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Tuesday, February 26, 2002 |
"Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly, I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it." --Theodore Roosevelt
1:17:55 PM 
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"Postmodernism: Challenge assertions that truth and ethical judgement have any objective validity. Pomo is an attempt to question the fundamental philosophical and political premises of the West. It argues that many of the concepts like truth, morality and objectivity are culturally “constructed,” for instance, the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, who has challenged objective notions of truth. Pomo rejects universal values and ideals, however, it establishes its own universal: Western imperialism becomes a variety of Original Sin. The implication is that any act against the West by a postcolonial power can be seen as a reaction to an act by the West."
"Postcolonialism: The seemingly universalist principles of the West are ideological constructs. One culture, particularly the West, cannot reliably condemn another, that a form of relativism must rule. Western claims of objectivity are put into question. A governing perspective of Poco is opposition to the West’s “myth of universality,” which is supposed to be little more than a “strategy of imperial control.” However, Poco’s rejections of universal values and ideals leave little room for unqualified condemnations of a terrorist attack. Such an attack can be seen as a horrifying airing of a legitimate cultural grievance. Military responses can seem no different. And so the conflict becomes a series of symmetrical confrontations (i.e. Isreal/Palestinian)."
"The values latent in Pomo and Poco—an insistence that differing perspectives be accounted for and that the other be comprehended—are consequences of the very ideas of the Western Enlightenment—reason and universality—that these values work to undo."
12:56:15 PM
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"It's not how big you are; it's how fast you are ... If you're big and slow, you'll have problems. If you're small and fast, or big and fast, you'll find a niche."
12:54:24 PM
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"We must make the philosophical distinction between proximate causes (spark plugs are there to generate an electrical spark) and ultimate causes (spark plugs are there to make cars go along roads). Likewise, we must be careful that any presumption of purpose does not say more about ourselves than the world of nature."
"Plainly genes are not there to cause disease. But you can go further, genes are not there to cause anything. To suppose otherwise is to venture into a philosophical mess of proximate and ultimate causation. Genes are mindless switches: any presupposition of higher purpose is of our own making."
12:53:16 PM
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Richard Rorty’s [postmodern] ideas expressed in The Professor of Complacence, Simon Blackburn, The New Republic, 8/20/01
“Truth is what your audiences let you get away with.”
“The highest human good is conversation. … It turns out that cruelty is not the worst thing that we perpetrate. The worst thing is distraction.”
12:49:02 PM
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“We describe things as true when we agree with them, and we describe people as reasonable when their minds move in the same ways as our minds.”
12:48:37 PM
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WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE ROOTS OF CONFIDENCE
After viewing the 1786 Jacques David's painting of the Death of Socrates, philosophy professor Alain De Botton was prompted to write these meditative words:
"Socrates, condemned to death by the people of Athens, prepares to drink a cup of hemlock, surrounded by woebegone friends. In the spring of 399 BC, three Athenian citizens had brought legal proceedings against the philosopher. They had accused him of failing to worship the city's gods, of introducing religious novelties and of corrupting the young men of Athens -- and such was the severity of their charges, they had called for the death penalty.”
"Socrates had responded with legendary equanimity. Though afforded an opportunity to renounce his philosophy in court, he had sided with what he believed to be true rather than what he knew would be popular. In Plato's account he had defiantly told the jury: "So long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practicing philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet . . . And so gentlemen . . .whether you acquit me or not, you know that I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths.”
"And so he had been led to meet his end in an Athenian jail, his death marking a defining moment in the history of philosophy ... “
"The philosopher had not buckled before unpopularity and the condemnation of the state. He had not retracted his thoughts because others had complained. Moreover, his confidence had sprung from a more profound source than hot-headedness or bull-like courage. It had been grounded in philosophy. Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval."
12:48:06 PM
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"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't." --Anatole France
12:44:22 PM
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"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." --Immanuel Kant
12:42:29 PM
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"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." --Samuel Johnson
12:41:48 PM
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"Never mistake a clear view for a short distance."
12:41:13 PM
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"When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us." --Alexander Graham Bell
12:40:32 PM
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"The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." --John Milton
12:39:46 PM
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Intellect thrives on sleep
Land of nod is a learning experience
"I think sleep is involved in rehearsing, restructuring and reclassifying our existing world view to allow us to function better" --Robert Stickgold ... [more]
11:03:55 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Michael Jamison. E-Mail: 
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