Magni Formica Laboris

Because we have in the understanding and sensibility two stems of cognition independent of one another, we must distinguish between possibility and actuality (otherwise we would have an intellectual intuition); because we are both sensible and rational beings, the moral law appears to us as what ought to be, not as what is or volition (otherwise we would have a holy will); because our understanding is discursive, the power of judgment judges organisms inevitably as natural purposes (otherwise we would have an intuitive understanding). And since Kant in all three causes insists that the ground for our corresponding judgments lies in our subjective character and not in things themselves, he draws for us general limits of cognition and at the same time indicates that it is necessary to attempt to think beyond those limits, at least experimentally. Such an attempt, if undertaken seriously, will hardly be without consequences. - Eckart Förster, The Significance of §§76 and 77 Of the Cr

Diogenes believed human beings live artificially and hypocritically and would do well to study the dog. - Wikipedia.

Aristotle was a little man with eyes like a lizard, and he found a streak down the midst of things, a smooth place for his feet much more important than the carved handles on the coffins of the great. He said you should put your hand out at the time and place of need: strength matters little, he said, nor even speed. His pupil, a king's son, died at an early age. That Aristotle spoke of him it is impossible to find—the youth was notorious, a conqueror, a kid with a gang, but even this Aristotle didn't ever say. Around the farthest forest and along all the bed of the sea, Aristotle studied immediate, local ways. Many of which were wrong. So he studied poetry. There, in pity and fear, he found Man. Many thinkers today, who stand low and grin, have little use for anger or power, its palace or its prison— but quite a bit for that little man with eyes like a lizard. - Humanities Lecture, William Stafford

Thus, 7000 Oaks is a sculpture referring to peoples' life, to their everyday work. That is my concept of art which I call the extended concept or art of the social sculpture. I wish to go more and more outside to be among the problems of nature and problems of human beings in their working places. This will be a regenerative activity; it will be a therapy for all of the problems we are standing before.... I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of humankind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context. I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet. The planting of seven thousand oak trees is thus only a symbolic beginning. And such a symbolic beginning requires a marker, in this instanc

"The fact that nature has produced a vast multitude of objects that we find beautiful, as if they were made for us, makes us think that we somehow fit. It seems to us as if this were a gift or blessing given to us by nature or by God. From the perspective of human autonomy, we might also say that it is not that nature does us a favor, but the other way around: we do nature a favor by finding it beautiful. But in any case, Kant suggests that this makes us think that ideas and higher purposes of our inner nature, like freedom and morality, may be realized in outer nature and society where human beings live together under moral laws. Reason thus takes an interest in any sign or trace in nature that might indicate a bridge between freedom and nature.” (Wenzel 115) “But since it also interests reason that the ideas (for which it produces an immediate interest in the moral feeling) also have objective reality, i.e., that nature should at least show some trace or give a sign that

from "Imagination & Perception" (in Foster and Swanson, Experience and Theory . Massachusetts, 1970.) "Of course when you first see a new, an unfamiliar thing of a familiar kind, there is no question of past perceptions of that thing being alive in the present perception. Still, one might say, to take it, to see it, as a thing of that kind is implicitly to have the thought of other possible perceptions related to your actual perception as perceptions of the same object. To see it as a dog, silent and stationary, is to see it as a possible mover and barker, even though you give yourself no actual images of it as moving and barking; though, again, you might do so if, say, you were particularly timid, if, as we say, your imagination was particularly active or particularly stimulated by the sight. Again, as you continue to observe it, it is not just a dog, with such and such characteristics, but the dog, the object of your recent observation, that you see, and see i

When he was in his twenties, [Miguel Mihura] wrote his best known comedy, Tres sombreros de copa , but its humour was not appreciated by the conservative pre-war Spanish society. Tres sombreros de copa was not staged until 1952, achieving a great success. cf. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring , others, and Ray's instructive query into the criteria of truth with respect to one's artistic decisions, and his response that the audience has a major role. also think of poems of canonical poets not yet canonical. It's a precarious situation...

