Quotes Collection

“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.”

“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.”

“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'.”

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

“Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.”

“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.”

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

“For to notice something-to be aware of it in the sense relevant to assessments of sapience, rather than of mere sentience is to respond to it by applying a concept, making a noninferential judgment about it. So until one has the concept 'green, one cannot notice or be aware of green things, though one can respond differentially to them - obviously, in ways other than by applying the concept green.”

“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.”

“For me philosophy is an art of creation, much like music or painting. Philosophy creates concepts, which are neither generalities nor truths. They are more along the lines of the Singular, the Important, the New. Concepts are inseparable from affects, i.e., from the powerful effects they exert on our life, and percepts, i.e., the new ways of seeing or perceiving they provoke in us.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“What faith is to religion, labor is to political economy: humans produce gods in the same way they produce automobiles.”

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

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

“We now have technologies that can do for written and visual culture something like what prices do for economic information and bureaucratic categories do for social information. Large models generate representations of a vast and ungraspable whole that do not fully capture that whole but are manipulable and reproducible at scale.”

“I shall then suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects among individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transforms' the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!' ... the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was 'really' addressed to him, and that 'it was really him who was hailed' (and not someone else)... individuals are always-already subjects.”

“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?”

“We decided not to ignore the present or forget the past. We're trying to set them aside and figure out together, not how to make the past better but how to make the future better. So, we created a bubble. We aren't out of touch at all. Not from what happened to the Jews or the Arabs. Not from what is happening now. But, we're applying maximum force to try and get this process moving.”

“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.”

“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”

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”

“...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.”

“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.'”

“...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.”

“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.”

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

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.”

“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.”

“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”

“The goal of AI should be to create systems that can learn and think like humans, but also go beyond human capabilities.”

“...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.”

“...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.”

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

“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.”

“The virtue of a logical proof is not that it compels belief, but that it suggests doubts.”

“...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.”

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

“I don't think it's useful to have a big goal. I think it's useful to have a direction.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Great philosophers coin new moral concepts and communicate new moral visions and modes of understanding. [...] From here we may see that the task of moral philosophers has been to extend, as poets may extend, the limits of language, and enable it to illuminate regions which were formerly dark.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I want to re-psychologize, re-socialize, and re-embed us in the world, where we reason about that world as well as about how we interact with and reflect upon it. Can we still be recognizably philosophical while letting the subjects of 'philosophies of' shine through much more clearly and inspire new philosophies, rather than merely exporting our same old 'philosophical' disputes to these new territories?”

“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.”

“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 sometimes go on as though people can't express themselves. In fact they're always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can't be preoccupied or tired without the man saying 'What's wrong? Say something…,' or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we're riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity's never blind or mute. So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 documentary tradition is one that gives voice to the victim. For a long time, I have wondered about the function of the victim and to what extent facing the victim is, in fact, a redeeming act. I would say it's almost a Christian situation, where you have a victim that is suffering for you [the spectator] and through his suffering he redeems the spectator and more: He says, you are human because you feel my suffering.”

“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?”

“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'.”

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

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

“These arts, especially literature and painting, show us the peculiar sense in which the concept of virtue is tied on to the human condition. They show us the absolute pointlessness of virtue while exhibiting its supreme importance; the enjoyment of art is a training in the love of virtue.”

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

“...'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.”

“The people who hear the madman announce the death of God don't realize that this event, insofar as it is conceived merely as atheism, does nothing to overcome the governing will to nothingness. An unheroic, ethically unambitious, risk-averse civilization that laughs at supernatural ideas (for example, at their empirical unverifiability, their childlike hopes for absolute security, their licensing of religious bigotry, or the supposed logical impossibility of former articles of faith, such as God being both omnipotent and all-good) sees man as nothing more than a sophisticated animal, and takes it for granted that life and its goods can be conceived only in naturalistic terms – such a down-to-earth naturalism does not by these tokens affirm life.”

“Instead of untangling every broken process, he just needs to define success and let AI navigate the mess. In fact, Bitter Lesson might actually be sweet: all those undocumented workflows and informal networks that pervade organizations might not matter. What matters is knowing good output when you see it.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”