Quote of the Month

Quote of the Month

"And if there are more virtues than one, the good will express the best and most complete virtue. Moreover, it will be in a complete life. For one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day; nor similarly, does one day or a short time make us blessed and happy." ¾Aristotle, "Metaphysics," (Irwin/Fine trans.)

Past Quotes:

"By convention, sweet; by convention, bitter; by convention, hot; by convention, cold; by convention, color; but in reality, atoms and void. ¾Democritus

"Truth is a qualification which applies to Appearance alone. Reality is just itself and it is nonsense to ask whether it be true or false. Truth is the conformation of Appearance to Reality." ¾Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

"What we can't say we can't say; and we can't whistle it either." ¾F.P. Ramsey

A rabbi scolds a tailor for taking six weeks to make a pair of trousers when God took but six days to create the entire world. The tailor replies, "Yes, Rabbi, but just see what a world made in a hurry looks like." ¾Nahun Glatzer, The Dimensions of Job.

"Gravity; it's not just a good idea, it's the law." ¾High School Physics Teacher

* * * * * * *

"I wish I could believe in reincarnation," he said.

"Not me. Once down the track is enough of a test. Pass me or fail me, Dear Lord, but don't make me go through high school again."

¾Dean Koontz, Forever Odd

* * * * *

"He rests. He has travelled.

With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer
and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer
and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer."
                                     ¾James Joyce, Ulysses

* * * * *

"I believe my consumption has grown worse. Also my asthma. The wheezing comes and goes, and I get dizzy more and more frequently.
I have taken to violent choking and fainting. My room is damp and I have perpetual chills and palpitations of the heart.
I noticed, too, that I am out of napkins. Will it never stop?"
                                                                                                               ¾Woody Allen, Selections from the Allen Notebooks

* * * * *

                                    Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
                                    A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse -- and Thou
                                             Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
                                    And Wilderness is Paradise now.   ¾   Omar Khayyam

* * * * *

"Nyuck - Nyuck - Nyuck" ¾Curley Joe

* * * * *

"The positive argument for realism is that it is the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle." ¾H. Putnam

* * * * *

"A man got to have a code." ¾Omar, The Wire

* * * * *

Philosophers are kind-hearted sorts of chaps, willing to help others into "the paragraphs," but there is still something mad about them, with their "ludicrous stiff solemnity and air of paragraph importance." They pity past generations, who lived when the System was presumably not finished, and when therefore unbiased objectivity was not yet possible. But when you ask them about the new System they always put you off with the same excuse: "No, it is not yet quite ready. The System is almost finished, or at least under construction, and will be finished by next Sunday." ¾Soren Kierkegaard, Postscript

* * * * *

Dispossessed elves run around up on the roof, gibbering.         ¾ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

* * * * *

"No one is without difficulties, whether in high or low life, and every person knows best where their own shoe pinches."         ¾ Abigail Adams (who may have taken this from Chaucer)

* * * * *

We might...express negation not by inserting the word 'not', but by writing what we negate upside down.        ¾ F.P. Ramsey, "Facts and Propositions"

* * * * *

       "If a man who 'turnips' cries
       Cries not when his father dies
       'Tis proof that he had rather
       Have a turnip than his father." ¾Mr. Piozzi, Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson

* * * * *

Metaphysicians are like musicians with no musical ability. ¾ Rudolf Carnap

* * * * *

The truth will set you free. ...But first, it will piss you off. ¾Gloria Steinem

* * * * *

How To Read a Textbook

  • Begin at the beginning, and do not allow yourself to gratify mere idle curiosity by dipping into the book, here and there. This would very likely lead to your throwing it aside, with the remark `This is much too hard for me!', and thus losing the chance of adding a very large item to your stock of mental delights . . .

  • Don't begin any fresh Chapter, or Section, until you are certain that you thoroughly understand the whole book up to that point and that you have worked, correctly, most if not all of the examples which have been set . . . Otherwise, you will find your state of puzzlement get worse and worse as you proceed till you give up the whole thing in utter disgust.

  • When you come to a passage you don't understand, read it again: if you still don't understand it, read it again: if you fail, even after three readings, very likely your brain is getting a little tired. In that case, put the book away, and take to other occupations, and next day, when you come to it fresh, you will very likely find that it is quite easy.