1. Thomas Carlyle's Foresight It is admitted on all sides, that the Metaphysical and Moral Sciences are falling into decay, while the Physical are engrossing, every day, more respect and attention ... This condition of the two great departments of knowledge; the outer, cultivated exclusively on mechanical principles---the inward finally abandoned, because, cultivated on such principles, it is found to yield no result---sufficiently indicates the intellectual bias of our time, its all-pervading disposition towards that line of enquiry. In fact, an inward perusasion has long been diffusing itself, and now and then even comes to utterance, that except the external, there are no true sciences; that, to the inward world (if there be any) our only conceivable road is through the outward; that, in short, what cannot be investigated and understood mechanically, cannot be investigated and understood at all. - Edinburgh Review , 1829, Vol. 49, pp. 444-447 2. Ruskin growls a warning: It ha

Look how in one part of his work [Plotinus] attacks the power of the necessity of fate--quite foolishly and carelessly it seems to me--and he forcefully rebukes people who fear the decrees of Fortune. He grants no power to the stars, and he offers no necessity to fate, but says that everything is within our power... And look how, when he was secure in his impudent rashness, the power of fate compelled everything: first his limbs became stiff from a chilling and torpor in his blood, and the sharpness of his eyes slowly lost their clarity as the light in them failed. After this, his whole skin erupted in a pestilence fed by malignant humors, so that his putrid body melted away into death with soured blood, failing limbs. Every day and every hour small parts of his viscera were dissolved by the creeping disease, and what was seen as intact one moment was deformed the next by the ulceration destroying his body. Thus corrupted and dissolved in appearance, the whole shape of his body

1. Early explorers to the land of the Inuit were given raw liver by the natives, which contained a toxic overdose of vitamin A for the white explorers; however, the same amount was harmless to the Inuit, who had no other source of Vitamin A except animal livers. source: forgotten

cf. to Judge Holden, "If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay." p. 307 cf. Heraclitus fragmenta: "War is both father and king of all; some he has shown forth as gods and others as men, some he has made slaves and others free." (53) "It should be understood that war is the common condition, that strife is justice, and that all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife." (80) From Zarathustra: I tell you: one must have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. (Prologue, 5) I would only believe in a God that knows how to dance. (I.7) vs. the theme of dancing and the judge as a skilled dancer. From GM: Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches — and in punishment there is so much that is festive! (2.VI) [In this one the link to BM is especially appreciable.] That every will must consider every other will its equal [ie. Kant's categorical imperative] — would be a p

Some of the salient passages from GM: 1. Every animal, including l a bête philosophe , strives instinctively for the optimum conditions under which it may release its powers. Every animal, instinctively and with a subtle flair that leaves reason far behind, abhors all interference that might conceivably block its path to that optimum. (3.VII) 2. It is easy to tell a philosopher: he avoids three shiny, loud things--fame, princes, and women; which is not to say that they won't seek him out. (3.VIII) 3. Even measured by the Greek standard, our whole modern existence, insofar as it is not weakness but power and the consciousness of power, looks like sheer hubris and impiety: things exactly contrary to the ones we reverence today had for the longest time conscience on their side and God for their guardian. Our whole attitude toward nature, our violation of nature with the help of machines and the heedless ingenuity of technicians and engineers, is hubris; so is our attitude to G

(from last 50 pages, excerpt copied from some other blog) One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree and deferring to this argument we will say that this is a ceremony of a certain magnitude perhaps more commonly called a ritual. A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals. Here every man knows the false at once. Never doubt it. That feeling in the breast that evokes a child's memory of loneliness such as when the others have gone and only the game is left with its solitary participant. A solitary game, without opponent. Where only the rules are at hazard. Don't look away. We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds? The judge leaned closer. What do you think death is, man? Of w

