iulie 28, 2012

Ongoing globalization

'The knowledge we deal with today is the result of history, of course. It is, more precisely, also the result of a historical superposition of globalization processes in which second-order knowledge, in particular in the form of images of knowledge shaping its societal role, has continued to accumulate in such a way that later layers interfered with earlier ones, without, however, eradicating them completely. Considering that bodies and images of knowledge are intertwined in a virtually endless historical chain of processes of reflection, local universalism has thus to be replaced by a global contextualism as a perspective from which to understand the globalization of knowledge in history.'

iulie 22, 2012

quantum discontinuity

'All too often, when we look back in time, we discover that much of what we thought science turned out to be myth after all. To use the word with something like neutrality, we could say that a myth is a structured world of perception and experience which can be observed externally; it is an inhabited world of meaning, a system of representations, however loosely organized. In which case, we might well be inhabiting a myth ourselves, but because our myth appears to us to be no more than a transparency onto the fabric of reality, we perceive it as science rather than myth. We cannot then see it externally; our structure of thought and the realities it perceives are connected by a transparent filament, invisible to our own eyes. Once such a transparency is superseded, once we can see how seemingly neutral scientific perception was in fact implicated in a set of cultural assumptions, structured if not necessarily contaminated by the fictions of the time,

iulie 17, 2012

Individualistic

Instead of the group being primary, whether a family, caste or community, the individ­ual becomes a microcosm of the society as a whole, with individu­al rights and duties. He or she becomes a legal, political, religious and economic entity in his or her own right, not merely insofar as he or she is a member of a wider group. This atomistic system is one where wider ties of blood and territory are weak and integration is through money, citizen­ship, paper, law and sentiment. People, in Marx’s ironic words, have been ‘set free’, not only in relation to the market, but also in relation to God and the State.

iulie 08, 2012

woo-woo land


      The formula in the political mind is simple: creativity/wellbeing/happiness = economic success = votes. There’s a certain plodding, uncreative logic to this. False, almost Lewis Carrollian logic, though, because there’s no evidence for any of it.

iulie 06, 2012

churning words

...a speaker expound the Buddha’s well-known reflection on the so-called “second arrow.” A student had come to him with questions about pain, meditation, suffering. The Buddha replied with a question of his own: “When someone is struck by an arrow, is it painful?” “Yes,” said the student. Then another question: “When this someone is struck by a second arrow, is it painful?” “Of course it is,” said the student. Then the Buddha said, “There is nothing you can do about the first arrow. You are bound to encounter pain. However the second arrow is your choice. You can choose to decline the second arrow.”

iulie 05, 2012

Croquet-Ground

The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it WOULD twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this,

iulie 04, 2012

analytic philosophy

Historically, however, the record of philosophers as ‘public intellectuals’ has not been a happy one, as a quick survey of the history of philosophy might show, from the days of Plato and Aristotle in antiquity to at least some of the public interventions of the likes of Heidegger, Sartre and Russell nearer to our own time. For whatever reason, historically there seems to have been no clear correlation between philosophic wisdom and practical wisdom, nor does philosophy in itself afford any reliable credentials for entry into public debate.

iulie 03, 2012

Ephemeral

Another great pleasure of the people is the ringing of bells, and it is a source of great delight to them whenever an opportunity of doing this presents itself. I do not suppose there is a country where bell-ringing is brought to such an art as it is here, where bells are always in chime and in harmony…. A good bell-ringer can ring out more than a thousand different peals and chimes … and the people are so fond of this amusement that they form societies among themselves for carrying it out.’