by the keepers of its signs and seals of legitimacy--by scientists. They are achieving it by converging the sciences into a single discipline. For this is the Public Philosophy of the Space Age. This they can achieve because, and only because, with all its novelty and power, it is in basic harmony with the old Literate public philosophy which the fragmented sciences had brought into decline. The major forces of disintegration will, under this mandate of Heaven, be turned around and organized constructively.
3. THE BUCK STOPS AT ALPHA
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Though we had corresponded briefly, and I had publicly discussed "The Religious Force of Unified Science",11 he did not say that Unified Science would, by its definition and intrinsic structure, have to be this sort of synthesis. Nor did he say that the public Philosophy of Higher Industrial Civilization can scarcely be anything but this over-all sort of synthesis. Nonetheless, he sensed and said clearly that the Two Cultures were about to unite. This prediction is now being fulfilled. And as this happens it will restore in our New World the ancient oneness of the human spirit.26
In 1955 Walter Lippmann hoped and pleaded for this restoration in The Public Philosophy--On the Decline and Revival of Western Democracy. I had replied that Unified Science is The Public Philosophy of the Space Age.12 And this involves a global, and thus Copernican, change of attitude.
This general synthesis presupposes, and depends upon, paradigm-changes such that the paradigms of all the relevant views and disciplines become compatible. And that is clearly what is happening today: each of the paradigms of Unified Science involves a profound change of its predecessor. And all of them combine into a coherent and largely verifiable system; a system of attitudes which tends to support the paradigms of advancing theologians, political scientists, economists, and men and women of the arts and literature.
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"I have lived into a generation," Dr. Fosdick continued, "where not science alone but education too `has created a world in which Christianity is an imperative."' He then lists almost all the defects which the crisis ridden university's now perfectly feasible assembly plant, Figure IV-11, has been shown to correct: "Facts without values, fragmentary specialties with no integrating Philosophy of life as a whole, data with no ethical standards for their use, techniques with no convictions about life's ultimate meaning or with corrupting convictions--here, too, a panacea has turned out to be a problem. What quality of faith and character is going to use our educated minds?"p.271.
Answer: The quality wherein Unified Science and religion at its best coincide; and that is probably throughout.
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2. Jonas, Hans, The Phenomenon of Life--Toward a Philosophy of Biology, Bell Publ. Co., New York, 1968.
3. This diagram, based upon Two Modes of Thought by James B. Conant is taken from my xeroxed book Unified Science--Assembly of the Sciences into A Single Discipline, Volume I, Scientia Generalis, Chap. 7. It has been used as a textbook at the New School for Social Research in New York and Southern Connecticut State College in New Haven, and is being readied for publication. (See, Conant, James, B., Two Modes of Thought, Trident Press, New York, 1964. Haskell, Edward, Unified--of the Sciences into a Single Discipline, Vol. I, Scientia Generalis. Preface and a chapter by Harold G. Cassidy. Offset-printed by N.I.H. 1968; xeroxed by IBM Systems Res. Inst., New York, 1969.)
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12. ----, "Unified Science--The Public Philosophy of the Space Age," Connecticut Review, Hartford, Conn., April, 1969.
13. "The Public Philosophy of the Space Age," a chapter in a symposium volume. Gordon and Breach, Science Publishers, New York, 1972.
14. Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, General Systems Theory--Foundations, Development, Applications. Braziller, New York, 1968.
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Public philosophy (Ref. Lippmann, Walter, The Public Philosophy.) A society's commonly shared world view. The higher the society's Period, the more forms its public philosophy must display: A different form for each Stratum. Coexistence of these different forms of the public philosophy depends upon the emergence of coherent Systems theory, complete with glossary, permitting translations between the diverse forms of the public philosophy. Unified science, religion and political ideology thus comprise the public Philosophy of the Space Age. (Ref., Haskell, E. F.).
Quasar (quasi stellar object) (n.) The first known stage in the development (ontogeny, q.v.) of a galaxy. The population of atoms emerges in the quasar's expanding spheroidal shells. (See Figs. II-2 and II-1b) C.f. Galaxy.
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People, it seems, are endowed with moral ability in varying degrees, just as they are endowed with mathematical or linguistic ability. All the Great Religions, and above all the Christian, clearly display approaches to the Periodic Law. They are expressions of this moral sense in the terms of pre-Literate and Literate peoples, Period 5. With the emergence of Unified Science, the continuity of this moral ability's development in terms of Lower and High Industrial cultures, Periods 6 and 7, becomes clearly visible. The empirical sciences' three-century-long structural amorality, the detour which Arthur Koestler called "The Parting of the Ways", comes to an end as science comes Full Circle, merging C. P. Snow's Two Cultures and producing Walter Lippmann's long urged and hoped for Public Philosophy of Industrial civilization.
The third anthropological sighting variable is analogous to the sighter's or aimer's own velocity. This variable has been described in Chapter II, Section 7, and related to Einstein's sighting technique in physics by way of his free-falling elevator and rotating room analogies. There it was pointed out that highly autocratic or predatory cultures on one hand, strongly symbiotic cultures on the other, give rise in their inhabitants to strongly biased images of the world: People raised in the first tend to misinterpret cooperators as predators; people raised in the second tend to misinterpret predators as harmless cooperators.
3.6.01 - Heraclitus, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Professor R. D. Ranade has recently published a small treatise on the Philosophy of Heraclitus. From the paging of the treatise it seems to be an excerpt, but from what there is nothing to tell. It is perhaps too much to hope that it is from a series of essays on philosophers or a history of philosophy by this perfect writer and scholar. At any rate such a work from such a hand would be a priceless gain. For Professor Ranade possesses in a superlative degree the rare gift of easy and yet adequate exposition; but he has more than this, for he can give a fascinating interest to subjects like philology and philosophy which to the ordinary reader seem harsh, dry, difficult and repellent. He joins to a luminous clarity, lucidity and charm of expression an equal luminousness and just clarity of presentation and that perfect manner in both native to the Greek and French language and mind, but rare in the English tongue. In these seventeen pages he has presented the thought of the old enigmatic Ephesian with a clearness and sufficiency which leaves us charmed, enlightened and satisfied.
On one or two difficult points I am inclined to differ with the conclusions he adopts. He rejects positively Pfleiderer's view of Heraclitus as a mystic, which is certainly exaggerated and, as stated, a misconception; but it seems to me that there is behind that misconception a certain truth. Heraclitus' abuse of the mysteries of his time is not very conclusive in this respect; for what he reviles is those aspects of obscure magic, physical ecstasy, sensual excitement which the Mysteries had put on in some at least of their final developments as the process of degeneration increased which made a century later even the Eleusinian a butt for the dangerous mockeries of Alcibiades and his companions. His complaint is that the secret rites which the populace held in ignorant and superstitious reverence "unholily mysticise what are held among men as mysteries." He rebels against the darkness of the Dionysian ecstasy in the approach to the secrets of Nature; but there is a luminous Apollonian as well as an obscure and sometimes dangerous Dionysian mysticism, a Dakshina as well as a Vama Marga of the mystic Tantra. And though no partaker in or supporter of any kind of rites or mummery, Heraclitus still strikes one as at least an intellectual child of the Mystics and of mysticism, although perhaps a rebel son in the house of his mother. He has something of the mystic style, something of the intuitive Apollonian inlook into the secrets of existence.
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Practically, the active secret of life is there; all life physical or mental or merely dynamic maintains itself by constant change and interchange. Still, Heraclitus' account is so far not altogether satisfactory. The measure, the value of the energy exchanged remains unaltered even when the form is altered, but why should also the cosmic commodities we have for the universal gold be fixed and in a way unchanging? What is the explanation, how comes about this eternity of principles and elements and kinds of combination and this persistence and recurrence of the same forms which we observe in the cosmos? Why in this constant cosmic flux should everything after all remain the same? Why should the sun, though always new, be yet for all practical purposes the same sun? Why should the stream be, as Heraclitus himself admits, the same stream although it is ever other and other waters that are flowing? It was in this connection that Plato brought in his eternal, ideal plane of fixed ideas, by which he seems to have meant at once an originating real-idea and an original ideal schema for all things. An idealistic Philosophy of the Indian type might say that this force, the Shakti which you call Fire, is a consciousness which preserves by its energy its original scheme of ideas and corresponding forms of things But Heraclitus gives us another account, not quite satisfactory, yet profound and full of suggestive truth; it is contained in his striking phrases about war and justice and tension and the Furies pursuing the transgressor of measures. He is the first thinker to see the world entirely in the terms of Power.
