Magni Formica Laboris

"He had no patience with algebra's 'scab of symbols,' the shorthand that made a mathematical page look 'as if a hen had been scraping there.' He conceded that these symbols might be useful, even necessary, aids to demonstration, but 'they ought no more to appear in public, than the most deformed necessary business which you do in your chambers.' " (CC to Hobbes, 114)

1. "Malebranche...reiterates the Augustinian view that, before Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, their passions were forceful enough to protect them from harm but not so strong as to distract them from the one true good, namely God. It is part of humanity's punishment for original sin that our passions are now much stronger and more compelling than they were, so that any attempt to lead a good life is an unremitting struggle, and the task of overcoming or counteracting our affects is a central aspect of any good life." (James 203) 2. In the modern period: "writers indebted to Stoicism viewed the passions as erroneous judgments, and argued that reason ought in principle to transcend them completely. People who progressively overcome their passions by cultivating a rational and correct understanding of the world are gradually released from the emotional ups and downs of a passionate life, and come to experience a state of... ataraxia " (205) 3. T...

Locke provided an implicit criticism of Hobbes’s rejection of incorporeal substance when he noted that our idea of corporeal substance is no clearer than our idea of spiritual substance, since we take both ideas to signify the unknown “substratum” that we suppose to underlie spiritual or corporeal qualities or operations. Locke concluded that we can no more infer to the nonexistence of spirit from the lack of a clear idea of an immaterial substratum than we can infer to the nonexistence of matter from the lack of a clear idea of a material substratum. — Schamltz, The science of mind. Cambridge Companion to EMP, p. 147.

"Had he stood alone in the world he could easily have ridiculed the whole affair, though it was also certain that in that event it could never have arisen at all" - Kafka, The Trial (Lawyer) "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains" - Rousseau

1. "Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings. There was the wonder I felt when I first saw a brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-white horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay. There was the delight I caught in seeing long straight rows of red and green vegetables stretching away in the sun to the bright horizon. There was the faint, cool kiss of sensuality when dew came on to my cheeks and shins as I ran down the wet green garden paths in the early morning. There was the vague sense of the infinite as I looked down upon the yellow, dreaming waters of the Mississippi River from the verdant bluffs of Natchez. There were the echoes of nostalgia I heard in the crying strings of wild geese winging south against a bleak, autumn sky. There was the tantalizing melancholy in the tingling scent of burning hickory wood. There was the teasing and impossible desire to imitate the pett...

1. "At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience could ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering." (end of Ch. 3) 2. "There are some elusive, profound, recondite things that men find hard to say to other men; but with the Negro it is the little things of life that become hard to say, for these tiny items shape his destiny. A man will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man's consciousness has been riveted upon obtaining a loaf of bread, that loaf of bread is as important as the stars." (Ch. 12) 3. "With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of ...

Putnam's slogan: "Scientific realism is the only philosophy of science that does not make the success of science a miracle." (xxii) "What should be noted is that agnostic empiricism comes in two varieties: naive and sophisticated. The naive variety stresses that the only rational option is suspension of judgment as to the truth of theoretical assertions. The sophisticated variety, associated with van Fraassen's approach, is that being agnostic is no less rational than being scientific realist." (Psillos xxi)

A quote from Nordmann's Cambridge introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus : 1) "The theory and practice of the Tractatus distinguishes not just three, but four uses of language, including the one in which it is written ... While Wittgenstein scholars have learned to accept that some sentences might be senseless but not nonsensical (ie. logical propositions), most will not find intelligible the inverse claim that other expressions are literally nonsensical and yet make sense, for example, in that they help us 'see the world right' (TLP 6.54)." (Nordman 9) and from Megill's Prophets of Extremity : 1) "...the loss of the transcendent dimension, prompted by the notion of Kritik as a pervasive power, leads to modern man's homelessness in the world. This is the crisis. It is the loss of authoritative standards of the good, the true, and the beautiful to which reason has access, coupled with loss of the Word of God in the Bible." (Megil xiii) 2) ...

From Ladyman: 1) Science is the only intellectually respectable form of inquiry. 2) All truths are either: (a) analytic, a priori and necessary (tautological) or (b) synthetic, a posteriori and contingent.* 3) So far as knowledge goes, it is either purely formal and analytic, such as math and logic, or it is a kind of empirical science.* 4) The purpose of philosophy is to explicate the structure or logic of science. Philosophy is really the epistemology of science and analyzing concepts.** 5) Logic is to be used to express precisely the relationships between concepts. 6) The verifiability criterion of meaning : a statement is literally meaningful if and only if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable. 7) The Verification Principle : the meaning of a non-tautological statement is its method of verification; that is, the way in which it can be shown to be true by experience. * - Godel's Incompleteness Proof seems to undo these two tenets, or at least to obfuscate t...

Excerpt about this scientific outlook in Ladyman , James, Understanding Philosophy of Science , Routledge 2002. "The constructive empiricism of van Fraassen has provoked renewed debate about scientific realism. Van Fraassen is happy to accept the semantic and metaphysical components of scientific realism...but he denies the epistemic component. He thinks that scientific theories about unobservables should be taken literally, and are true or false in the correspondence sense, depending on whether the entities they describe are part of the mind-independent world. However, he argues that acceptance of the best theories in modern science does not require belief in the entities postulated by them, and that the nature and success of modern science relative to its aims can be understood without invoking the existence of such entities. "Van Fraassen defines scientific realism as follows: 'Science aims to give us, in its theories, a literally true story of what the world ...