Philosophy

Yay! there's still time... - WoH: Professor MOTHRA

"For clearly the first particles of things // did not all place themselves in due order // by their own planning or intelligence, // nor did they through some agreement assign // the motions each of them should have. Instead, // since there are many of them and they change // in many ways through all the universe, // they are pushed, energized by collisions, // for a limitless length of time, and then, /// having gone through every kind of motion // and combination, they at length fall into // those arrangements which make up and create // this totality of things, which also, // once suitably set in patterned motion, // has been preserved through many lengthy years. // (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Since earth // was made by nature. Seeds of things themselves, // jostling freely here and there in various ways // and forced to random, confused collisions, // produced nothing—then finally those ones // suddenly united which could become, // every time, the beginnings of great things. (...) Since the moment earth was first created, // that day sea, land, and rising sun were born, //... more... - Amira

See also: How Epicurus’ ideas survived through Lucretius’ poetry, and led to toleration http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post... Lucretius: ‘O unhappy race of men, when they ascribed actions to the gods’ http://amiquote.tumblr.com/post... #universe #atoms #higgsboson #ancient #poetry - Amira

"We’re beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it’s much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy. Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it’s always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth. You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state. (...) You’re going to have a parallel architecture because, after all, the brain is obviously massively parallel. It’s going to be a connectionist network. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

Bernard Williams: “The generic human need to make and listen to music, for instance, might be explained at the level of evolutionary psychology, but the emergence of the classical symphony certainly cannot. In fact, the insistence on finding explanations of cultural difference in terms of biological evolution exactly misses the point of the great evolutionary innovation represented by... more... - Amira

"In [Hilary Putnam’s] view, there is no reason to suppose that a complete account of reality can be given using a single set of concepts. That is, it is not possible to reduce all types of explanation to one set of objective concepts. (...) The full scope of reality is simply too complex to be fully described by one method of explanation. The problem with all of this, and one that Putnam has struggled with, is what sort of picture of reality we are left with once we accept these three central arguments: the collapse of the fact-value dichotomy, the truth of semantic externalism and conceptual relativity. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"We could—like Putnam before the 1970s—become robust realists and simply accept that values and norms are no less a part of the world than ,elementary particles and mathematical objects. We could—like Putnam until the 1990s—become “internal realists” and, in a vaguely Kantian move define reality in terms of mind-dependent concepts and idealised rational categories. Or we could adopt... more... - Amira