Without Lifting A Finger

 On the contrary: to us the most alluring questions are those to which there is no actual, no universally valid, answer. I hope that sooner or later, philosophy will be thus defined, in contrast to science:—philosophy is the teaching of truths which are binding on none.

Annotation E. It is often not within our power to keep our minds clear of images: whenever we deal with lines, surfaces, and points, our mind resorts to these fictions and models, because that was how we first comprehended what they represent; and thereafter we made a habit of using them. Likewise, when we think about God, some picture of a dignified old man comes into our mind; and those who religiously struggle to shake them off usually do not succeed. The mind is only clear when it is abstracted from such images, or at least when we do not have them in any great number, do not value them, do not affirm or deny anything of them, and do not infer anything from them, but infer the natures of things only from a notion or idea. Thus, little by little we reach a state in which those images are so well filtered that very few pass through, or even none at all. For images are reinforced by repeated reflection, and by the utterance of speeches evoked by them and the demands they mak...

I struck a bargain with a captain called Desjardins: he had to carry the Abbé Nagot, Superior of the Saint-Sulpice Seminary, to Baltimore, with several seminarists in their principal’s care. These companions on the voyage would have been more to my liking four years earlier: from being the zealous Christian I once was, I had become a free thinker, that is to say a feeble thinker. This change in my religious opinions had been brought about by reading philosophical works. I believed, in all good faith, that a religious mind was partially paralysed, that there were truths which would not occur to it, however superior it might be otherwise. This smug pride led me astray: I inferred in the religious mind the absence of a faculty which is found precisely in the philosophic mind; a limited intelligence thinks it sees all, because it opens its eyes wide; a superior intelligence consents to close its eyes because it sees all within. One final thing completed my misery: the groundless despair ...

A reading period in which I'm jumping from book to book. Lots of starts, few finishes. Just the way it is: work and restless sleep. Sometimes the way we come to a writer is as interesting as the writer him/herself. Or at least both are interesting. So it is with Cioran. Found him in a circuitous way. Settled first on Drawn and Quartered . * Despite everything, man pulverized his last prejudice, and his last belief; when he finally  brings himself to do so, dazzled and destroyed by his own audacity, he will find himself naked facing the abyss that follows upon the disappearance of all dogmas, and of all taboos.

Emil Michel Cioran ( Romanian pronunciation:  [eˈmil t͡ʃoˈran]  ( listen ) ; 8 April 1911 – 20 June 1995) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist , who published works in both Romanian and French . Cioran was born in Rășinari, Sibiu County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time. His first French book, A Short History of Decay , was awarded the prestigious Rivarol Prize in 1950. It was the only book for which he accepted an award given to him, claiming that it would have been insolent of him to refuse it. The Latin Quarter of Paris was his permanent residence and he lived much of his life in isolation with his partner Simone Boué. [From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Cioran ]

An old friend brought up Nietzsche, the silver fox of a philosopher (or man-on-the-street) mumbled something about Chomsky, and something at work this week made me think of Richard Rorty. What do I understand about philosophy? Next to nothing. And yet I sometimes dabble, choosing this person or that primarily on the way that he/she shuffles words. Anyway, I dug up the Rorty text that I was thinking of and will jot down just a couple of passages I highlighted long long ago. * From Rorty's introduction to Essays on Heidegger and Others: Consider sentences as strings of marks and noises emitted by organisms, strings capable of being paired off with the strings we ourselves utter (in the way we call "translating"). Consider beliefs, desires, and intentions -- sentential attitudes generally -- as entities posited to help predict the behavior of these organisms. Now think of those organisms as gradually evolving as a result of producing longer and more complicate...

Johanna [ 1 ] "Hannah" Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-American political theorist . Though often described as a philosopher, she rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular" and instead described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world." [ 2 ] Her works deal with the nature of power , and the subjects of politics, direct democracy , authority , and totalitarianism . The Hannah Arendt Prize is named in her honour. Life and career Arendt was born into a secular family of German Jews in Linden (present-day Hanover ), the daughter of Martha (née Cohn) and Paul Arendt. [ 3 ] She grew up in Königsberg (renamed Kaliningrad and annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin. At the University of Marburg , she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger . According to Hans Jonas , her only Germa...

How much do we know about Pythagoras? What did Plato and Aristotle say about him? Since I'm teaching Physics this year (at least for now), I started reading Aristotle's Physics . We'll see how long it will hold my attention. Anyway, I ran across this interesting paragraph in the online  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy : The Pythagorean question, then, is how to get behind this false glorification of Pythagoras in order to determine what the historical Pythagoras actually thought and did. In order to obtain an accurate appreciation of Pythagoras' achievement, it is important to rely on the earliest evidence before the distortions of the later tradition arose. The popular modern image of Pythagoras is that of a master mathematician and scientist. The early evidence shows, however, that, while Pythagoras was famous in his own day and even 150 years later in the time of Plato and Aristotle, it was not mathematics or science upon which his fame rested. Pythagoras wa...

The Reverend Thomas Reid FRSE (7 May (26 April O.S. ) 1710 – 7 October 1796), was a religiously trained Scottish philosopher , and a contemporary of David Hume , was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense , and played an integral role in the Scottish Enlightenment . The early part of his life was spent in Aberdeen , Scotland , where he created the 'Wise Club' (a literary-philosophical association) and graduated from the University of Aberdeen . He was given a professorship at King's College, Aberdeen in 1752, where he wrote An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (published in 1764). Shortly afterward he was given the prestigious Professorship of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow when he was called to replace Adam Smith . He resigned from this position in 1781. Reid believed that common sense (in a special philosophical sense of sensus communis ) is, or at least should be, at the foundation of all philosophical inq...