The Question of Methodology

The methodological question. In a previous book I gave a good deal of thought and analysis to the methodological importance f°r work in the human sciences of finding and formulating a first s t eP. a point of departure, a beginning principle.11 A major lesson I learned and tried to present was that there is no such thing as a merely given, or simply available, starting point: beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows from them. Nowhere in my experien...

 Beginnings of Speciation in Romantic Paintings

She wandered on her own, looking at the portraits. The big crowd scenes were too much for her, like epic movies all jammed into a single frame. The subjects of the portraits, on the other hand, looked at her with expressions she recognized immediately. “I am always me, I am always new, I am always me”—for eight centuries they had been saying it. Nothing but women and men. One woman had her left nipple exposed, just under the curve of a necklace; in most periods that would have been tran...

 Science in the Time of Hordes

The only sciences known to savage hordes, are a slight and crude idea of astronomy, and the knowledge of certain medicinal plants employed in the cure of wounds and diseases; and even these are already corrupted by a mixture of superstition. Meanwhile there is presented to us in this epoch one fact of importance in the history of the human mind. We can here perceive the beginnings of an institution, that in its progress has been attended with opposite effects, accelerating the advancement of...

 Aristotle on Knowing

184a Since, in all pursuits in which there are sources or causes or elements, it is by way of our acquaintance with these that knowing and understanding come to us (for we regard ourselves as knowing each thing whenever we are acquainted with its first causes and first beginnings, even down to its elements), it is clear that also for the knowledge of nature one must first try to mark out what pertains to its sources. On the other hand, the natural road is from what is more familiar and cleare...

 Movement According to Aristotle

241b 34 Every moving thing must be moved by something. For if it does not have the source of its motion in itself, it is clear that it is moved by something else (for another 40 thing will be the mover); but if it is in itself, let AB be taken, which is moving in its own right, and not by means of some part of it being moved. First, then, to suppose that AB is moved by itself since the whole is moved and by nothing outside it,would be as if, when KL was moving LM and was itself moving, one we...