December 2010
11 posts
“In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on...”
– A. N. Whitehead
On Parables
MANY complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something that he cannot designate more precisely either,...
“The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the...”
– A. N. Whitehead
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
— T. S. Eliot
You're very clever, young man, very clever.
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a...
Jason Silva, Sanford Kwinter & Gene Youngblood on...
“As Sanford Kwinter describes “the boundaryless new medium of “virtual” reality is not a simulated environment, as many continue to claim, but a new space altogether….Cyberspace, of course, as the now classic adage goes, is “where we are when we are talking on the telephone.” It is, in other words, neither in a Here nor a There, but is a continual process of articulation…. In other words, it is...
“In the case of philosophy, its job is not to add to our knowledge or to provide...”
– Nancy Baker on Wittgenstein