Quine, W.V.O., (1951, 1961), ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’

A wonderfully forceful and lucid attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction.

Žižek, S. (Autumn 2007), ‘Tolerance as an Ideological Category’:

The Culturalization of Politics
Why are today so many problems perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems of inequality, exploitation, injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? » Continue reading “On the Liberalist’s Tolerance”

Grice, H.P. (1975), ‘Logic and Conversation’

Formalists vs. Informalists:

• Divergences in meaning exist between formal devices and natural languages.
• Philosophers in the formalist camp view elements of meaning in natural languages as imperfections.
• Informalists hold that the insistence on a perfect language is philosophically unjustified.

“Zipf’s Law describes the power law patterning of the ordering of word frequencies. The frequency of a particular word in natural languages is found to be proportional with its rank: the most commonly used word is twice as frequent as the second most common word, three times as frequent as the third most common word, etc. Cancho and Solé were able to model the emergence of Zipf’s power law distribution in a network describing the effort required in mutual understanding between a hearer and a speaker. Language which relies upon maximum rigidity of word and meaning associations (such as computational machine language) requires too much work for the speaker, whereas language which allows maximum flexibility of associations (such as dream language) requires too much work for the hearer. Least effort is achieved at a point of creative ambiguity, a sudden transition point in which words are distributed in Zipf’s power law relation.”

- From a thesis on Hermeutic Gaia by Adam Croft

“Only when he has attained a final knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are only the boundaries of man.”

- Nietzsche, Daybreak (translated into English by R. J. Hollingdale (2003)).

“Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.

Nürnberg, Sep. 30, 1809

Written to remember
Hegel, Prof. & Principal.”

» Continue reading “Table of Contents”

BS: D1. Per causam sui intelligo id cujus essentia involvit existentiam sive id cujus natura non potest concipi nisi existens.

SS: D1. By that which is self-caused I mean that whose essence involves existence; or that whose nature can be conceived only as existing.

:: What does BS understand by conceivability?

» Continue reading “§1 De Deo / Of God”

GWH: Die Vernunft ist Geist, indem die Gewißheit, alle Realität zu sein, zur Wahrheit erhoben und sie sich ihrer selbst als ihrer Welt und der Welt als ihrer selbst bewußt ist.

HTG: Reason is spirit, since the certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is self-consciously aware of itself as its own world, and the world as itself.

:: Can something be [self-consciously aware] of something else? Is it not (i) self-conscious, or (ii) conscious of itself, rather than self-conscious of itself? » Continue reading “§6 Der Geist / The Spirit”

“[...] the fondness for reducing all the bodies in nature to three or four elements, proceeds from a prejudice which has descended to us from the Greek Philosophers. The notion of four elements, which, by the variety of their proportions, compose all the known substances in nature, is a mere hypothesis, assumed long before the first principles of experimental philosophy or chemistry had any existence. In those days, without possessing facts, they framed systems; while we, who have collected facts, seem determined to reject them, when they do not agree with our prejudices. The authority of these fathers of human philosophy still carry great weight, and there is reason to fear that it will even bear hard upon generations yet to come.”

- Antoine Lavoisier (1789), Elements of Chemistry

(Stolen from: ‘synapsomatic’)