Melville had begun to suspect that violence and death (as opposed, say, to liberty and justice) defined American history. That is why the bloody business of whaling, and not something more benign like the spread of railroads or the "annex" of new territories (which were, of course, only relatively benign), stands as his metaphor for American capitalist and imperial aspirations. (Philips 8)

( from a recent interview with Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian ) AVC: You’ve been extremely critical of the politicization of teaching literature… HB: Critical, young man, is hardly the word. I stand against it like Jeremiah prophesying in Jerusalem. It has destroyed most of university culture. The teaching of high literature now hardly exists in the United States. The academy is in ruins, and they’ve destroyed themselves Source: http://www.avclub.com/articles/harold-bloom-on-blood-meridian,29214/ I showed Zack this quote and neither of us are certain of what "the politicization of teaching literature" actually is, can anyone throw light on this?

Learning from Art: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as a Critique of Divine Determinism by Dennis Sansom [after examples of Voltaire's Candide critiquing Leibniz's optimism, Huxley's Brave New World critiquing Marxism] The artist’s imagination, especially in literature, pictures what can happen. Aristotle may be right in saying that art imposes an ideational form upon matter, but art can also indicate whether an ideational form should be imposed upon matter. In keeping with Aristotle’s terminology, the actuality of the idea may pervert or hinder the potentiality of the matter. Some ideas do not fulfill the potentiality of the human experience and they should be rejected, though they are logical, systematic, and clear. Some philosophical ideas cannot stand the test of the imagination. How does the artistic imagination test an idea? The artistic imagination is not just a fanciful thought experiment or a mirror of experience. In the Critique of Judgement Kant argued that artis

In the "Old Man" sections of The Wild Palms (1939), the flood throws forth its "charging welter of dead cows and mules and outhouses and cabins and hencoops." Faulkner's prose strikes an elegiac note as the convict's skiff rides "even upon the backs of the mules as though even in death they were not to escape that burden-bearing doom with which their eunuch race was cursed" (145-46). in Blood Meridian (1985) … having a mule drowned intentionally: "The Yumas were swimming the few sorry mules ... across the river. . . . Downriver they'd drowned one of the animals and towed it ashore to be butchered" (253). … That the image of the drowned mule also occupies a subliterary folk status in the South is perhaps attested by a common simile in which a wealthy person is said to have "enough money to burn up a wet mule." 6. Falls from cliffs. The novel Blood Meridian (1985) establishes Cormac McCarthy as unchallenged king of literary mu

Achinstein's definition of scientific realism: a doctrine committed at least to the claim that unobservable entities exist. Three alternative definitions: (1) Scientific realism is a view about truth and reference in scientific theories generally. (Psillos, Laudan, Boyd). They are committed to at least the following claims: (A) Scientific theories (at least in the "mature" sciences) are typically approximately true, and more recent theories are closer to the truth than other theories in the same domain. (B) The observational and theoretical terms within the theories of a mature science genuinely refer (roughly, there are substances in the world which correspond to the ontologies presumed by our best theories). (C) Successive theories in any mature science will be such that they "preserve" the theoretical relations and the apparent referents of earlier theories (that is, earlier theories will be "limiting cases" of later theories). (D) Acceptable n

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. - Laplace, Introduction to the Essai . ... if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any great numbe

"Elspeth Crawford has sought to understand Faraday's creativity by studying his learning process. As she rightly emphasizes, learning about nature was for Faraday a form of self-knowledge and one that led to a particular emotional state by which he could, through humility, free himself from prejudice and give rein to his curiosity and creative powers." ( Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist p. 263)

