Quotes Collection

“I have argued that to treat a plan – or any other form of prescriptive representation – as a specification for a course of action shuts down precisely the space of inquiry that begs for investigation; that is, the relations between an ordering device and the contingent labors through which it is produced and made reflexively accountable to ongoing activity.”

“Empirical knowledge is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.”

“It has long been my view that since there are so many books one can read, and so many things that one can do besides read books, the burden is always on the author to make the topic at hand more interesting than all of these other options.”

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”

“It is this distinction that allows Spinoza to introduce an 'ethical difference' between various types of modes of existence. In Spinoza, an individual will be considered 'bad' (or servile, or weak, or foolish) who remains cut off from its power of acting, who remains in a state of slavery or impotence; conversely, a mode of existence will be called 'good' (or free, or rational, or strong) that exercises its capacity for being affected in such a way that its power of acting increases, to the point where it produces active affections and adequate ideas.”

“Neither are we yet at so deplorable a loss, in the other parts of what we call Science; but that we may meet with what will content ingenuity, at this distance from perfection, though all things will not completely satisfy strict and rigid inquiry. Philosophy indeed cannot immortalize us, or free us from the inseparable attendants on this state, Ignorance and Error. But shall we malign it, because it entitles us not to an Omniscience?”

“When Foucault admires Kant for having posed the problem of philosophy, not in relation to the eternal but in relation to the Now, he means that the object of philosophy is not to contemplate the eternal, nor to reflect on history, but to diagnose our actual becomings.”

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

“Minor science is continually enriching major science, communicating its intuitions to it, its way of proceeding, its itinerancy, its sense of and taste for matter, singularity, variation, intuitionist geometry and the numbering number... Major science has a perpetual need for the inspiration of the minor; but the minor would be nothing if it did not confront and conform to the highest scientific requirements.”

“The methods for coming up with useful examples in mathematics... are even less clear than the methods for proving mathematical statements.”

“...different proofs of the same naive conjecture lead to quite different theorems”

“...'looks' talk is not an autonomous language game - one that could be played though one played no other. It is entirely parasitic on the practice of making risky empirical reports of how things actually are.”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

“I shall tell you. You yourself said you failed many times to fit them into a formula. Now what happened was this: you had three or four conjectures which in turn were quickly refuted. Your table was built up in the process of testing and refuting these conjectures. These dead and now forgotten conjectures suggested the facts, not the facts the conjectures. Naive conjectures are not inductive conjectures: we arrive at them by trial and error, through conjectures and refutations.”

“In the course of his argument, Ortega gains the important insight that each of us is an 'I' not because we each have a special zoological apparatus called 'consciousness', but because each of us is something, and that something can never be exhausted by conscious introspection any more than by outward description. It follows that every non-human object can also be called an 'I' in the sense of having a definite inwardness that can never fully be grasped”

“What formalism really means in Kantian ethics is an ethical purification that separates humans from the world. Ethics plays out entirely on the side of a human being's commitment to duty, to treating others as ends in themselves rather than solely as means, and in the end the world and its objects play no genuine ethical role.”

“This, then, is the first feature of an immanent ethics: it replaces the notion of the transcendental subject with immanent modes of existence that are determined by their degrees of power and relations of affectivity. In his later works, Foucault suggested replacing the term 'subject' with the term 'subjectivation.'”

“If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.”

“The development of consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor. Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision.”

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

“For he defined the mind by its epistemic status, as what is best known to itself by falling within the reach of the subject's incorrigibility and local omniscience.”

“On my view it might be said that, per contra, the primary general words could be dispensed with entirely and all moral work could be done by the secondary specialized words. If we picture the agent as compelled by obedience to the reality he can see, he will not be saying 'This is right', i.e., 'I choose to do this', he will be saying 'This is A B C D' (normative-descriptive words), and action will follow naturally.”

“...gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself...”

“In fact, the confusing behaviors of 'cause' strike me as similar in their developmental origins to those that attach to 'force,' which isn't altogether surprising due to the fact that the applicational demands upon the two words are closely linked.”