What is the nature of this exchange? It is strife, eris, it is war, polemos! What is the rule and result of the war? It is justice. How acts that justice? By a just tension and compensation of forces which produce the harmony of things and therefore, we presume, their stability. "War is the father of all and the king of all"; "All things becoming according to strife"; "To know that strife is justice"; these are his master apophthegms in this matter. At first we do not see why exchange should be strife; it would seem rather to be commerce. Strife there is, but why should there not also be peaceful and willing interchange? Heraclitus will have none of it; no peace! he would agree with the modern Teuton that commerce itself is a department of War. It is true there is a commerce, gold for commodities, commodities for gold, but the commerce itself and all its circumstances are governed by a forceful, more, a violent compulsion of the universal Fire. That is what he means by the Furies pursuing the sun; "for fear of Him" says the Upanishad "the wind blows ... and death runs." And between all beings there is a constant trial of strength; by that warfare they come into being, by that their measures are maintained. We see that he is right; he has caught the initial aspect of cosmic Nature. Everything here is a clash of forces and by that clash and struggle and clinging and wrestling things not only come into being, but are maintained in being. Karma? Laws? But different laws meet and compete and by their tension the balance of the world is maintained. Karma? It is the forcible justice of an eternal compelling Power and it is the Furies pursuing us if we transgress our measures.
37.02 - The Story of Jabala-Satyakama, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Integral Yoga
The knowledge and realisation that he had gained from his life of a wandering cowherd are the basic truth of the world, the supreme secret of creation. He realised that Brahman is the ultimate Truth, the one and only Reality. The signs or qualities of this ultimate Truth or Reality are four. Brahman may be described as if in a group of four aphorisms, like the first four aphorisms of the Brahmasutra, the basic compendium of Vedantic thought, which Shankara has commented on in-very clear terms. If you know his commentary on these four aphorisms, you get to know practically the entire Philosophy of the Vedanta as interpreted by Shankara.
The first of the aphorisms taught to Satyakama implies that Brahman has made himself manifest, for He is selfmanifest. Another Upanishad has said the same thing: tameva bhantam anubhati sarvam,"His is the Light that illumines all." Of this self-luminous form of Brahman or God the four limbs are the four quarters. He is manifest on all sides, above and below, in every direction, and he is not only thus manifest; there is also no end or limit to his manifestation. Hence, as a second step in our knowledge, we learn that God or Brahman is the Infinite. This Infinity too has four limbs or lines: (1) earth, or the physical and material extension, (2) mid-air, or the expanse of the vital worlds, (3) the vast expanses of mind, and (4) the oceanic reaches of the higher worlds that stand above the mind. The third attri bute or quality of God is Luminosity, He is the Bright, the Effulgent One - He is the supreme light. Of His Brightness or Effulgence the symbols are four, the four that serve as the medium or base: these are fire, the sun, the moon and the stars. Fire is enkindled on the solid earth of matter; the sun burns in the mid-regions of life; the moon illumines with its cooling rays the regions of the quiet and happy mind; and the stars give us the brilliance of the world beyond mind. It is needless to add that the Seer is not speaking here in terms of astronomy. He has been expressing his meaning through the help of significant symbols or metaphors. And finally, the Reality or God is made up of Form: that is to say, He has put Himself forth variously through a multitude of forms, rupam rupam pratirupo babhuva.And the functions or instrumentalities through which Form has taken shape are the four main powers of sense-consciousness. These are: (I) the power of sensitivity, the capacity of living contact and intimate or close experience, of which the sense of touch represents to us the external form or activity, for through it we get a sense of reality as living existence; (2) the power of vision or sight, for through the eyes we get a sense of form and definite shape; (3) the power of hearing, for the organ of hearing gives us a sense of rhythm, of sound, the form of articulate speech; and (4) the power of mind which, being the centre of thinking, gives us a sense of meaning, builds the forms of thought.
3.7.1.06 - The Ascending Unity, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
HE HUMAN mind loves a clear simplicity of view; the more trenchant a statement, the more violently it is caught by it and inclined to acceptance. This is not only natural to our first crudity of thinking, and the more attractive because it makes things delightfully easy to handle and saves an immense amount of worry of enquiry and labour of reflection, but, modified, it accompanies us to the higher levels of a more watchful mentality. Alexander's method with the fateful knot is our natural and favourite dealing with the tangled web of things, the easy cut, the royal way, the facile Philosophy of this and not this, that and not that, a strong yes and no, a simple division, a pair of robust opposites, a clean cut of classification.
Our reason acts by divisions, even our ordinary illogical thought is a stumbling and bungling summary analysis and arrangement of the experience that offers itself to us with such unending complexity. But the cleanest and clearest division is that which sets us most at ease, because it impresses on our still childlike intelligence a sense of conclusive and luminous simplicity.
4.01 - THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the bounds of a Philosophy of immediate enjoyment and feel
the need to come to terms with the profound requirements of
--
to a certain Philosophy of the world to which nothing is possible
save what has always been, perspectives such as these will seem
4.02 - GOLD AND SPIRIT, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[353] The striking analogy between certain alchemical ideas and Christian dogma is not accidental but in accordance with tradition. A good part of the symbolism of the king derives from this source. Just as Christian dogma derives in part from Egypto-Hellenistic folklore, as well as from the Judaeo-Hellenistic Philosophy of writers like Philo, so, too, does alchemy. Its origin is certainly not purely Christian, but is largely pagan or Gnostic. Its oldest treatises come from that sphere, among them the treatise of Komarios (1st cent.?) and the writings of Pseudo-Democritus (1st to 2nd cent.) and Zosimos (3rd cent.). The title of one of the latters treatises is The True Book of Sophe16 the Egyptian and Divine Lord of the Hebrews, [and] of the Powers of Sabaoth.17 Berthelot thinks that Zosimos really was the author, and this is quite possible. The treatise speaks of a knowledge or wisdom that comes from the Aeons:
Ungoverned (
4.03 - Prayer to the Ever-greater Christ, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
A collection of essays in science and the Philosophy of
science dealing with problems raised by Evolution and the
--
Whole, Philosophy of the, 93
Word incarnate, 96, 151
4.03 - The Special Phenomenology of the Child Archetype, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
important part to play in the natural Philosophy of the Middle
Ages. And in our own day we hear of Christ's androgyny in
4.1.01 - The Intellect and Yoga, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Joad, Counterattack from the East: The Philosophy of Radhakrishnan (London: Allen and Unwin, 1932)]. "New Statesman and Nation", vol. 6, no. 145 (2 December 1933): pp. 702 - 4.
2 See the letters on pages 357 - 68. - Ed.
6.0 - Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
77 Cf. the English version, The Philosophy of Love, trans, by Friedeberg-Seeley
and Barnes, pp. 92 and 94. The source of this view can be found in the cabalistic
--
Psycho therapy and a Philosophy of Life (1943)
Medicine and Psycho therapy (1945)
9.99 - Glossary, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Dvaita: The Philosophy of Dualism.
Dwapara: The third of the four yugas or world cycles. See yuga.
--
Visishtadvaita: The Philosophy of Qualified Non-dualism.
Visuddha: The fifth centre in the Sushumna. See Kundalini.
Blazing P1 - Preconventional consciousness, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
69
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 215-216
70
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 215-216
71
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
72
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
73
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 215-216
74
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 215-216
75
--
Kohlberg, Lawrence (1981). The Philosophy of moral development: Moral stages and the idea
of justice (Essays on moral development: Vol. 1.)(1st ed.). San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Blazing P2 - Map the Stages of Conventional Consciousness, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
18
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
19
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 215-216
20
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 215-216
21
--
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
47
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
48
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 215-216
49
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 215-216
50
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
51
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
Infancy to Enlightenment, Part II: Conventional Consciousness
--
Kohlberg, Lawrence (1981). The Philosophy of moral development: Moral stages and the idea
of justice (Essays on moral development: Vol. 1.)(1st ed.). San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Blazing P3 - Explore the Stages of Postconventional Consciousness, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
19
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
20
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 215-216
21
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 215-216
22
--
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
48
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 409-412
49
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 215-216
50
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, 1981, pp. 215-216
51
--
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of moral development, pp. 370-372
90
--
Kohlberg, Lawrence (1981). The Philosophy of moral development: Moral stages and the idea
of justice (Essays on moral development: Vol. 1.) (1st ed.). San Francisco: Harper & Row.
--
Reagan, D. Stewart (Eds.), The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (pp. 36-58). Boston: Beacon Press.
Smith, A. (1984). The mind. New York: Viking.
