Magni Formica Laboris

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...

"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...