  • If possible, find some genial friend, who will read the book along with you, and will talk over the difficulties with you. Talking is a wonderful smoother-over of difficulties. When I come upon anything—in Logic or in any other hard subject—that entirely puzzles me, I find it a capital plan to talk it over, aloud, even when I am all alone. One can explain things so clearly to one's self! And then you know, one is so patient with one's self: one never gets irritated at one's own stupidity!

                                                                ¾Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic

* * * * *

  • Rule 1: No more causes of natural things should be admitted than are both true and sufficient to explain their phenomena.
  • Rule 2: Therefore, the causes assigned to natural effects of the same kind must be, so far as possible, the same.
  • Rule 3: Those qualities of bodies that cannot be intended and remitted [i.e., qualities that cannot be increased and diminished] and that belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made should be taken as qualities of all bodies universally.
  • Rule 4: In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions.
                                                                ¾Isaac Newton, The Principia [Cohen & Whitman trans.]

* * * * *

                Young men marching, helmets shining in the sun,
                Polished and precise like the brain behind the gun (should be!),
                They got me thinking 'bout eternity,
                Some kinda ecstasy got a hold on me.
                                                                 ¾Bruce Cockburn

* * * * *

"I wish I'd met you before I met your mother."

¾Jim Anderson to Bud Anderson (characters on the sitcom "Father Knows Best") after Bud, being a typically represented 1950's teenager, gives Jim the usual sort of hard time. This is a particularly good, and atypical type of, joke for this show.

"I don't try to play the guitar. I try to play music." ¾Michael Hedges

"The problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience has grave implications also for the institutionalization of criticism. Copernicus's theory was banned by the Catholic Church in 1616 because it was said to be pseudoscientific. It was taken off the index in 1820 because by that time the Church deemed that facts had proved it and therefore it became scientific. The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in 1949 declared Mendelian genetics pseudoscientific and had its advocates, like Academician Vavilov, killed in concentration camps; after Vavilov's murder Mendelian genetics was rehabilitated; but the Party's right to decide what is science and publishable and what is pseudoscience and punishable was upheld. The new liberal Establishment of the West also exercises the right to deny freedom of speech to what it regards as pseudoscience, as we have seen in the case of the debate concerning race and intelligence. All these judgments were inevitably based on some sort of demarcation criterion. And this is why the problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not a pseudo-problem of armchair philosophers: it has grave ethical and political implications." ¾Imre Lakatos

"Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination, and does not extend to that of other men." ¾C.S. Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief"

"You don't go to school to eat lunch." ¾Al Pinon (to his daughter Michele)

Context: Introduction to Philosophy, Discussion of Descartes' 1st Meditation

Student: "Well I know that I exist."
Teacher: "And how do you know this?"
Student: "Well if I didn't exist, I'd fall right through this chair."

"Try to discover whether the weight of a body may be altered by heat or cold, by dilatation or condensation, beating, powdering, transferring to several places or several heights, or placing a hot or heavy body over it or under it or by magnetism, whether lead or its dust spread abroad, whether a plate flat-ways or edgeways is heaviest." ¾Isaac Newton (from a notebook he kept as an undergraduate at Cambridge University, under the title "Of Gravity & Levity")

"Time is to clock as mind is to brain." ¾Dava Sobel, Longitude

"Eternal nothingness is O.K., if you're dressed for it." ¾Woody Allen, Getting Even

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937520...

"All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill in dancing." ¾Moliere

"For almost anything you might think you know, there are powerful skeptical arguments that threaten to establish that you know no such thing. Take, for instance, your belief that you have hands. (Those who don't have hands should change the example.)" ¾ Keith DeRose, Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader

"Once you've heard the truth, everything else is just cheap whiskey." ¾ Sherriff Buck Olmstead

"The greatest weight. What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence --- even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I found anything more devine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate confirmation and seal?" ---Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