BOOK II. -- PART III. ADDENDA. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
course of his attack on Evolutionism (1873, "Mr. Darwin's Philosophy of Language"), Prof. Max
Muller stigmatized the Darwinian theory as "vulnerable at the beginning and at the end." The fact is,
--
apply to? What is the Philosophy of reason for all such hebdomadic offerings and symbolical
calculations as: "ye shall count . . . . from the morrow after the Sabbath . . . . that ye brought the sheaf
--
* Professor Max Muller's Lectures -- "on the Philosophy of Mythology" -- are before us. We read his
citations of Herakleitos (460 B.C.), declaring that Homer deserved "to be ejected from public
--
in giving out the beliefs and Philosophy of more than prehistoric races, it is not quite as easy to deal
with the subject matter as it would be if only the Philosophy of one special race, and its evolution, were
concerned. The Secret Doctrine is the common property of the countless millions of men born under
BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
As the whole Philosophy of the problem of evil hangs upon the correct comprehension of the
constitution of the inner being of nature and man, of the divine within the animal, and hence also the
--
The Philosophy of that law in Nature, which implants in man as well as in every beast a passionate,
inherent, and instinctive desire for freedom and self-guidance, pertains to psychology and cannot be
--
The Philosophy of Occult Science finds two weak points in the above reflections, and points them out.
http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sd/sd2-2-07.htm (3 von 10) [06.05.2003 03:36:47]
--
sciences, theology, and especially the Philosophy of every nation which preceded the last universally
known, but not universal Deluge, had been recorded ideographically from the primitive oral records of
--
form of circles. In the primitive Philosophy of the Hierophants these invisible circles were the
prototypic causes and builders of all the heavenly orbs, which were their visible bodies or coverings,
--
twitted in their turn by their correligionists as "Vedantins in disguise." The esoteric Philosophy of both
these can be but one if carefully analysed and compared, as Gautama Buddha and Sankaracharya are
BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
"positivists" of the archaic ages. If we take a one-sided view of the Philosophy of the latter, our
materialists may be right in their own way. The Buddhists maintained that there is no Creator, but an
--
pessimistic Philosophy of the Unconscious, while it is, perhaps, the closest approximation made by
European speculation to the Hindu Adwaitee Doctrines, similarly falls far short of the reality.
--
order to exist as Spirit." -- Philosophy of History. Sibree's English translation, p. 340.
Next Section
--
looked into the Philosophy of these incorporeal Entities, or thought over them -- modern chemistry,
owing to observation and discovery, should have unconsciously been forced to adopt and recognize the
--
Thus the Philosophy of psychic, spiritual, and mental relations with man's physical functions is in
almost inextricable confusion. Neither the old Aryan, nor the Egyptian psychology are now properly
--
which all gravitates, and upon which is hung the Philosophy of the rest, is the One homogeneous
divine SUBSTANCE-PRINCIPLE, the one radical cause.
--
According to the Hermetico-Kabalistic Philosophy of Paracelsus, it is Yliaster -- the ancestor of the
just-born Protyle, introduced by Mr. Crookes in chemistry -- or primordial Protomateria that evolved
BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
only by one who adhered to the Philosophy of the Vedantins. It becomes a pure fallacy, if we exclude
the interference of operating, intelligent, powerful (never "all-powerful") Beings, who are called
--
as may be the Philosophy of the Visishtadwaita, when compared with that of the Adwaita -- the nondualists, -- it is yet supremely higher in logic and philosophy than the cosmogony accepted by either
Christianity, or its great opponent, modern Science. The followers of one of the greatest minds that
--
higher psychological Philosophy of the West is able, in its present incompleteness and tendency
towards a decided agnosticism, to do justice to the inner; especially to his higher capacities and
--
prove the antiquity of the Indian Zodiac, in the signs of which were found the root and Philosophy of
all the most important religious festivals of that country, the origin of which religious ceremonies goes
BOOK I. -- PART II. THE EVOLUTION OF SYMBOLISM IN ITS APPROXIMATE ORDER, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
"The basic idea underlying the religious Philosophy of the Hebrews was that God
contained all things within himself*; and that man was his image, man including woman
--
the Philosophy of I'bn Gebirol's Kabbalah, translated by Isaac Myer. "In the introduction written by
R'Hez'quee-yah, which is very old," says our author, "and forms part of our Brody edition of the Zohar
--
foundation. As shown by an expounder of the Kabala, "the basic idea underlying the Philosophy of the
Hebrews was that God contained all things within himself and that man was his image; man, including
BOOK X. - Porphyrys doctrine of redemption, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
This is the religion which possesses the universal way for delivering the soul; for, except by this way, none can be delivered. This is a kind of royal way, which alone leads to a kingdom which does not totter like all temporal dignities, but stands firm on eternal foundations. And when Porphyry says, towards the end of the first book De Regressu Anim, that no system of doctrine which furnishes the universal way for delivering the soul has as yet been received, either from the truest philosophy, or from the ideas and practices of the Indians, or from the reasoning[432] of the Chaldans, or from any source whatever, and that no historical reading had made him acquainted with that way, he manifestly acknowledges that there is such a way, but that as yet he was not acquainted with it. Nothing of all that he had so laboriously learned concerning the deliverance of the soul, nothing of all that he seemed to others, if not to himself, to know and believe, satisfied him. For he perceived that there was still wanting a commanding authority which it might be right to follow in a matter of such importance. And when he says that he had not learned from any truest philosophy a system which possessed the universal way of the soul's deliverance, he shows plainly enough, as it seems to me, either that the Philosophy of which he was a disciple was not the truest, or that it did not comprehend such a way. And how can that be the truest philosophy which does not possess this way? For what else is the universal way of the soul's deliverance than that by[Pg 431] which all souls universally are delivered, and without which, therefore, no soul is delivered? And when he says, in addition, "or from the ideas and practices of the Indians, or from the reasoning of the Chaldans, or from any source whatever," he declares in the most unequivocal language that this universal way of the soul's deliverance was not embraced in what he had learned either from the Indians or the Chaldans; and yet he could not forbear stating that it was from the Chaldans he had derived these divine oracles of which he makes such frequent mention. What, therefore, does he mean by this universal way of the soul's deliverance, which had not yet been made known by any truest philosophy, or by the doctrinal systems of those nations which were considered to have great insight in things divine, because they indulged more freely in a curious and fanciful science and worship of angels? What is this universal way of which he acknowledges his ignorance, if not a way which does not belong to one nation as its special property, but is common to all, and divinely bestowed? Porphyry, a man of no mediocre abilities, does not question that such a way exists; for he believes that Divine Providence could not have left men destitute of this universal way of delivering the soul. For he does not say that this way does not exist, but that this great boon and assistance has not yet been discovered, and has not come to his knowledge. And no wonder; for Porphyry lived in an age when this universal way of the soul's deliverance,in other words, the Christian religion,was exposed to the persecutions of idolaters and demon-worshippers, and earthly rulers,[433] that the number of martyrs or witnesses for the truth might be completed and consecrated, and that by them proof might be given that we must endure all bodily sufferings in the cause of the holy faith, and for the commendation of the truth. Porphyry, being a witness of these persecutions, concluded that this way was destined to a speedy extinction, and that it, therefore, was not the universal way of the soul's deliverance, and did not see that the very thing that thus moved him, and deterred him from becoming a Christian, contri buted to the confirmation and more effectual commendation of our religion.
[Pg 432]
BS 1 - Introduction to the Idea of God, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
You have the unknown world. Thats just what you dont know, at all. Thats outside the ocean that surrounds the island that you inhabit. Something like that. Its chaos itself. You act in that world, and you act in ways that you dont understand. Theres more to your actions than you can understand. One of the things that Jung said I loved this, when I first understood it. He says that everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. You should know what your myth is, because it might be a tragedy, and maybe you dont want it to be. Thats really worth thinking about, because you have a pattern of behaviour that characterizes you. God only knows where you got it. Its partly biological, and its partly from your parents; its your unconscious assumptions; its the way the Philosophy of your society has shaped you; and its aiming you somewhere. Is it aiming you somewhere you want to go? Thats a good question. Thats part of self-realization.
We know we dont understand our actions. Almost every argument you have with someone is about that. Its like, why did you do that? You come up with some half-baked reasons why you did it; youre flailing around in the darkness; you try to give an account for yourself, but you can only do it partially. Its very, very difficult, because youre a complicated animal, with the beginnings of an articulated mind, and youre just way more than you can handle. So you act things out, and thats a kind of competence. Then you imagine what you act out, and you imagine what everyone else acts out. Theres a tremendous amount of information in your action, and that information is translated up into the dream, and then into art, mythology and literature. Theres a tremendous amount of information in that, and some of that is translated into articulated thought.
ENNEAD 06.05 - The One and Identical Being is Everywhere Present In Its Entirety.345, #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
Let us compare with this historical evidence, that which supports the universally admitted dependence of Plotinos on his teacher Ammonius. We have only two witnesses: Hierocles and Nemesius; and the latter attri butes the argument for the immateriality of the soul to Ammonius and Numenius jointly. No doubt, Ammonius may have taught Plotinos in his youth; but so no doubt did other teachers; and of Ammonius the only survivals are a few pages preserved by Nemesius. The testimony for Plotinos's dependence on Numenius is therefore much more historical, as well as significant, in view of Numenius having left written records that were widely quoted. The title of "Father of Neo-platonism," therefore, if it must at all be awarded, should go to Numenius, who had written a "History of the Platonic Succession," wherein he attempts to restore "original" Platonism. This fits the title "Neo-platonism," whereas the Philosophy of Ammonius, would be better described as an eclectic synthesis of Platonism and Aristotelianism.
3. CONTRAST BETWEEN THEM.
--
Drews has shown that Edouard von Hartmann used Plotinos' semi-devotional ecstasy as a metaphysical basis for his Philosophy of the Unconscious.
