Posts tagged philosophy.
Self-realization of the universe from J. W. Nicholas’ 1977 Psience: A General Theory of Existence.
via Unurthed
“Ayn Rand, boys and girls. The heart and soul of the GOP and Tea Party. Sure, she hated God and grabbed Social Security and Medicare when she needed it, but all the Tea Party douchebags are going to be millionaires someday, right? Every single one of them.” -Patton Oswalt
ayn didn’t believe that everyone deserved love. what a lady (cough). she also wanted to be an actress, when she first made it to los angeles. rejection does weird things. ask hitler.
2 years ago on April 24, 2011 at 10:02am
via eye-you
Philosophy of Wonder: “The best antidote to this spiritualist temptation is to bear in mind... ›
“The best antidote to this spiritualist temptation is to bear in mind the lesson of Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge—as expounded in March 2003, when the then US defence secretary engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophising: ‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we…
Too Weird for THE WIRE ›
Photo courtesy: http://weblog.liberatormagazine.com/2008_06_29_archive.html
The defense, such as it is, boils down to this: As officers of the court, all defense lawyers are really on the government’s side, having sworn an oath to uphold a vast, century-old conspiracy to conceal the fact that most aspects of the federal government are illegitimate, including the courts, which have no constitutional authority to bring people to trial. The defendants also believed that a legal distinction could be drawn between their name as written on their indictment and their true identity as a “flesh and blood man.”
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Nobody in the Baltimore federal courthouse is willing to state, or even speculate on the record, that Mitchell and his cohorts may have averted death with the flesh-and-blood defense. There are other possibilities involving evidence, witnesses, and Justice Department policy. But the elaborate processes of federal capital cases weren’t built to accommodate farcical pro se filings and challenges. Traffic offenses, tax cases—even farm foreclosures—are one thing. When the end goal is execution, even the most ludicrous defenses are taken seriously.
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Willie Mitchell and company won’t go on trial until September, if then, and they won’t face the death penalty, even though they probably deserve it if anyone does. But they will probably be convicted and spend the rest of their lives in federal prison, never to be heard from again, because in the end, the flesh-and-blood defense is no defense at all
2 years ago on January 25, 2011 at 04:45pm
…On being human
2 years ago on January 21, 2011 at 01:27pm
Now then, when you want to get control of something that wiggles, it’s pretty difficult, isn’t it? You try and pick up a fish in your hands, and the fish is wiggly and it slips out. What do you do to get hold of the fish? You use a net. And so the net is the basic thing we have for getting hold of the wiggly world. So if you want to get hold of this wiggle, you’ve got to put a net over it. A net is something regular. And I can number the holes in a net. So many holes up, so many holes across. And if I can number these holes, I can count exactly where each wiggle is, in terms of a hole in that net. And that’s the beginning of calculus, the art of measuring the world. But in order to do that, I’ve got to break up the wiggle into bits. I’ve got to call this a specific bit, and this the next bit of the wiggle, and this the next bit, and this the next bit of the wiggle. And so these bits are things or events. Bit of wiggles. Which I mark out in order to talk about the wiggle. In order to measure and therfore in order to control it. But in nature, in fact, in the physical world, the wiggle isn’t bitted. Like you don’t get a cut-up fryer out of an egg. But you have to cut the chicken up in order to eat it. You bite it. But it doesn’t come bitten.
Alan Watts - on the nature of consciousness2 years ago on January 17, 2011 at 05:19pm
If someone claims to have free will, ask them, ‘Free from precisely what?’
Peter J. Carroll
via @eglinski
(via metaconscious)
What can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? Let us not forget that violence does not exist by itself and cannot do so; it is necessarily interwoven with lies. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle…But writers and artists can achieve more: they can conquer the lie. In the struggle with falsehood, art has always won and always will win! One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn - “Russia’s greatest living writer” in his acceptance lecture for a 1970 Nobel Prize - which he has been unable to deliver for the the past 40 years.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,910395-1,00.html#ixzz17rEIkOus
2 years ago on December 11, 2010 at 08:47pm
TED Blog | Why we should teach philosophy to kids ›
Compared with 72 control children, the philosophy children showed significant improvements on tests of their verbal, numerical and spatial abilities.
Philosophy isn’t just learning about dead Greek dudes- it’s a careful and effective mode of thinking.
A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.
Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It2 years ago on November 28, 2010 at 04:38pm
The Humanized technology design team ›
The humanized technology design team
Our Philosophy
From clocks to computers, these are the principles we follow when designing and evaluating humane interfaces. We’re constantly working to make software follow them more and more. However, these principles are also hard to design for, and even harder to realize. We can’t promise to make every piece of software on your computer work this way today, but we do promise to provide you with the most humane software we are capable of making.
- It’s not your fault.
- Simple things should stay simple.
- Fewer choices mean fewer worries.
- Your data is sacred.
- Your train of thought is sacred.
- Good interfaces create good habits.
- Modes cause misery.
- It’s easy to learn.
Questions? Check out the website.
2 years ago on November 23, 2010 at 11:57am
We need not so much a philosophy of the social sciences of the present and the past as we need a philosophy for the social sciences of the future, and indeed, for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of social phenomena.
John Searle, Making the Social World, p. 5
This book is going to be the central text upon which my History & Theory of Geography term paper is built. It is exactly what I want: an analytic approach to social phenomena that avoids the needless reductionism of many other works of analytic philosophy on the same topic.
(via newleft)
