- #1
RageSk8
Donald Davidson
There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
Don't try to **** higher than your arse
Friedrich Nietzsche
God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.
Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers and witches whose promises and pretensions first had to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely more had to be promised than could ever be fulfilled in order that anything at all might be fulfilled in the realms of knowledge.
Michel Foucault
There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes—continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations—when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.
Sexuality is a part of our behavior. It’s part of our world freedom. Sexuality is something that we ourselves create. It is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality; it’s a possibility for creative life. It’s not enough to affirm that we are gay but we must also create a gay life.
As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
Richard Rorty
I think of the course of human history as a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem--a poem that leads up to nothing save itself. When the species is extinct, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but a set of vocabularies--the more, and the more various, the better.
Just as the child outgrows the need for parental care and the need to believe in parental omnipotence and benevolence, so may we in time outgrow the need to believe in divinities that concern themselves with our happiness and in the possibility of allying ourselves with a nonhuman power called the Intrinsic Nature of Reality.
The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.
In my Utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away 'prejudices' or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see unfamiliar people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar groups of people.
This process of coming to see other human beings as 'one of us' rather than as 'them' is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist's report, the comic book, the documentary drama and, especially, the novel.
There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
Don't try to **** higher than your arse
Friedrich Nietzsche
God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.
Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers and witches whose promises and pretensions first had to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely more had to be promised than could ever be fulfilled in order that anything at all might be fulfilled in the realms of knowledge.
Michel Foucault
There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes—continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations—when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.
Sexuality is a part of our behavior. It’s part of our world freedom. Sexuality is something that we ourselves create. It is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality; it’s a possibility for creative life. It’s not enough to affirm that we are gay but we must also create a gay life.
As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
Richard Rorty
I think of the course of human history as a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem--a poem that leads up to nothing save itself. When the species is extinct, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but a set of vocabularies--the more, and the more various, the better.
Just as the child outgrows the need for parental care and the need to believe in parental omnipotence and benevolence, so may we in time outgrow the need to believe in divinities that concern themselves with our happiness and in the possibility of allying ourselves with a nonhuman power called the Intrinsic Nature of Reality.
The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.
In my Utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away 'prejudices' or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see unfamiliar people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar groups of people.
This process of coming to see other human beings as 'one of us' rather than as 'them' is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist's report, the comic book, the documentary drama and, especially, the novel.