1328 It is, of course, among mystics that Plotinos has been accorded the greater honor. His practical influence descended through the visions and ecstasies of the saints down to Swedenborg, who attempted to write the theology of the ecstasy; and the relation between these two, Swedenborg and Plotinos should prove a fertile field for investigation.
Euthyphro, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Euthyphro is a religionist, and is elsewhere spoken of, if he be the same person, as the author of a Philosophy of names, by whose 'prancing steeds' Socrates in the Cratylus is carried away. He has the conceit and self-confidence of a Sophist; no doubt that he is right in prosecuting his father has ever entered into his mind. Like a Sophist too, he is incapable either of framing a general definition or of following the course of an argument. His wrong-headedness, one-sidedness, narrowness, positiveness, are characteristic of his priestly office. His failure to apprehend an argument may be compared to a similar defect which is observable in the rhapsode Ion. But he is not a bad man, and he is friendly to Socrates, whose familiar sign he recognizes with interest. Though unable to follow him he is very willing to be led by him, and eagerly catches at any suggestion which saves him from the trouble of thinking. Moreover he is the enemy of Meletus, who, as he says, is availing himself of the popular dislike to innovations in religion in order to injure Socrates; at the same time he is amusingly confident that he has weapons in his own armoury which would be more than a match for him. He is quite sincere in his prosecution of his father, who has accidentally been guilty of homicide, and is not wholly free from blame. To purge away the crime appears to him in the light of a duty, whoever may be the criminal.
Thus begins the contrast between the religion of the letter, or of the narrow and unenlightened conscience, and the higher notion of religion which Socrates vainly endeavours to elicit from him. 'Piety is doing as I do' is the idea of religion which first occurs to him, and to many others who do not say what they think with equal frankness. For men are not easily persuaded that any other religion is better than their own; or that other nations, e.g. the Greeks in the time of Socrates, were equally serious in their religious beliefs and difficulties. The chief difference between us and them is, that they were slowly learning what we are in process of forgetting. Greek mythology hardly admitted of the distinction between accidental homicide and murder: that the pollution of blood was the same in both cases is also the feeling of the Athenian diviner. He had not as yet learned the lesson, which philosophy was teaching, that Homer and Hesiod, if not banished from the state, or whipped out of the assembly, as Heracleitus more rudely proposed, at any rate were not to be appealed to as authorities in religion; and he is ready to defend his conduct by the examples of the gods. These are the very tales which Socrates cannot abide; and his dislike of them, as he suspects, has branded him with the reputation of impiety. Here is one answer to the question, 'Why Socrates was put to death,' suggested by the way. Another is conveyed in the words, 'The Athenians do not care about any man being thought wise until he begins to make other men wise; and then for some reason or other they are angry:' which may be said to be the rule of popular toleration in most other countries, and not at Athens only. In the course of the argument Socrates remarks that the controversial nature of morals and religion arises out of the difficulty of verifying them. There is no measure or standard to which they can be referred.
Gorgias, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
'Learn the Philosophy of business, and acquire the reputation of wisdom. But leave to others these niceties,'
whether they are to be described as follies or absurdities:
Liber 46 - The Key of the Mysteries, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
This is the characteristic phrase of the Philosophy of 18^th century
enlightenment: "God is Reason" --- also the characteristic error. 19^th
--
that exceptional philosophy, which Paracelsus called the Philosophy of
sagacity, "philosophia sagax."
Liber 71 - The Voice of the Silence - The Two Paths - The Seven Portals, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
was pure bluff. A similar remark is true of the Philosophy of the West,
where the Schoolmen produced an equal obfuscation. Even now people
Liber, #Liber Null, #Peter J Carroll, #Occultism
description ::: These are texts relating to the Philosophy of Thelema, many of them written by the occultist Aleister Crowley who founded the organization A.'. A.'. (Argentium Astrum -- the Silver Star) as well as others by members of the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis -- Order of the Eastern Temple) (founded by Theodor Reuss and Karl Kellner in 1895). These two organizations work together to promote Thelema.
--- LIBER
Meno, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Locke cannot be truly regarded as the author of sensationalism any more than of idealism. His system is based upon experience, but with him experience includes reflection as well as sense. His analysis and construction of ideas has no foundation in fact; it is only the dialectic of the mind 'talking to herself.' The Philosophy of Berkeley is but the transposition of two words. For objects of sense he would substitute sensations. He imagines himself to have changed the relation of the human mind towards God and nature; they remain the same as before, though he has drawn the imaginary line by which they are divided at a different point. He has annihilated the outward world, but it instantly reappears governed by the same laws and described under the same names.
A like remark applies to David Hume, of whose philosophy the central principle is the denial of the relation of cause and effect. He would deprive men of a familiar term which they can ill afford to lose; but he seems not to have observed that this alteration is merely verbal and does not in any degree affect the nature of things. Still less did he remark that he was arguing from the necessary imperfection of language against the most certain facts. And here, again, we may find a parallel with the ancients. He goes beyond facts in his scepticism, as they did in their idealism. Like the ancient Sophists, he relegates the more important principles of ethics to custom and probability. But crude and unmeaning as this philosophy is, it exercised a great influence on his successors, not unlike that which Locke exercised upon Berkeley and Berkeley upon Hume himself. All three were both sceptical and ideal in almost equal degrees. Neither they nor their predecessors had any true conception of language or of the history of philosophy. Hume's paradox has been forgotten by the world, and did not any more than the scepticism of the ancients require to be seriously refuted. Like some other philosophical paradoxes, it would have been better left to die out. It certainly could not be refuted by a philosophy such as Kant's, in which, no less than in the previously mentioned systems, the history of the human mind and the nature of language are almost wholly ignored, and the certainty of objective knowledge is transferred to the subject; while absolute truth is reduced to a figment, more abstract and narrow than Plato's ideas, of 'thing in itself,' to which, if we reason strictly, no predicate can be applied.
The question which Plato has raised respecting the origin and nature of ideas belongs to the infancy of philosophy; in modern times it would no longer be asked. Their origin is only their history, so far as we know it; there can be no other. We may trace them in language, in philosophy, in mythology, in poetry, but we cannot argue a priori about them. We may attempt to shake them off, but they are always returning, and in every sphere of science and human action are tending to go beyond facts. They are thought to be innate, because they have been familiar to us all our lives, and we can no longer dismiss them from our mind. Many of them express relations of terms to which nothing exactly or nothing at all in rerum natura corresponds. We are not such free agents in the use of them as we sometimes imagine. Fixed ideas have taken the most complete possession of some thinkers who have been most determined to renounce them, and have been vehemently affirmed when they could be least explained and were incapable of proof. The world has often been led away by a word to which no distinct meaning could be attached. Abstractions such as 'authority,' 'equality,' 'utility,' 'liberty,' 'pleasure,' 'experience,' 'consciousness,' 'chance,' 'substance,' 'matter,' 'atom,' and a heap of other metaphysical and theological terms, are the source of quite as much error and illusion and have as little relation to actual facts as the ideas of Plato. Few students of theology or philosophy have sufficiently reflected how quickly the bloom of a philosophy passes away; or how hard it is for one age to understand the writings of another; or how nice a judgment is required of those who are seeking to express the Philosophy of one age in the terms of another. The 'eternal truths' of which metaphysicians speak have hardly ever lasted more than a generation. In our own day schools or systems of philosophy which have once been famous have died before the founders of them. We are still, as in Plato's age, groping about for a new method more comprehensive than any of those which now prevail; and also more permanent. And we seem to see at a distance the promise of such a method, which can hardly be any other than the method of idealized experience, having roots which strike far down into the history of philosophy. It is a method which does not divorce the present from the past, or the part from the whole, or the abstract from the concrete, or theory from fact, or the divine from the human, or one science from another, but labours to connect them. Along such a road we have proceeded a few steps, sufficient, perhaps, to make us reflect on the want of method which prevails in our own day. In another age, all the branches of knowledge, whether relating to God or man or nature, will become the knowledge of 'the revelation of a single science' (Symp.), and all things, like the stars in heaven, will shed their light upon one another.
MENO
MoM References, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Nietzsche, F. (1966). Beyond good and evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the future (W. Kaufmann, Trans.).
New York: Vintage Books.
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Vaihinger, H. (1924). The Philosophy of as if: A system of the theoretical, practical, and religious fictions of mankind (C.K. Ogden, Trans.). New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company.
