This might also be a guide to reading this blog.
(*) While reblogging breaks the rules of FYPh!, this one is just too good to pass it up.
ALL TOO HUMAN
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS
“ after ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated neros, genghis khans, and hitlers. this, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.
bertrand russell, unpopuar essays, ch.1, philosophy & politics (1950) (via nosex)
“ [The radical version of positivism] is an attempt to consolidate science as a self‑sufficient activity, which exhausts all the possible ways of appropriating the world intellectually. In this radical positivist view, the realities of the world – which can, of course, be interpreted by natural science, but which are in addition an object of man’s “existential curiosity,” a source of fear or disquiet, an occasion for commitment or rejection – if they are to be encompassed by reflection and expressed in words, can be reduced to their empirical properties. Suffering, death, ideological conflict, social clashes, antithetical values of any kind – all are declared out of bounds, matters we can only be silent about, in obedience to the principle of verifiability. Positivism so understood is an act of escape from commitments, an escape masked as a definition of knowledge, invalidating all such matters as mere figments of the imagination stemming from intellectual laziness. Positivism in this sense is the escapist’s design for living, a life voluntarily cut off from participation in anything that cannot be correctly formulated. The language it imposes exempts us from the duty of speaking up in life’s most important conflicts, encases us in a kind of armor of indifference to the ineffabilia mundi, the indescribable qualitative data of experience.
Leszek Kołakowski (1927-2009): The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought (translated by Norbert Guterman) (via fuckyeahphilosophy)
“ I want to strip you naked and see your inner self, the one you keep hidden because you think it’s not beautiful. I want to show you secret parts of myself. And I will transgress the rules to have you, because my desire is too strong to permit anything else.
Filthy Gorgeous Things | Force | S&M 101 (via lepetitmort) (via sequence-non)
“ I am physical object sitting in a physical world. Some of the forces of this physical world impinge on my surface. Light rays strike my retinas; molecules bombard my eardrums and fingertips. I strike back, emanating concentric airwaves. These waves take the form of a torrent of discourse about tables, people, molecules, light rays, retinas, prime numbers, infinite classes, joy and sorrow, good and evil.
W. V. O. Quine: ‘The Scope and Language of Science’, in id.: Ways of Paradox (via fuckyeahphilosophy)
Listen! The Potential of Shared Hallucinations (1997)
We need a breakthrough here!
And questions can’t lead us to a breakthrough unless we’re willing to break something.
Before we can learn, before we can grow, we have to be prepared to listen.
What does it mean, to listen?
The word is commonly understood to mean “attentive hearing.”
It has its etymological origin in the archaic verb, list.
“List!” they used to say. “Ssh! List! The wild boar is outside!”
But the verb “list” also means to tilt something to one side.
When a sea vessel leans to starboard or port, it is said to be listing.
So how did the word “list” turn into the verb “listen?”
Because when we try to hear something, we sometimes cock our heads in the direction of the sound.
So to listen means more than to hear attentively.
The word also implies a change of inclination.
A new slant.
To listen is to put ourselves into a receptive attitude.
A position to be re-aligned.
To truly listen is to admit the possibility of upset.
