26 MAR 2025 by ideonexus
Your Productive Life is Only as Long as You Retain Your M...
We ught to consider not only that our life is daily wasting away and a smaller part of it is left, but another thing also must be taken into the account, that if a man should live longer, it is quite uncertain whether the understanding will still continue sufficient for the comprehension of things, and retain the power of contemplation which strives to acquire the knowledge of the divine and the human. For if he shall begin to fall into dotage, perspiration and nutrition and imagination and a...Folksonomies: philosophy mortality
Folksonomies: philosophy mortality
26 MAR 2025 by ideonexus
The Longest Lived and Shortest Lived Lose the Same
Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. The longest and shortest are thus brought to the same. For the present is the same to all, though that which perishes is not the same; and so that which is lost appears to be a mere moment. For a man cannot lose either the past or the future: for what a man has not, how ...Folksonomies: philosophy mortality
Folksonomies: philosophy mortality
23 SEP 2023 by ideonexus
School of Epicurus
In fact, fourth-century Greece passed much the same judgment on the school of Epicurus, whose students avoided public service and chose to live in obscurity. One of the school’s harshest critics was Epictetus. Like other Stoics, he prized civic duty, and he thought the Epicureans needed to get real: “In the name of Zeus, I ask you, can you imagine an Epicurean state?…The doctrines are bad, subversive of the State, destructive to the family…Drop these doctrines, man. Y...Folksonomies: philosophy civilization
Folksonomies: philosophy civilization
17 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
Humans Trained Themselves in Symbolic Thought
From animals to man, the transition is not violent, as good philosophers will admit. What was man before the invention of words and the knowledge of tongues? An animal of his species, who, with much less native instinct than the others, whose king he then considered himself to be, could not be distinguished from the ape and from the rest, except as the ape itself differs from the other animals; which means, by a face giving promise of more intelligence. Reduced to the bare “intuitive knowle...Folksonomies: philosophy empiricism
Folksonomies: philosophy empiricism
17 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
Belief Discovers No New Qualities
SINCE therefore belief implies a conception, and yet is something more; and since it adds no new idea to the conception; it follows, that it is a different MANNER of conceiving an object; something that is distinguishable to the feeling, and depends not upon our will, as all our ideas do. My mind runs by habit from the visible object of one ball moving towards another, to the usual effect of motion in the second ball. It not only conceives that motion, but feels something different in the con...Folksonomies: philosophy empiricism
Folksonomies: philosophy empiricism
17 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
Understanding Cause and Effect is Based on Experience
Were a man, such as Adam, created in the full vigor of understanding, without experience, he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first. It is not anything that reason sees in the cause, which make us infer the effect. Such an inference, were it possible, would amount to a demonstration, as being founded merely on the comparison of ideas. But no inference from cause to effect amounts to a demonstration, as being founded merely on the compar...Folksonomies: philosophy empiricism
Folksonomies: philosophy empiricism
Adam would not know that one billiard ball hitting another would cause a chain reaction.
14 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
I Think, Therefore I Am
I had long before remarked that, in relation to practice, it is sometimes necessary to adopt, as if above doubt, opinions which we discern to be highly uncertain, as has been already said; but as I then desired to give my attention solely to the search after truth, I thought that a procedure exactly the opposite was called for, and that I ought to reject as absolutely false all opinions in regard to which I could suppose the least ground for doubt, in order to ascertain whether after that the...Folksonomies: philosophy metaphysics
Folksonomies: philosophy metaphysics
The first paragraph is sound, but then the conclusions drawn in the second are not.
27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Nietzsche is the Opposite of Humanism
If one wanted to single out a thinker who represented the opposite of humanism (indeed, of pretty much every argument in this book), one couldn’t do better than the German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).109 Earlier in the chapter I fretted about how humanistic morality could deal with a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Nietzsche argued that it’s good to be a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Not good for everyone, of course, but that doesn’t matter:...27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Human Progress Confounds -isms
It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the major -isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on mile-high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infinitely malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of individuals.43 A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex netw...30 DEC 2016 by ideonexus