Vinogradova, O. (1961). The orientation reaction and its neuropsychological mechanisms. Moscow:
Phaedo, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
10. The last ground of our belief in immortality, and the strongest, is the perfection of the divine nature. The mere fact of the existence of God does not tend to show the continued existence of man. An evil God or an indifferent God might have had the power, but not the will, to preserve us. He might have regarded us as fitted to minister to his service by a succession of existences,like the animals, without attri buting to each soul an incomparable value. But if he is perfect, he must will that all rational beings should partake of that perfection which he himself is. In the words of the Timaeus, he is good, and therefore he desires that all other things should be as like himself as possible. And the manner in which he accomplishes this is by permitting evil, or rather degrees of good, which are otherwise called evil. For all progress is good relatively to the past, and yet may be comparatively evil when regarded in the light of the future. Good and evil are relative terms, and degrees of evil are merely the negative aspect of degrees of good. Of the absolute goodness of any finite nature we can form no conception; we are all of us in process of transition from one degree of good or evil to another. The difficulties which are urged about the origin or existence of evil are mere dialectical puzzles, standing in the same relation to Christian philosophy as the puzzles of the Cynics and Megarians to the Philosophy of Plato. They arise out of the tendency of the human mind to regard good and evil both as relative and absolute; just as the riddles about motion are to be explained by the double conception of space or matter, which the human mind has the power of regarding either as continuous or discrete.
In speaking of divine perfection, we mean to say that God is just and true and loving, the author of order and not of disorder, of good and not of evil. Or rather, that he is justice, that he is truth, that he is love, that he is order, that he is the very progress of which we were speaking; and that wherever these qualities are present, whether in the human soul or in the order of nature, there is God. We might still see him everywhere, if we had not been mistakenly seeking for him apart from us, instead of in us; away from the laws of nature, instead of in them. And we become united to him not by mystical absorption, but by partaking, whether consciously or unconsciously, of that truth and justice and love which he himself is.
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17. Living in an age when logic was beginning to mould human thought, Plato naturally cast his belief in immortality into a logical form. And when we consider how much the doctrine of ideas was also one of words, it is not surprising that he should have fallen into verbal fallacies: early logic is always mistaking the truth of the form for the truth of the matter. It is easy to see that the alternation of opposites is not the same as the generation of them out of each other; and that the generation of them out of each other, which is the first argument in the Phaedo, is at variance with their mutual exclusion of each other, whether in themselves or in us, which is the last. For even if we admit the distinction which he draws between the opposites and the things which have the opposites, still individuals fall under the latter class; and we have to pass out of the region of human hopes and fears to a conception of an abstract soul which is the impersonation of the ideas. Such a conception, which in Plato himself is but half expressed, is unmeaning to us, and relative only to a particular stage in the history of thought. The doctrine of reminiscence is also a fragment of a former world, which has no place in the Philosophy of modern times. But Plato had the wonders of psychology just opening to him, and he had not the explanation of them which is supplied by the analysis of language and the history of the human mind. The question, 'Whence come our abstract ideas?' he could only answer by an imaginary hypothesis. Nor is it difficult to see that his crowning argument is purely verbal, and is but the expression of an instinctive confidence put into a logical form:'The soul is immortal because it contains a principle of imperishableness.' Nor does he himself seem at all to be aware that nothing is added to human knowledge by his 'safe and simple answer,' that beauty is the cause of the beautiful; and that he is merely reasserting the Eleatic being 'divided by the Pythagorean numbers,' against the Heracleitean doctrine of perpetual generation. The answer to the 'very serious question' of generation and destruction is really the denial of them. For this he would substitute, as in the Republic, a system of ideas, tested, not by experience, but by their consequences, and not explained by actual causes, but by a higher, that is, a more general notion. Consistency with themselves is the only test which is to be applied to them. (Republic, and Phaedo.)
18. To deal fairly with such arguments, they should be translated as far as possible into their modern equivalents. 'If the ideas of men are eternal, their souls are eternal, and if not the ideas, then not the souls.' Such an argument stands nearly in the same relation to Plato and his age, as the argument from the existence of God to immortality among ourselves. 'If God exists, then the soul exists after death; and if there is no God, there is no existence of the soul after death.' For the ideas are to his mind the reality, the truth, the principle of permanence, as well as of intelligence and order in the world. When Simmias and Cebes say that they are more strongly persuaded of the existence of ideas than they are of the immortality of the soul, they represent fairly enough the order of thought in Greek philosophy. And we might say in the same way that we are more certain of the existence of God than we are of the immortality of the soul, and are led by the belief in the one to a belief in the other. The parallel, as Socrates would say, is not perfect, but agrees in as far as the mind in either case is regarded as dependent on something above and beyond herself. The analogy may even be pressed a step further: 'We are more certain of our ideas of truth and right than we are of the existence of God, and are led on in the order of thought from one to the other.' Or more correctly: 'The existence of right and truth is the existence of God, and can never for a moment be separated from Him.'
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No indeed, he replied; and therefore they who have any care of their own souls, and do not merely live moulding and fashioning the body, say farewell to all this; they will not walk in the ways of the blind: and when Philosophy offers them purification and release from evil, they feel that they ought not to resist her influence, and whither she leads they turn and follow.
What do you mean, Socrates?
Sophist, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
IV. The later dialogues of Plato contain many references to contemporary philosophy. Both in the Theaetetus and in the Sophist he recognizes that he is in the midst of a fray; a huge irregular battle everywhere surrounds him (Theaet.). First, there are the two great philosophies going back into cosmogony and poetry: the Philosophy of Heracleitus, supposed to have a poetical origin in Homer, and that of the Eleatics, which in a similar spirit he conceives to be even older than Xenophanes (compare Protag.). Still older were theories of two and three principles, hot and cold, moist and dry, which were ever marrying and being given in marriage: in speaking of these, he is probably referring to Pherecydes and the early Ionians. In the Philosophy of motion there were different accounts of the relation of plurality and unity, which were supposed to be joined and severed by love and hate, some maintaining that this process was perpetually going on (e.g. Heracleitus); others (e.g. Empedocles) that there was an alternation of them. Of the Pythagoreans or of Anaxagoras he makes no distinct mention. His chief opponents are, first, Eristics or Megarians; secondly, the Materialists.
The picture which he gives of both these latter schools is indistinct; and he appears reluctant to mention the names of their teachers. Nor can we easily determine how much is to be assigned to the Cynics, how much to the Megarians, or whether the 'repellent Materialists' (Theaet.) are Cynics or Atomists, or represent some unknown phase of opinion at Athens. To the Cynics and Antis thenes is commonly attri buted, on the authority of Aristotle, the denial of predication, while the Megarians are said to have been Nominalists, asserting the One Good under many names to be the true Being of Zeno and the Eleatics, and, like Zeno, employing their negative dialectic in the refutation of opponents. But the later Megarians also denied predication; and this tenet, which is attri buted to all of them by Simplicius, is certainly in accordance with their over-refining philosophy. The 'tyros young and old,' of whom Plato speaks, probably include both. At any rate, we shall be safer in accepting the general description of them which he has given, and in not attempting to draw a precise line between them.
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Nevertheless the consideration of a few general aspects of the Hegelian philosophy may help to dispel some errors and to awaken an interest about it. (i) It is an ideal philosophy which, in popular phraseology, maintains not matter but mind to be the truth of things, and this not by a mere crude substitution of one word for another, but by showing either of them to be the complement of the other. Both are creations of thought, and the difference in kind which seems to divide them may also be regarded as a difference of degree. One is to the other as the real to the ideal, and both may be conceived together under the higher form of the notion. (ii) Under another aspect it views all the forms of sense and knowledge as stages of thought which have always existed implicitly and unconsciously, and to which the mind of the world, gradually disengaged from sense, has become awakened. The present has been the past. The succession in time of human ideas is also the eternal 'now'; it is historical and also a divine ideal. The history of philosophy stripped of personality and of the other accidents of time and place is gathered up into philosophy, and again philosophy clothed in circumstance expands into history. (iii) Whether regarded as present or past, under the form of time or of eternity, the spirit of dialectic is always moving onwards from one determination of thought to another, receiving each successive system of philosophy and subordinating it to that which followsimpelled by an irresistible necessity from one idea to another until the cycle of human thought and existence is complete. It follows from this that all previous philosophies which are worthy of the name are not mere opinions or speculations, but stages or moments of thought which have a necessary place in the world of mind. They are no longer the last word of philosophy, for another and another has succeeded them, but they still live and are mighty; in the language of the Greek poet, 'There is a great God in them, and he grows not old.' (iv) This vast ideal system is supposed to be based upon experience. At each step it professes to carry with it the 'witness of eyes and ears' and of common sense, as well as the internal evidence of its own consistency; it has a place for every science, and affirms that no Philosophy of a narrower type is capable of comprehending all true facts.
The Hegelian dialectic may be also described as a movement from the simple to the complex. Beginning with the generalizations of sense, (1) passing through ideas of quality, quantity, measure, number, and the like, (2) ascending from presentations, that is pictorial forms of sense, to representations in which the picture vanishes and the essence is detached in thought from the outward form, (3) combining the I and the not-I, or the subject and object, the natural order of thought is at last found to include the leading ideas of the sciences and to arrange them in relation to one another. Abstractions grow together and again become concrete in a new and higher sense. They also admit of development from within their own spheres. Everywhere there is a movement of attraction and repulsion going onan attraction or repulsion of ideas of which the physical phenomenon described under a similar name is a figure. Freedom and necessity, mind and matter, the continuous and the discrete, cause and effect, are perpetually being severed from one another in thought, only to be perpetually reunited. The finite and infinite, the absolute and relative are not really opposed; the finite and the negation of the finite are alike lost in a higher or positive infinity, and the absolute is the sum or correlation of all relatives. When this reconciliation of opposites is finally completed in all its stages, the mind may come back again and review the things of sense, the opinions of philosophers, the strife of theology and politics, without being disturbed by them. Whatever is, if not the very bestand what is the best, who can tell?is, at any rate, historical and rational, suitable to its own age, unsuitable to any other. Nor can any efforts of speculative thinkers or of soldiers and statesmen materially quicken the 'process of the suns.'