"Every day is a bonus" ---Sam Kasonovich

"Screw the planet; Save yourself" --- Anonymous

"The following science-fiction plot is feasible, given a technology that differs from today's only in being a little speeded up. Professor Jim Crickson has been kidnapped by an evil foreign power and forced to work in its biological-warfare labs. To save civilization it is vitally important that he should communicate some top-secret information to the outside world, but all normal channels of communication are denied him. Except one. The DNA code consists of sixty-four triplet 'codons,' enough for a complete upper- and lower-case English alphabet plus ten numerals, a space character and a full stop. Professor Crickson takes a virulent influenza virus off the laboratory shelf and engineers into its genome the complete text of his message to the outside world, in perfectly formed English sentences. He repeats his message over and over again in the engineered genome, adding an easily recognizable 'flag' sequence -- say, the first ten prime numbers. He infects himself with the virus and sneezes in a room full of people. A wave of flu sweeps the world, and medical labs in distant lands set to work to sequence its genome in an attempt to design a vaccine. It soon becomes apparent that there is a strange repeated pattern in the genome. Alerted by the prime numbers -- which cannot have arisen spontaneously -- somebody tumbles to the idea of deploying code-breaking techniques. From there it would be short work to read the full English text of Professor Crickson's message, sneezed around the world."
--- Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden

"Next Week." -- Nuu Tuimoloau

"Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers." ---T.S. Kuhn, "Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?"

"I may say then of myself that which one said in jest (since it marks the distinction so truly), 'It cannot be that we should think alike, when one drinks water and the other drinks wine.' Now other men, as well in ancient as in modern times, have in the matter of sciences drunk a crude liquor like water, either flowing spontaneously from the understanding, or drawn up by logic, as by wheels from a well. Whereas I pledge mankind in liquor strained from countless grapes, from grapes ripe and fully seasoned, collected in clusters, and gathered, and then squeezed in the press, and finally purified and clarified in the vat.
And therefore it is no wonder if they and I do not think alike."
---Francis Bacon, Novum Organum CXXIII

"There is someone who is living my life. And I know nothing about him."
---Luigi Pirandello, Diary

"And so, when you go and buy a chair, you buy not only the appearances which it presents to you at that moment, but also those other appearances that it is going to present when it gets home. If it were a phantom chair, it would not present any appearances when it got home, and would not be the sort of thing you would want to buy."
---Bertrand Russell, "What There Is", from The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

"Each party, then, neither gets the same from the other, nor ought to seek it; but when children render to their parents what they ought to render to those who brought them into the world, and the parents render what they should to their children, the friendship of such persons will be abiding and excellent." --- Aristotle, Nic. Eth.

"Only with Frege was the proper object of philosophy finally established: namely, first, that the goal of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of thought; secondly, that the study of thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study of the psychological process of thinking; and finally, that the only proper method for analysing thought consists in the analysis of language." ---- Michael Dummett

We Real Cool

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
by
Gwendolyn Brooks

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

"One 'oh, shit' cancels a thousand 'atta boys'". -- Billie Dale Shanklin

"Epistemology begins with the problem of induction, the observation that drawing conclusions beyond the available evidence entails some possibility of error."
-- K.T. Kelly, O. Schulte, C. Juhl, "Learning Theory and the Philosophy of Science", in Philosophy of Science, Vol. 64, No. 2., June 1997

"6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way:
anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical,
when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb up beyond them. (He must,
so to speak, throw away the ladder after has has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
---Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

"And raising my eyes a little I saw on high
Aristotle, the master of those who know,
ringed by the great souls of philosophy.

All wait upon him for their honor and his.
I saw Socrates and Plato at his side
before all others there. Democritus

who ascribes the world to chance, Diogenes,
and with him there Thales, Anaxagoras,
Zeno, Heraclitus, Empedocles."

---Dante, The Inferno, Canto IV

"...the strongest instance that can be produced of a fine genius wrought up to a degree of madness by metaphysical speculation and hypothetical enthusiasm".
---Henry St. John Bolingbroke on Nicolus Malebranche

Philosophy I: Everyone from Plato to Camus is read, and the following topics are covered: Ethics: The categorical imperative, and six ways to make it work for you. Aesthetics: Is art the mirror of life, or what? Metaphysics: What happens to the soul after death? How does it manage? Epistemology: Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this? The Absurd: Why existence is often considered silly, particularly for men who wear brown and white shoes. Manyness and oneness are studied as they relate to otherness. (Students achieving oneness will move ahead to twoness.)
From Woody Allen, "Spring Bulletin", Getting Even

