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I have been a bit negative about memes, but they have their cheerful side as well. When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may…
You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has…
When you say exergasia, synathroesmus, and incrementum together in a list, it seems to me that you have thereby given an example of all three devices in that same phrase.” Swan snorted at this. “How so, Socrates?” “ ‘Exergasia’ means ‘use of different phrases to express the same idea,’ ‘synathroesmus’ means…
The burning of the Pythagorean school had already signalized the war, not less ancient, not less eager, of the oppressors of mankind against philosophy. The one and the other will continue to be waged as long as there shall exist priests or kings upon the earth; and these wars will occupy a conspicuous place in the…
This fortunate circumstance, still more than political freedom, wrought in the human mind, among the Greeks, an independance, the surest pledge of the rapidity and greatness of its future progress. In the mean time their learned men, their sages, as they were called, but who soon took the more modest appellation of…
Yet the divine trump card is not fully effective in the way religious parents may expect. This was shown a long time ago by Plato in his dialogue, Euthyphro. In that dialogue Socrates asks what the holy is. After several failed efforts to answer the question, Euthyphro offers the suggestion that the holy is doing what…
The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong…
The passage shows how different aspects of virtue connect. Patience is part intellectual virtue, part moral virtue and part physical virtue, as it is portrayed here. The humility which allows Leopold to lie down in the muck unselfconsciously is a moral virtue, but humble recognition of our own ignorance is also a key…
Even when it's applied sensitively, scientific scepticism may come across as arrogant, dogmatic, heartless and dismissive of the feelings and deeply held beliefs of others. And, it must be said, some scientists and dedicated sceptics apply this tool as a blunt instrument, with little finesse. Sometimes it looks as if…