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(b) Hegel's treatment of the early Greek thinkers affords the readiest illustration of his meaning in conceiving all philosophy under the form of opposites. The first abstraction is to him the beginning of thought. Hitherto there had only existed a tumultuous chaos of mythological fancy, but when Thales said 'All is water' a new era began to dawn upon the world. Man was seeking to grasp the universe under a single form which was at first simply a material element, the most equable and colourless and universal which could be found. But soon the human mind became dissatisfied with the emblem, and after ringing the changes on one element after another, demanded a more abstract and perfect conception, such as one or Being, which was absolutely at rest. But the positive had its negative, the conception of Being involved Not-being, the conception of one, many, the conception of a whole, parts. Then the pendulum swung to the other side, from rest to motion, from Xenophanes to Heracleitus. The opposition of Being and Not-being projected into space became the atoms and void of Leucippus and Democritus. Until the Atomists, the abstraction of the individual did not exist; in the Philosophy of Anaxagoras the idea of mind, whether human or divine, was beginning to be realized. The pendulum gave another swing, from the individual to the universal, from the object to the subject. The Sophist first uttered the word 'Man is the measure of all things,' which Socrates presented in a new form as the study of ethics. Once more we return from mind to the object of mind, which is knowledge, and out of knowledge the various degrees or kinds of knowledge more or less abstract were gradually developed. The threefold division of logic, physic, and ethics, foreshadowed in Plato, was finally established by Aristotle and the Stoics. Thus, according to Hegel, in the course of about two centuries by a process of antagonism and negation the leading thoughts of philosophy were evolved.
There is nothing like this progress of opposites in Plato, who in the Symposium denies the possibility of reconciliation until the opposition has passed away. In his own words, there is an absurdity in supposing that 'harmony is discord; for in reality harmony consists of notes of a higher and lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by the art of music' (Symp.). He does indeed describe objects of sense as regarded by us sometimes from one point of view and sometimes from another. As he says at the end of the Fifth Book of the Republic, 'There is nothing light which is not heavy, or great which is not small.' And he extends this relativity to the conceptions of just and good, as well as to great and small. In like manner he acknowledges that the same number may be more or less in relation to other numbers without any increase or diminution (Theat.). But the perplexity only arises out of the confusion of the human faculties; the art of measuring shows us what is truly great and truly small. Though the just and good in particular instances may vary, the IDEA of good is eternal and unchangeable. And the IDEA of good is the source of knowledge and also of Being, in which all the stages of sense and knowledge are gathered up and from being hypotheses become realities.
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The Philosophy of Hegel appeals to an historical criterion: the ideas of men have a succession in time as well as an order of thought. But the assumption that there is a correspondence between the succession of ideas in history and the natural order of philosophy is hardly true even of the beginnings of thought. And in later systems forms of thought are too numerous and complex to admit of our tracing in them a regular succession. They seem also to be in part reflections of the past, and it is difficult to separate in them what is original and what is borrowed. Doubtless they have a relation to one anotherthe transition from Descartes to Spinoza or from Locke to Berkeley is not a matter of chance, but it can hardly be described as an alternation of opposites or figured to the mind by the vibrations of a pendulum. Even in Aristotle and Plato, rightly understood, we cannot trace this law of action and reaction. They are both idealists, although to the one the idea is actual and immanent,to the other only potential and transcendent, as Hegel himself has pointed out (Wallace's Hegel). The true meaning of Aristotle has been disguised from us by his own appeal to fact and the opinions of mankind in his more popular works, and by the use made of his writings in the Middle Ages. No book, except the Scriptures, has been so much read, and so little understood. The Pre-Socratic philosophies are simpler, and we may observe a progress in them; but is there any regular succession? The ideas of Being, change, number, seem to have sprung up contemporaneously in different parts of Greece and we have no difficulty in constructing them out of one anotherwe can see that the union of Being and Not-being gave birth to the idea of change or Becoming and that one might be another aspect of Being. Again, the Eleatics may be regarded as developing in one direction into the Megarian school, in the other into the Atomists, but there is no necessary connexion between them. Nor is there any indication that the deficiency which was felt in one school was supplemented or compensated by another. They were all efforts to supply the want which the Greeks began to feel at the beginning of the sixth century before Christ,the want of abstract ideas. Nor must we forget the uncertainty of chronology;if, as Aristotle says, there were Atomists before Leucippus, Eleatics before Xenophanes, and perhaps 'patrons of the flux' before Heracleitus, Hegel's order of thought in the history of philosophy would be as much disarranged as his order of religious thought by recent discoveries in the history of religion.
Hegel is fond of repeating that all philosophies still live and that the earlier are preserved in the later; they are refuted, and they are not refuted, by those who succeed them. Once they reigned supreme, now they are subordinated to a power or idea greater or more comprehensive than their own. The thoughts of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle have certainly sunk deep into the mind of the world, and have exercised an influence which will never pass away; but can we say that they have the same meaning in modern and ancient philosophy? Some of them, as for example the words 'Being,' 'essence,' 'matter,' 'form,' either have become obsolete, or are used in new senses, whereas 'individual,' 'cause,' 'motive,' have acquired an exaggerated importance. Is the manner in which the logical determinations of thought, or 'categories' as they may be termed, have been handed down to us, really different from that in which other words have come down to us? Have they not been equally subject to accident, and are they not often used by Hegel himself in senses which would have been quite unintelligible to their original inventorsas for example, when he speaks of the 'ground' of Leibnitz ('Everything has a sufficient ground') as identical with his own doctrine of the 'notion' (Wallace's Hegel), or the 'Being and Not-being' of Heracleitus as the same with his own 'Becoming'?
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2. Hegel, if not the greatest philosopher, is certainly the greatest critic of philosophy who ever lived. No one else has equally mastered the opinions of his predecessors or traced the connexion of them in the same manner. No one has equally raised the human mind above the trivialities of the common logic and the unmeaningness of 'mere' abstractions, and above imaginary possibilities, which, as he truly says, have no place in philosophy. No one has won so much for the kingdom of ideas. Whatever may be thought of his own system it will hardly be denied that he has overthrown Locke, Kant, Hume, and the so-called Philosophy of common sense. He shows us that only by the study of metaphysics can we get rid of metaphysics, and that those who are in theory most opposed to them are in fact most entirely and hopelessly enslaved by them: 'Die reinen Physiker sind nur die Thiere.' The disciple of Hegel will hardly become the slave of any other system-maker. What Bacon seems to promise him he will find realized in the great German thinker, an emancipation nearly complete from the influences of the scholastic logic.
3. Many of those who are least disposed to become the votaries of Hegelianism nevertheless recognize in his system a new logic supplying a variety of instruments and methods hitherto unemployed. We may not be able to agree with him in assimilating the natural order of human thought with the history of philosophy, and still less in identifying both with the divine idea or nature. But we may acknowledge that the great thinker has thrown a light on many parts of human knowledge, and has solved many difficulties. We cannot receive his doctrine of opposites as the last word of philosophy, but still we may regard it as a very important contri bution to logic. We cannot affirm that words have no meaning when taken out of their connexion in the history of thought. But we recognize that their meaning is to a great extent due to association, and to their correlation with one another. We see the advantage of viewing in the concrete what mankind regard only in the abstract. There is much to be said for his faith or conviction, that God is immanent in the world,within the sphere of the human mind, and not beyond it. It was natural that he himself, like a prophet of old, should regard the philosophy which he had invented as the voice of God in man. But this by no means implies that he conceived himself as creating God in thought. He was the servant of his own ideas and not the master of them. The Philosophy of history and the history of philosophy may be almost said to have been discovered by him. He has done more to explain Greek thought than all other writers put together. Many ideas of development, evolution, reciprocity, which have become the symbols of another school of thinkers may be traced to his speculations. In the theology and Philosophy of England as well as of Germany, and also in the lighter literature of both countries, there are always appearing 'fragments of the great banquet' of Hegel.
SOPHIST
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STRANGER: Because, in self-defence, I must test the Philosophy of my father Parmenides, and try to prove by main force that in a certain sense not-being is, and that being, on the other hand, is not.
THEAETETUS: Some attempt of the kind is clearly needed.
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
aim to realise everything. So in the political Philosophy of the West you find
that if they accept democracy, it is democracy alone; all the rest is set
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
tial achievement was to combine the evolutionary Philosophy of
Anaximander, who taught that man's ancestor was an aquatic animal
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Prime Material, with the Philosophy of Empedokles who taught the
survival of the fittest among the random aggregations of organic forms.
