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Month: December 2010
<![CDATA[was their unfashionable realism, their reluctance to make ontology, the theory of what is, subservient to epistemology, the theory of what can be known. At bottom, the positivist mentality consists in deriving ontology from epistemology." — Palle Yourgrau, The World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein.]]>
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…lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will stare back. — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
People often think Nietzsche was an advocate of unchristian action. He was always aware that philosophy had become monstrous in the most devout hands. He spoke of the “superhuman” as a means of asking for the ultimate humanity in the philosophers who read and attempted to think with him.]]>
<![CDATA[First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
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<![CDATA[It is standard Enlightenment thinking to assume the universe itself is reasonable. To get to the core of experience, to understand our experience of reality, we'll need to abandon the idea that the universe is rational. It is a universe without reason that contains reason. Just as physics has arrived at quantum understandings that defy consistent reasoned explanation, consciousness research will have to abandon a psychophysics that makes rational sense. But we’re still at a stage of science analogous to Newton’s probing in his eye socket with a knitting needle to grasp the foundations of optics.
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<![CDATA[opera? It's like Verdi as a teenager, full of asexual angst or Wagner after his neutering by Nietzsche. Philip Glass writing sitcoms.
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<![CDATA["Passions are not limited by justice, they are enlarged and extended." — Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature
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