“While translation is always pursued at real risk to both rhyme and reason, surely what can be found in translation is also an additional measure of meaning and elegance. Try as we might, we cannot avoid to some degree ‘making up’ our interpretation and ‘making over’ the text with it. But at the same time, […]
“Simply put, the philosophical fallacy is committed whenever the outcome of a process is presumed to be antecedent to that process––whenever some ostensive ‘principle’ is identified, isolated, and abstracted from the flow of experience and is then used anachronistically and reduplicatively to rationalize an always-emergent history. Dewey from early on saw as ‘the most pervasive […]
“When we turn to the art of being most fully human, disclosure in our relationships is what makes this family and this community meaningful, or said more dynamically, is what makes these radically embedded relationships a situated case of ‘meaning making.’ Any understanding of harmony that demands conformity at the expense of a disclosing particularity […]
“We need to wrap our minds around the fact that as human beings we are inherently limited in our ability to reason and to discover things about the world. These limitations do not give us a license to arbitrarily ‘go beyond’ reason and evidence into religion or mysticism. On the contrary, they are reminders that […]
“The main difference between human beings and other animals when it comes to superstition is that other species abandon the silly behavior almost immediately once they figure out that it doesn’t actually work.” ––Answers for Aristotle, by Massimo Pigliucci, pg. 244 “He got home and looked though the mail, and he had driven past […]
“We have finally arrived at Rawls’s crucial thought experiment, his version of a social contract, and the answer to the question of what sort of society we should agree to have, given all of these considerations. Rawls’s approach here is ingenious and can be appreciated even if one does not happen to agree with his […]
“Aristotle’s opinion was that friends hold a mirror up to each other; through that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this (reciprocal) mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons. Friends, then, share a similar concept of eudaimonia and help each other […]
“The modern philosophical theory of love as emotion can be enhanced and informed by what biologists tell us concerning the reason for the existence of human emotions in general and the emotions accompanying love in particular, as well as what they say about the mechanisms of emotion. Shakespeare famously asked (in As You Like It): […]
“If we had kissed, it would have been the miracle to make us human in each other’s eyes. Instead we killed each other.” ––Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, pg. 322 “The compatibilist acknowledges that our actions have to be caused, and that they are limited or channeled by physical, biological, and psychological constraints. […]
“‘Why are we fighting the buggers?’ ‘I’ve heard all kinds of reasons,’ said Graff. ‘Because they have an overcrowded system and they’ve got to colonize. Because they can’t stand the thought of other intelligent life in the universe. Because they don’t think we are intelligent life. Because they have some weird religion. Because they watched […]