Theaetetus, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
The theory that 'Knowledge is sensible perception' is the antithesis of that which derives knowledge from the mind (Theaet.), or which assumes the existence of ideas independent of the mind (Parm.). Yet from their extreme abstraction these theories do not represent the opposite poles of thought in the same way that the corresponding differences would in modern philosophy. The most ideal and the most sensational have a tendency to pass into one another; Heracleitus, like his great successor Hegel, has both aspects. The Eleatic isolation of Being and the Megarian or Cynic isolation of individuals are placed in the same class by Plato (Soph.); and the same principle which is the symbol of motion to one mind is the symbol of rest to another. The Atomists, who are sometimes regarded as the Materialists of Plato, denied the reality of sensation. And in the ancient as well as the modern world there were reactions from theory to experience, from ideas to sense. This is a point of view from which the Philosophy of sensation presented great attraction to the ancient thinker. Amid the conflict of ideas and the variety of opinions, the impression of sense remained certain and uniform. Hardness, softness, cold, heat, etc. are not absolutely the same to different persons, but the art of measuring could at any rate reduce them all to definite natures (Republic). Thus the doctrine that knowledge is perception supplies or seems to supply a firm standing ground. Like the other notions of the earlier Greek philosophy, it was held in a very simple way, without much basis of reasoning, and without suggesting the questions which naturally arise in our own minds on the same subject.
(b) The fixedness of impressions of sense furnishes a link of connexion between ancient and modern philosophy. The modern thinker often repeats the parallel axiom, 'All knowledge is experience.' He means to say that the outward and not the inward is both the original source and the final criterion of truth, because the outward can be observed and analyzed; the inward is only known by external results, and is dimly perceived by each man for himself. In what does this differ from the saying of Theaetetus? Chiefly in thisthat the modern term 'experience,' while implying a point of departure in sense and a return to sense, also includes all the processes of reasoning and imagination which have intervened. The necessary connexion between them by no means affords a measure of the relative degree of importance which is to be ascribed to either element. For the inductive portion of any science may be small, as in mathematics or ethics, compared with that which the mind has attained by reasoning and reflection on a very few facts.
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Yet, in spite of Plato and his followers, mankind have again and again returned to a sensational philosophy. As to some of the early thinkers, amid the fleetings of sensible objects, ideas alone seemed to be fixed, so to a later generation amid the fluctuation of philosophical opinions the only fixed points appeared to be outward objects. Any pretence of knowledge which went beyond them implied logical processes, of the correctness of which they had no assurance and which at best were only probable. The mind, tired of wandering, sought to rest on firm ground; when the idols of philosophy and language were stripped off, the perception of outward objects alone remained. The ancient Epicureans never asked whether the comparison of these with one another did not involve principles of another kind which were above and beyond them. In like manner the modern inductive philosophy forgot to enquire into the meaning of experience, and did not attempt to form a conception of outward objects apart from the mind, or of the mind apart from them. Soon objects of sense were merged in sensations and feelings, but feelings and sensations were still unanalyzed. At last we return to the doctrine attri buted by Plato to Protagoras, that the mind is only a succession of momentary perceptions. At this point the modern Philosophy of experience forms an alliance with ancient scepticism.
The higher truths of philosophy and religion are very far removed from sense. Admitting that, like all other knowledge, they are derived from experience, and that experience is ultimately resolvable into facts which come to us through the eye and ear, still their origin is a mere accident which has nothing to do with their true nature. They are universal and unseen; they belong to all timespast, present, and future. Any worthy notion of mind or reason includes them. The proof of them is, 1st, their comprehensiveness and consistency with one another; 2ndly, their agreement with history and experience. But sensation is of the present only, is isolated, is and is not in successive moments. It takes the passing hour as it comes, following the lead of the eye or ear instead of the comm and of reason. It is a faculty which man has in common with the animals, and in which he is inferior to many of them. The importance of the senses in us is that they are the apertures of the mind, doors and windows through which we take in and make our own the materials of knowledge. Regarded in any other point of view sensation is of all mental acts the most trivial and superficial. Hence the term 'sensational' is rightly used to express what is shallow in thought and feeling.
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2. The second question, namely, that concerning the relation of the mind to external objects, is really a trifling one, though it has been made the subject of a famous philosophy. We may if we like, with Berkeley, resolve objects of sense into sensations; but the change is one of name only, and nothing is gained and something is lost by such a resolution or confusion of them. For we have not really made a single step towards idealism, and any arbitrary inversion of our ordinary modes of speech is disturbing to the mind. The youthful metaphysician is delighted at his marvellous discovery that nothing is, and that what we see or feel is our sensation only: for a day or two the world has a new interest to him; he alone knows the secret which has been communicated to him by the philosopher, that mind is allwhen in fact he is going out of his mind in the first intoxication of a great thought. But he soon finds that all things remain as they werethe laws of motion, the properties of matter, the qualities of substances. After having inflicted his theories on any one who is willing to receive them 'first on his father and mother, secondly on some other patient listener, thirdly on his dog,' he finds that he only differs from the rest of mankind in the use of a word. He had once hoped that by getting rid of the solidity of matter he might open a passage to worlds beyond. He liked to think of the world as the representation of the divine nature, and delighted to imagine angels and spirits wandering through space, present in the room in which he is sitting without coming through the door, nowhere and everywhere at the same instant. At length he finds that he has been the victim of his own fancies; he has neither more nor less evidence of the supernatural than he had before. He himself has become unsettled, but the laws of the world remain fixed as at the beginning. He has discovered that his appeal to the fallibility of sense was really an illusion. For whatever uncertainty there may be in the appearances of nature, arises only out of the imperfection or variation of the human senses, or possibly from the deficiency of certain branches of knowledge; when science is able to apply her tests, the uncertainty is at an end. We are apt sometimes to think that moral and metaphysical philosophy are lowered by the influence which is exercised over them by physical science. But any interpretation of nature by physical science is far in advance of such idealism. The Philosophy of Berkeley, while giving unbounded license to the imagination, is still grovelling on the level of sense.
We may, if we please, carry this scepticism a step further, and deny, not only objects of sense, but the continuity of our sensations themselves. We may say with Protagoras and Hume that what is appears, and that what appears appears only to individuals, and to the same individual only at one instant. But then, as Plato asks,and we must repeat the question,What becomes of the mind? Experience tells us by a thousand proofs that our sensations of colour, taste, and the like, are the same as they were an instant agothat the act which we are performing one minute is continued by us in the nextand also supplies abundant proof that the perceptions of other men are, speaking generally, the same or nearly the same with our own. After having slowly and laboriously in the course of ages gained a conception of a whole and parts, of the constitution of the mind, of the relation of man to God and nature, imperfect indeed, but the best we can, we are asked to return again to the 'beggarly elements' of ancient scepticism, and acknowledge only atoms and sensations devoid of life or unity. Why should we not go a step further still and doubt the existence of the senses of all things? We are but 'such stuff as dreams are made of;' for we have left ourselves no instruments of thought by which we can distinguish man from the animals, or conceive of the existence even of a mollusc. And observe, this extreme scepticism has been allowed to spring up among us, not, like the ancient scepticism, in an age when nature and language really seemed to be full of illusions, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when men walk in the daylight of inductive science.
--
SOCRATES: Or again, in politics, while affirming that just and unjust, honourable and disgraceful, holy and unholy, are in reality to each state such as the state thinks and makes lawful, and that in determining these matters no individual or state is wiser than another, still the followers of Protagoras will not deny that in determining what is or is not expedient for the community one state is wiser and one counsellor better than anotherthey will scarcely venture to maintain, that what a city enacts in the belief that it is expedient will always be really expedient. But in the other case, I mean when they speak of justice and injustice, piety and impiety, they are confident that in nature these have no existence or essence of their ownthe truth is that which is agreed on at the time of the agreement, and as long as the agreement lasts; and this is the Philosophy of many who do not altogether go along with Protagoras. Here arises a new question, Theodorus, which threatens to be more serious than the last.
THEODORUS: Well, Socrates, we have plenty of leisure.
