Truth is what peers let you say.”
It was false said at the APA.
And so Richard Rorty
changed peer groups at forty:
Now his statements get truer each day.
— Dean Zimmerman (quoted in Alvin Goldman’s Knowledge in a Social World, p. 11)
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own. — Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (via philphys)

Earle Birney, Elsemereland I & II

ELLESMERELAND I

Explorers say that harebells rise
from the cracks of Ellesmereland
and cod swim fat beneath the ice
that grinds its meagre sands
No man is settled on that coast
The harebells are alone
Nor is there talk of making man
from ice cod bell or stone

1952


ELLESMERELAND II

And now in Ellesmereland there sits
a town of twenty men
They guard the floes that reach to the Pole
a hundred leagues and ten
These warders watch the sky watch them
the stricken hills eye both
A mountie visits twice a year
and there is talk of growth

1965

be both the lion and the fox

A prince, therefore, being compelled knowingly to adopt the beast, ought to choose the fox and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves. Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves.

Nicolo Machiavellli, The Prince

Frege died an embittered man, convinced both that he had been unjustly neglected, and that his life’s work had been for the most part failure. Michael Dummett, Frege, Philosophy of Language (via philphys)
philphys:

P.F. Strawson

philphys:

P.F. Strawson

Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders. — Adam Phillips, On Flirtation
The main purpose of the article is to refute my theory of descriptions. As I find that some philosophers whom I respect consider that it has achieved its purpose successfully, I have come to the conclusion that a polemical reply is called for. I may say, to begin with, that I am totally unable to see any validity whatever in any of Mr. Strawson’s arguments. Whether this inability is due to senility on my part or some other cause, I must leave to readers to judge. — Bertrand Russell, “Mr. Strawson on Referring”, 1957.

this thought experiment is ridic

The best I can do to make sense of Lewis’s story is to liken it to Daniel Dennett’s predicament at a certain point in his marvelous memoir, “Where am I?” (Dennett (1978)). In Dennett’s tale, a body, Fortinbras, is connected remotely to two functionally identical brains, Hubert and Yorick (one electronic and one a human brain that is floating in the proverbial vat). Both brains receive the same perceptual input from Fortinbras, by way of radio signals, though only one of them at a time is able to control him. But since the brains are perfectly synchronized, Fortinbras does what both of his potential controllers simultaneously decide that he shall do, and so it seems to each subject that its decisions are efficacious. Hubert and Yorick are each ignorant of which is controlling Fortinbras (and also of which is the human brain, and which the electronic one). Now suppose we modify Dennett’s story by saying that both synchronized brains are under the illusion that they are controlling two bodies, one on the tallest mountain, and one on the coldest mountain, while in fact one brain is controlling just one of the bodies, and the other the other. Put each brain into the head of the body controlled by that brain. Instead of remote radio connections to send the same perceptual inputs to two brains, we assume that each has divine perceptual capacities to see everything at once, from no particular perspective. Both gods decide both to throw down manna from the tallest mountain and to throw down thunderbolts from the coldest mountain. Each god knows that one of his decisions is efficacious, while the other is causally inert, but neither knows which is which.


(Stalnaker)

the ruin creates the present form of the past life — Georg Simmel
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. Geoffrey Chaucer (via mediumaevum)