“Thus I believe that philosophers should fancy themselves as dedicated students of the irregular. But inherited fashions within our subject presently reward ersatz rigor and armchair pontification without encouraging the informed attention to detail and practical application upon which proper conceptual disentanglements characteristically depend.”

“The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says”

“Re-engineering is cumulative and is what makes our cumulative cultures possible. And any engineering project must be responsive to real world constraints, thus realism. Our social, cognitive, and cultural ways of being are no less real than the rest of the natural world, and all together leave their marks.”

“Thus, different levels of rigour differ only about where they draw the line between the rigour of proof-analysis and the rigour of proof, i.e. about where criticism should stop and justification should start.”

“This difference between the present and the actual, for Deleuze, is much more important than the difference between the present and the past. The present is what we are, and for that reason, what we are already ceasing to be; the actual is not what we are, but rather what we are becoming, what we are in the process of becoming.”

“...examine these two ideas and determine how that which survives criticism in each is properly to be combined with the other...”

“I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science. In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land.”

“Hilbert, who wrote a thesis on invariants in 1885, and in 1888 gave a much simpler, but noncomputational, proof of Gordan's result on binary forms, astonished the mathematical community in 1890 by showing that any form, of any degree, in any number of variables, has a basis. Hilbert adopted a new, conceptual, approach to the subject.”

“...We also don't want to theorize the world, much less act within it, in terms of Global Systems, but we do need an earthwide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different-and power-differentiated - communities.”

“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”

“We are accustomed to call concepts metaphysical if we have forgotten how we reached them. One can never lose one's footing, or come into collision with facts, if one always keeps in view the path by which one has come.”

“Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”

“Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful.”

“He had to choose between those two. What could help him to choose? Could the Christian doctrine? No. Christian doctrine says: Act with charity, love your neighbour, deny yourself for others, choose the way which is hardest, and so forth. But which is the harder road? To whom does one owe the more brotherly love, the patriot or the mother?”

“I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.”

“Everyday conversation is not necessarily a morally neutral activity and certain ways of describing people can be corrupting and wrong. A smart set of concepts may be a most efficient instrument of corruption. It is especially characteristic of normative words, both desirable and undesirable, to belong to sets or patterns without an appreciation of which they cannot be understood.”

“...Contrary to some philosophical views, 'empirical contingencies' are crucially important to philosophy. We are embodied socialized beings: evolved and developing in a world conditioned by our sociality and technology.”

“Each thing insofar as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its being.”

“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.”

“...there are 'moral facts' in the sense of moral interpretations of situations where the moral concept in question determines what the situation is, and if the concept is withdrawn then we are not left with the same situation or the same facts. In short, if moral concepts are regarded as deep moral configurations of the world, rather than as lines drawn round separable factual areas, then there would be no facts 'behind them' for them to be erroneously defined in terms of.”

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.”

“...the abnormal will throw light on the normal, will help us to penetrate the blinding veil of ease and obviousness that hides the mechanisms of the natural successful act.”

“Sellars's pragmatism dictates that issues of conceptual priority be translated into questions of the relative autonomy of different strata of language -that is, into questions concerning what language games can be played independently of and antecedently to which others.”

“...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. Philosophy wisdom (sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair.”

“AI is not about replacing humans, it's about augmenting human capabilities.”

“Thus in GM, Nietzsche contrasts two forms of happiness: that of the engaged active person 'bursting with strength' (GM, p. 23), and that of the passive powerless type for whom happiness is a disengaged escape: it is 'essentially a narcotic, an anaesthetic, rest, peace, 'sabbath' relaxation of the mind ... in short [it is] something passive!'”

“In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.'”

“Now then, imagine the importance of a language or system of expressive signs whose function was not to tell us about things but to present them to us in the act of executing themselves. Art is just such a language; this is what art does. The esthetic object is inwardness as such – it is each thing as 'I'.”

