Continuing our wildly successful “Scratch-Pad” feature, we now inaugurate an on-deck circle for
stray philosophy-related quotations, pursuant to their eventual incorporation into the appropriate
Host Post.
And yet and yet -- as we watch history before our wincing eyes unfolding, in all its irrationality, its mad rush to doom, we must wonder: mayhap he was right.
[Cf. What is Truth?]
[Cf. Causality]
In The Decline of the West [Der Untergang des Abendlandes], Spengler had argued that the idea of
destiny was the answer to the narrow and lifeless theory of causality used by historians, and that ‘the
destiny-logic of the world-becoming’ was to be preferred to ‘the causal logic
of notion and law’.
-- Gordon Craig, Germany 1866-1945
(1978), p. 492
That is mistily/mystically worded; to decipher, consider the metaphor of embryonic development (largely pre-programmed -- ‘destined’)
versus the vicissitudes of post-uterine life. -- That observation is not necessarily to defend Oswald Spengler’s dark doctrine
-- indeed, my initial purpose in quoting it was mere mockery -- but simply to render it parsable to the
contemporary mind.
[Cf. What is Truth?]
The objection is not only false,
but very much the reverse of the facts.
-- G.K. Chesterton, All Things
Considered (1908)
(This is more than wordplay -- it is the difference between contradictory and contrary. Something
can fail to be strictly true, based on a triviality. Chesterton is here after bigger game.)
[Cf. Consilience]
The intellectual structure of
micro-economic theory is very
similar to that of theories controlling the behavior of perfect gases in
physics.
-- David Berlinski, The Deniable
Darwin (2009), p. 129
(This is probably hogwash; but still, it’ll wash your hog bright ‘n’ shiny.)
[Cf. Babylonian mathematics]
Egyptian engineers working under the pharaohs knew that the angles of a triangle sum to more or less one hundred and eighty
degrees. The number appears as a
free parameter in their theories, something given by experience and
experiment. The Greeks, on the
other hand, could prove what the Egyptians could only calculate.
-- David Berlinski, The Deniable
Darwin (2009), p. 268
No comments:
Post a Comment