“Whenever an object of the will has to be laid down as the basis for prescribing the rule that determines the will, there the rule is none other than heteronomy; the imperative is conditional, namely: if or because one wills this object, one ought to act in such or such a way; hence it can never command morally, that is, categorically.” (G 444) The will’s principle to serve as a ‘compass’: common human reason “knows very well how to distinguish in every case that comes up what is good and what is evil, what is in conformity with duty or contrary to duty, if, without in the least teaching it anything new, we only, as did Socrates, make it attentive to its own principle (note – a reference to ‘recollection’); and that there is, accordingly, no need of science and philosophy to know what one has to do in order to be honest and good, and even wise and virtuous.” (G 404) "From love of humankind I am willing to admit that even most of our actions are in conformity with duty; but if we

"The traditional term 'natural philosopher' may be aptly applied to a scientist who was also a scholar, deeply conscious of the historical roots and philosophical import of his physics." - Harman "Around 1850 the science of physics came to be defined in terms of the unifying role of the concept of energy and the programme of mechanical explanation. Quantification, the search for mathematical laws, and precision measurement, the attainment of accurate values in experimentation, came to be seen as normative in physical science." (Harman 3) [Remember the two pivotal statements Rynasiewicz made about history of science: 1. There is no philosophy of science without a history of science; 2. If you want to study history, there are three central texts that must be read (and to which almost all other historical texts refer): Ptolemy's Almagest , Newton's Principia , and Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism .] "Maxwell urged caution

“Hume is a Socratic thinker. He believes that in order to avoid being plagued by [skeptical doubts and] anxiety we must achieve self-knowledge. The philosopher stands in need of it as much as his or her fellows do. Socrates would have agreed; but he appeared to think that self-knowledge was to come through the pursuit of the dialectical questioning in which the philosopher is expert, and Hume does not think this. Hume thinks that he has available a scientific mode of understanding that illuminates our nature for us, and that the philosopher must turn to this to save himself. Our nature is intelligible; and once we have learned its key features, we can avoid those influences in philosophy (and in religion) that would lead us to do violence to it. The understanding of human nature that Hume urges on us is different indeed from that deriving from Socrates, at least as Plato presents him to us.” – Terence Penelhum , Hume’s Moral Psychology from CC to Hume Duty is derived from "

"When I was twenty, says a French poet, Ovid was my favourite: Now I am forty, I declare for Horace." (5.30) "Inanimate objects may bear to each other all the same relations, which we observe in moral agents; though the former can never be the object of love or hatred, nor are consequently susceptible of merit or iniquity. A young tree, which over-tops and destroys its parent, stands in all the same relations with Nero, when he murdered Agrippina; and if morality consisted merely in relations, would, no doubt, be equally criminal" (Appx 1, 17)

1. There is something slightly artificial about Heidegger's choice of the entity to be questioned (i.e. ourselves). We must avoid any suggestion that the being of human beings is to serve as the model for the being of all other entities. The real ground for his choice is that what distinguishes our being from that of other entities is that it includes an understanding of being. Dasein is not an entity from which the meaning of being is to be abstracted [or 'read off'] it is what he calls the 'place of the understanding of being'. (Gorner 22) 2. However, such [ontic-type] theory building itself depends upon taking for granted certain basic ways in which the given discipline demarcates and structures its own area of study; and those foundations tend to remain unthematized by the discipline itself, until it finds itself in a state of crisis. Relativity theory precipitated such a crisis in physics... Such conceptual enquiries are not examples of theories that conform to

1. "Until he was 11, Galileo was educated privately at home, by his father and the occasional tutor. Among his other talents, Galileo developed an aptitude for the lute (his father's favourite instrument) and reached professional standard; although he only played for amusement, the instrument remained a source of pleasure throughout his life." (Gribbin 26) 2. "The thing that looks particularly weird to modern eyes is that Bacon was trying to develop a method for doing science in a step-by-step approach that would lead even the humblest practitioner to the correct conclusions, with no need for geniuses or flashes of insight -- no room, in fact, for the imagination. He made an analogy with the difficulty of drawing a straight line freehand, which required a steady hand and a real deal of practice, and drawing a straight line with the aid of a ruler, which anyone could do. His method was to be to science what a ruler was to the drawing of straight lines, a mechanic