“Here we encounter an important quality in modern political discourse and in the way people commonly think about what measures are justified in response to the possibilities technologies make available. In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity—especially the need to maintain crucial technological systems as smoothly working.”

“We are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence most people, if they glance back when they have come to the end of life, will find that al along they have been living ad interim, they will be surprised to find that the veryt hing they disregarded and let slip by unenjoyed was jut in the life in the expectation of which they passed all their time.”

“...But what we call the meaning of a statement is its point. That's the only definition of meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement's novelty. You can listen to people for hours, but what's the point? . . . That's why arguments are such a strain, why there's never any point arguing. You can't just tell someone what they're saying is pointless. So you tell them it's wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn't that some things are wrong, but that they're stupid or irrelevant.”

“Language is far more idiosyncratic than has been admitted. Reasons are not necessarily and qua reasons public. They may be reasons for a very few, and none the worse for that. 'I can't explain. You'd have to know her.' If the common object is lacking, communication may break down and the same words may occasion different results in different hearers.”

“Bartlett et al. (2020) note 'the phenomenon of benign overfitting is one of the key mysteries uncovered by deep learning methodology: deep neural networks seem to predict well, even with a perfect fit to noisy training data.' However, benign overfitting behaviour can be reproduced with other model classes, can be understood intuitively, and is described by rigorous frameworks for characterizing generalization that have existed for decades.”

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”

“I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

“So, I think my problem, and 'our' problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own 'semiotic technologies' for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a 'real' world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

“Thus although our sensations, as regards their quality, are only signs whose particular character depends wholly upon our own makeup, they are still not to be dismissed as a mere semblance, but they are precisely signs of something, be it something existing or happening, and — what is most important — they can form for us an image of the law of this thing which is happening.”

“Transfinites and infinitesimals are two types of infinite number, which characterize degrees of infinity in different fashions. In effect, this means that contemporary mathematics has 'two distinct rigorous formulations of the calculus': that of Weierstrass and Cantor, who eliminated infinitesimals, and that of Robinson, who rehabilitated and legitimized them.”

“While with Fraenkel and Sono we witness the birth of the abstract ring concept, with Noether and Artin we see the birth of abstract ring theory. Noether and Artin made the abstract ring concept central in algebra by framing in an abstract setting the theorems which were its major inspirations.”

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

“Most of human and animal learning is unsupervised learning. If intelligence is a cake, the bulk of the cake is unsupervised learning.”

“Computers are a tool for conducting the network of conversations.”

“We know not through our intellect but through our experience.”

“To say that man is a rational animal, is to say that man is a creature not of habits, but of rules. When God created Adam, he whispered in his ear, 'In all contexts of action you will recognize rules, if only the rule to grope for rules to recognize. When you cease to recognize rules, you will walk on four feet.'”

“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”

“...We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name. So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility.”

“Now then, imagine the importance of a language or system of expressive signs whose function was not to tell us about things but to present them to us in the act of executing themselves. Art is just such a language; this is what art does. The esthetic object is inwardness as such – it is each thing as 'I'.”

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven; a time to be born and a time to die; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time of peace. Ladies and gentlemen, the time for peace has come.”

“A genetic intelligibility is grasped by a direct insight into some single driving factor that keeps the development moving through developmental phases, such as found in developmental models of stars, plants, human intelligence, and human morality. A dialectical intelligibility is grasped by an inverse insight that there is no single driving factor that keeps the development moving.”

“I want to see more tools and fewer operated machines - we should be embracing our humanity instead of blindly improving efficiency. And that involves using our new AI technology in more deft ways than generating more content for humans to evaluate.”

“Ultimately, then, satisfaction is determined not by the world but by a declaration on the part of the requestor that a condition is satisfied. The case of 'fit' may seem extreme, but every condition of satisfaction ultimately rests on a declaration by an individual, within the background of a community.”

“the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”

“KAPPA: But will they? What if God created polyhedra so that all true universal statements about them – formulated in human language – are infinitely long? Is it not blasphemous anthropomorphism to assume that (divine) true theorems are of finite length?”