"It is easy enough to divide our neighbors quickly, with the usual myopia, from a mere five paces away, into useful and harmful, good and evil men; but in any large-scale accounting, when we reflect on the whole a little longer, we become suspicious of this neat division and finally abandon it." --- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. --- Anonymous"

"Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word." --W.V. Quine

"In the inability to deal with questions of motion in relation to a moving earth, the average person is in the same position as some of the greatest scientists of the past, which may be a source of considerable comfort. The major difference is, however, that for the scientist of the past the inability to resolve these questions was a sign of the times, whereas for us moderns such inability is, alas, a badge of ignorance." ---I Bernard Cohen, The Birth of a New Physics

"No one can tell you everything,
We all come and go unknown.
So deep and superficial,
From the forceps to the stone."
---Joni Mitchell, Hejira

"The gravitational force is weak," he said at one conference, introducing his work on quantizing gravity. "In fact, it's damned weak." At that instant a loudspeaker demonically broke loose from the ceiling and crashed to the floor. Feynman barely hesitated: "Weak --- but not negligible."

One of the strangest of all the liquid-helium manifestations demonstrated how the mixture would work. A circular tube like a bicycle tire was packed with powder and then filled with liquid helium. It was set spinning and the abruptly halted. The powder would halt the flow of any normal liquid. But the superfluid component of liquid helium would continue to flow, around and around, passing through the microscopic interstices in the powder, in effect ignoring the presence of another, normal liquid. Students could sense the flow by feeling the tire's resistence to torque, as a spinning gyroscope resists sidelong pressure. And, once set in motion, the superflow would persist as long as the universe itself.
Both from James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

There are very few moments in a man's existence, when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. ---Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers

"In normal jurisprudence, a man who commits arson or murder can avoid conviction if his lawyers can prove insanity. In the jurisprudence of Socrates, any criminal could escape punishment by pleading that the crime was involuntary due to 'ignorance.' How could anyone be convicted of bank robbery when a philosophically sophisticated burglar could so easily show by Socratic standards that he did not even know what a bank was?" ---I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates

"DID I MISS ANYTHING?"

A question frequently asked by students after missing a class. Possible answers:

1. Nothing. When we realized you weren't here we sat with our hands folded on our desks in silence,for the full two hours.

2. Everything. I gave an exam worth 40% of the grade for this term and assigned some reading due today on which I'm about to hand out a quiz worth 50%.

3. Nothing. None of the content of this course has value or meaning. Take as many days off as you like: any activities we undertake as a class I assure you will not matter either to you or me and are without purpose.

4. Everything. A few minutes after we began last time a shaft of light descended and an angel or other heavenly being appeared and revealed to us what each woman or man must do to attain divine wisdom in this life and the hereafter. This is the last time the class will meet before we disperse to bring this good news to all people on earth.

5. Nothing. When you are not present how could something significant occur?

6. Everything. Contained in this classroom is a microcosm of human existence assembled for you to query and examine and ponder. This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered, but it was one place, and you weren't here.

---Tom Wayman, The Teaching Professor, Vol. 7, No. 4.

Round and Round and Round we spin; to weave a wall to hem us in; it won't be long. How slow and slow and slow it goes; to mend the tear that always shows; it won't be long. ---Neil Young

Have we any right, for instance, to enunciate Newton's Law? No doubt numerous observations are in agreement with it, but is not that a simple fact of chance? ---Henri Poincare

"Skepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it."
---Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits

The crucial element in a collective discipline (we have argued) is the recognition of a sufficiently agreed goal or ideal, in terms of which common outstanding problems can be identified. Where this common goal is an explanatory one, the discipline is a scientific one; but men's common efforts can equally be directed towards technical or judicial ideals, and the concepts of law or technology are therefore subject to a comparable rational development. ---Stephen Toulmin

"The man who argues that philosophy, for example, has made no progress emphasizes that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristotelianism has failed to progress".
--Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

"I read Surfer Magazine because I can't understand Nietzsche."
---Shane Stoneman

"The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God's mind -- a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you've just made a down payment on a house."
--Woody Allen, Gettng Even

"Thoughts on a Poem. The poem presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk."
---Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human

"Body am I entirely and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body."
---Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

"If people were saner, their sympathies also would be less stunted and deformed; hearts would be in much better shape if heads were less tangled, and haunted, and befogged."
---Geoffrey Warnock, The Object of Morality