Magni Formica Laboris

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...