The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Livre de la Philosophie naturalle des metaux (Book on the Natural Philosophy of Metals) is in
the few pages composing in his famous Parabole (Parable) is in the few pages composing the
--
Gnosis), doctrine of the Gnostics, and Philosophy of the Magi. We know that Gnosis was the
body of the sacred knowledge, which the Magi carefully kept secret and which, for the
Timaeus, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
But what did Plato mean by essence, (Greek), which is the intermediate nature compounded of the Same and the Other, and out of which, together with these two, the soul of the world is created? It is difficult to explain a process of thought so strange and unaccustomed to us, in which modern distinctions run into one another and are lost sight of. First, let us consider once more the meaning of the Same and the Other. The Same is the unchanging and indivisible, the heaven of the fixed stars, partaking of the divine nature, which, having law in itself, gives law to all besides and is the element of order and permanence in man and on the earth. It is the rational principle, mind regarded as a work, as creationnot as the creator. The old tradition of Parmenides and of the Eleatic Being, the foundation of so much in the Philosophy of Greece and of the world, was lingering in Plato's mind. The Other is the variable or changing element, the residuum of disorder or chaos, which cannot be reduced to order, nor altogether banished, the source of evil, seen in the errors of man and also in the wanderings of the planets, a necessity which protrudes through nature. Of this too there was a shadow in the Eleatic philosophy in the realm of opinion, which, like a mist, seemed to darken the purity of truth in itself.So far the words of Plato may perhaps find an intelligible meaning. But when he goes on to speak of the Essence which is compounded out of both, the track becomes fainter and we can only follow him with hesitating steps. But still we find a trace reappearing of the teaching of Anaxagoras: 'All was confusion, and then mind came and arranged things.' We have already remarked that Plato was not acquainted with the modern distinction of subject and object, and therefore he sometimes confuses mind and the things of mind(Greek) and (Greek). By (Greek) he clearly means some conception of the intelligible and the intelligent; it belongs to the class of (Greek). Matter, being, the Same, the eternal,for any of these terms, being almost vacant of meaning, is equally suitable to express indefinite existence,are compared or united with the Other or Diverse, and out of the union or comparison is elicited the idea of intelligence, the 'One in many,' brighter than any Promethean fire (Phil.), which co-existing with them and so forming a new existence, is or becomes the intelligible world...So we may perhaps venture to paraphrase or interpret or put into other words the parable in which Plato has wrapped up his conception of the creation of the world. The explanation may help to fill up with figures of speech the void of knowledge.
The entire compound was divided by the Creator in certain proportions and reunited; it was then cut into two strips, which were bent into an inner circle and an outer, both moving with an uniform motion around a centre, the outer circle containing the fixed, the inner the wandering stars. The soul of the world was diffused everywhere from the centre to the circumference. To this God gave a body, consisting at first of fire and earth, and afterwards receiving an addition of air and water; because solid bodies, like the world, are always connected by two middle terms and not by one. The world was made in the form of a globe, and all the material elements were exhausted in the work of creation.
--
Space is said by Plato to be the 'containing vessel or nurse of generation.' Reflecting on the simplest kinds of external objects, which to the ancients were the four elements, he was led to a more general notion of a substance, more or less like themselves, out of which they were fashioned. He would not have them too precisely distinguished. Thus seems to have arisen the first dim perception of (Greek) or matter, which has played so great a part in the metaphysical Philosophy of Aristotle and his followers. But besides the material out of which the elements are made, there is also a space in which they are contained. There arises thus a second nature which the senses are incapable of discerning and which can hardly be referred to the intelligible class. For it is and it is not, it is nowhere when filled, it is nothing when empty. Hence it is said to be discerned by a kind of spurious or analogous reason, partaking so feebly of existence as to be hardly perceivable, yet always reappearing as the containing mother or nurse of all things. It had not that sort of consistency to Plato which has been given to it in modern times by geometry and metaphysics. Neither of the Greek words by which it is described are so purely abstract as the English word 'space' or the Latin 'spatium.' Neither Plato nor any other Greek would have spoken of (Greek) or (Greek) in the same manner as we speak of 'time' and 'space.'
Yet space is also of a very permanent or even eternal nature; and Plato seems more willing to admit of the unreality of time than of the unreality of space; because, as he says, all things must necessarily exist in space. We, on the other hand, are disposed to fancy that even if space were annihilated time might still survive. He admits indeed that our knowledge of space is of a dreamy kind, and is given by a spurious reason without the help of sense. (Compare the hypotheses and images of Rep.) It is true that it does not attain to the clearness of ideas. But like them it seems to remain, even if all the objects contained in it are supposed to have vanished away. Hence it was natural for Plato to conceive of it as eternal. We must remember further that in his attempt to realize either space or matter the two abstract ideas of weight and extension, which are familiar to us, had never passed before his mind.
--
To do justice to the subject, we should consider the physical Philosophy of the ancients as a whole; we should remember, (1) that the nebular theory was the received belief of several of the early physicists; (2) that the development of animals out of fishes who came to land, and of man out of the animals, was held by Anaximander in the sixth century before Christ (Plut. Symp. Quaest; Plac. Phil.); (3) that even by Philolaus and the early Pythagoreans, the earth was held to be a body like the other stars revolving in space around the sun or a central fire; (4) that the beginnings of chemistry are discernible in the 'similar particles' of Anaxagoras. Also they knew or thought (5) that there was a sex in plants as well as in animals; (6) they were aware that musical notes depended on the relative length or tension of the strings from which they were emitted, and were measured by ratios of number; (7) that mathematical laws pervaded the world; and even qualitative differences were supposed to have their origin in number and figure; (8) the annihilation of matter was denied by several of them, and the seeming disappearance of it held to be a transformation only. For, although one of these discoveries might have been supposed to be a happy guess, taken together they seem to imply a great advance and almost maturity of natural knowledge.
We should also remember, when we attri bute to the ancients hasty generalizations and delusions of language, that physical philosophy and metaphysical too have been guilty of similar fallacies in quite recent times. We by no means distinguish clearly between mind and body, between ideas and facts. Have not many discussions arisen about the Atomic theory in which a point has been confused with a material atom? Have not the natures of things been explained by imaginary entities, such as life or phlogiston, which exist in the mind only? Has not disease been regarded, like sin, sometimes as a negative and necessary, sometimes as a positive or malignant principle? The 'idols' of Bacon are nearly as common now as ever; they are inherent in the human mind, and when they have the most complete dominion over us, we are least able to perceive them. We recognize them in the ancients, but we fail to see them in ourselves.
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Kheper - Philosophy_of_Sant_Mat -- 17
Integral World - What Would Errol Do?, A Brief Introduction to the Octagonal Philosophy of Errol Flynn, David Lane
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Integral World - Why Idealism is Bonkers, Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Bernardo Kastrup, Frank Visser
Integral World - Eloquent Emptiness, The Philosophy of WOW! and the End of Science, Frank Visser
selforum - philosophy of sri aurobindo
selforum - sri aurobindos philosophy of evolution
selforum - sri aurobindos philosophy of
selforum - rejecting philosophy of human access
selforum - sri aurobindos philosophy of new and
selforum - take philosophy off back burner and
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Little Clowns of Happy Town (1987 - 1988) - "Laughter is the best medicine." That was the philosophy of writer and cancer survivor Norman Cousins, who was hired as a consultant on this show about the residents of Itty Bitty City. Also known as Happytown, the city was home to miniature clowns whose purpose was to spread joy throughout the worl...
Philosophy Of A Knife(2008) - The true history of Japanese Unit 731, from its beginnings in the 1930s to its demise in 1945, and the subsequent trials in Khabarovsk, USSR, of many of the Japanese doctors from Unit 731. The facts are told, and previously unknown evidence is revealed by an eyewitness to these events, former doctor...
Won't You Be My Neighbor?(2018) - A deep look into the life and guiding philosophy of children's TV host Fred Rogers and his program "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood"
Gandhi (1982) ::: 8.0/10 -- PG | 3h 11min | Biography, Drama, History | 25 February 1983 (USA) -- The life of the lawyer who became the famed leader of the Indian revolts against the British rule through his philosophy of nonviolent protest. Director: Richard Attenborough Writer:
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A New Philosophy of Society
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
British Society for the Philosophy of Religion
British Society for the Philosophy of Science
Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics
Center for Philosophy of Science
Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science
Commensurability (philosophy of science)
Constructivism (philosophy of education)
Constructivism (philosophy of mathematics)
Constructivism (philosophy of science)
Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art
Contemporary Philosophy of Thought
Critical realism (philosophy of the social sciences)
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
Diploma in the Philosophy of Medicine
Elements of the Philosophy of Newton
Elements of the Philosophy of Right
Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism
Eternalism (philosophy of time)
European Journal for Philosophy of Religion
Formalism (philosophy of mathematics)
Functionalism (philosophy of mind)
Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic
History and philosophy of science
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
Index of philosophy of language articles
Index of philosophy of mind articles
Index of philosophy of religion articles
Index of philosophy of science articles
Interactionism (philosophy of mind)
International Academy of Philosophy of Science
International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy
International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science
International Union of History and Philosophy of Science
Journal for General Philosophy of Science
Journal of Philosophy of Education
Journal of the Philosophy of History
Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
Life and Philosophy of Swami Vivekananda
Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics
Marxist philosophy of nature
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Philosophy of architecture
Philosophy of Arithmetic
Philosophy of artificial intelligence
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Philosophy of biology
Philosophy of business
Philosophy of chemistry
Philosophy of color
Philosophy of copyright
Philosophy of culture
Philosophy of desire
Philosophy of dialogue
Philosophy of eating
Philosophy of ecology
Philosophy of education
Philosophy of engineering
Philosophy of experience
Philosophy of film
Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosophy of geography
Philosophy of happiness
Philosophy of healthcare
Philosophy of history
Philosophy of human rights
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