iunie 26, 2013

Spiritive, Appetitive, and Reasoning.


'They are told that people generally are guided primarily by one part of their soul, like being left-handed or right-handed. They are told that they have the capacity for being guided primarily by reason and are able to control the balance of the parts of their soul. They are told that those who are superior have the right and the duty to rule absolutely for the good of society. '

iunie 21, 2013

Indecisively


'The centrality of dreams in his stories also reflects Freud’s certainty about the significance of the dream life. The spread of Freudianism and the rise of Kafka’s reputation ran, not without good reason, in parallel. Kafka reads like Freud fictionalized. Freud’s reputation is now quite properly in radical decline; Kafka’s, somehow, lives on. Without belief in Freud, Kafka’s stories lose their weight and authority.'

iunie 18, 2013

Translating

'An idea need have no intrinsic reality except what it derives from my thought, of which it is a mode. But any idea that has representative reality must surely come from a cause that contains at least as much intrinsic reality as there is representative reality in the idea. For if we suppose that an idea contains something that was not in its cause, it must have got this from nothing; yet the kind of reality that is involved in something’s being represented in the mind by an idea, though it may not be very perfect, certainly isn’t nothing, and so it can’t come from nothing. It might be thought that since the reality that I am considering in my ideas is merely representative, it might be possessed by its cause only representatively and not intrinsically. That would mean that the cause is itself an idea, because only ideas have representative reality. But that would be wrong. Although one idea may perhaps originate from another, there can’t be an infinite regress of such ideas; eventually one must come back to an idea whose cause isn’t

iunie 13, 2013

perspectively



'So the trance ended, and we grew
Restless, we knew not how or why;
And there were sudden gusts that blew
Our dreaming banners into storm;
We wore the uncertain crumbling form
Of a brown swirl of windy leaves,
A phantom shape that stirs and heaves
Shuddering from earth, to fall again
With a dry whisper of withered rain.
'

iunie 12, 2013

Cold Commemorative


'Umbra ta, lovindu-se de ziduri,
iar se sparge-n cioburi colorate.
Oh, de-aceea m-ai zărit în stradă
adunând pierdutele-i pătrate.

Şi s-o fac la loc, în ceasul nopţii,
peste geamuri ţi le-aşez cu grijă,
verzi, albastre, galbene şi roşii,
încoifate-n creştet cu o sprijă.'


(
Nichita Stănescu - Vitraliu )

iunie 11, 2013

Iff



'While the meaning of artefacts is subjective and even their existence, as I have pointed out, is subject to selection and pressure, it does seem that up to a certain extent they act as independent witnesses. We can read many meanings into a text but, to a certain extent, a spade is a spade. Either a civilization developed a steam engine or it did not. Therefore, the archaeological record is to a certain extent uncontaminated by the grosser swings of theoretical fashion. '

iunie 07, 2013

"Check!"


'By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back, the fight was over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight: `but it doesn't matter much,' thought Alice, `as all the arches are gone from this side of the ground.' So she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back for a little more conversation with her friend.'

iunie 03, 2013

Nullius in verba


'We have undoubtedly shifted the nature of the correspondences, and their alignments one to another. With the demise of alchemy, we have looked increasingly to experiment and measurable results to dictate the nature of our science. Alchemy is the last moment when the magical is still permitted as a licit element of the genuinely scientific enterprise, and it is a moment that has a sort of afterlife in Newton, who would appear to have regarded force at a distance as an occult power, and who never gave up his alchemical experiments to the end of his life.'