Magni Formica Laboris

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things; Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings; World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird. - From Among School Children , verse 6

Is he some sort of a midwife, or more like a Silenus statue? The import of this question was emphasized by Prior in The Socratic Problem, from the Blackwell Companion to Plato The midwife analogy from the Theaetetus : "The common reproach against me is that I am always asking questions of other people but never express my own views about anything, because there is no wisdom in me, and that is true enough... With those who associate with me it is different. At first some may give the impression of being ignorant and stupid; but as time goes on and our association continues, all whom God permits are seen to make progress - a progress which is amazing both to other people and to themselves. And yet it is clear that this is not due to anything they have learned from me." (excerpts 150c4-d7) The Silenus analogy from the Symposium (told by Alcibiades): "To begin with, he's crazy about beautiful boys; he constantly follows them around in a perpetual daze. Also, he lik...

1. "It is arguable, however, that law's functions in our culture are more closely related to its coercive aspect than Hart seems to have assumed. Contemporary use of ‘game theory’ in the law tends to show that the rationale of a great variety of legal arrangements can be best explained by the function of law in solving problems of opportunism, like the so called Prisoner's Dilemma situations. In these cases, the law's main role is, indeed, one of providing coercive measures. Be this as it may, we should probably refrain from endorsing Austin's or Kelsen's position that providing sanctions is law's only function in society. Solving recurrent and multiple coordination problems, setting standards for desirable behavior, proclaiming symbolic expressions of communal values, resolving disputes about facts, and such, are important functions which the law serves in our society, and those have very little to do with law's coercive aspect and its sanction-providi...

see 6.493A-C "The image of the Beast conveys a great deal of what Plato wanted to say about democracy. Fundamental is the thought that in a political system of direct popular rule, where key decisions are taken not by an individual or a body with restricted membership, but by the assembled populace itself, the people become the source of all values in the society. As we might put it, democracy is in this regard a totalitarian system. More specifically, the power of public opinion generates a radically corrupt system of values. This is because it is the passions and appetites of the populace which in the end dictate the contents of what passes for wisdom. If they like something, that counts as good (i.e. as what we should truly want), in the teaching of the sophists as for everyone else; if they dislike it, the opposite. Necessity--that is (presumably), political expediency--is what gets dignified by the language of moral approbation: 'just', 'fine'. What has...

"Concerning the gods I am unable to know either that they are or that they are not, or what their appearance is like. For many are the things that hinder knowledge: the obscurity of the matter and the shortness of human life." (Eusebius, Preparation of the Gospel 14.3.7 = 80B4) Buddhism and Jainism are agnostic religions. Protagoras, Democritus, Hume, Emmanuel Kant, William James, Herbert Spencer, Albert Einstein were agnostic. from an atheism website: http://atheisme.free.fr/Atheisme/Agnosticism.htm

He treated the classical writers with a household familiarity, as if they had all been his roommates at some period, and he knew many things that should not have been known, such as the fact that Saint Augustine wore a wool jacket under his habit that he did not take off for fourteen years and that Arnaldo of Villanova, the necromancer, was impotent since childhood because of a scorpion bite. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. - From One Hundred Years of Solitude

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...