Syllogiser

... savoir joindre à un tempérament de vampire la discrétion d’une anémone.

 (Syllogismes de l’amertume)

Un musicien philosophe

C'est un penseur très original qui a développé une intuition sublime qui l'a accompagné toute sa vie : l'ouïe est à l'origine de l'entendement parce que le son est le véhicule physique de la conscience, de sorte que c'est en analysant la structure fondamentale du son que l'on peut dévoiler les clés qui ont permis la naissance des idées, le développement des civilisations, l'émancipation des sciences et des arts. Porté au départ au pinacle par les philosophes des Lumières (Diderot, D'Alembert), Rameau sera ensuite déjugé - notamment par Rousseau -, dès que ses intuitions contrarieront l'agnosticisme en vogue.

littératurite

Il y a fort à parier qu’on va vers une rupture,

Même si dans ces affaires le pire n’est jamais sûr.

La droite aime les chefs, sans vouloir les choisir.

Elle se donne aux hussards qui forcent ses désirs.

C’est pourquoi mes amis, si les deux sont hors-jeu,

Si le coq et le bouc se tuent à petit feu,

Je parierais plutôt sur un vrai carnivore

Que sur une antilope, une poule ou un castor…

Skepticism

Traditional definitions, at least as commonly portrayed in contemporary discussions of the definition of art, take artworks to be characterized by a single type of property. The standard candidates are representational properties, expressive properties, and formal properties. So there are representational or mimetic definitions, expressive definitions, and formalist definitions, which hold that artworks are characterized by their possession of, respectively, representational, expressive, and formal properties. It is not difficult to find fault with these simple definitions. For example, possessing representational, expressive, and formal properties cannot be sufficient

essentials inessential

'Perhaps the greatest legacy is not in any specific thing, but in the relations between parts of our lives. I believe that modernity and its freedoms and benefits emerge from the never-ending tension caused by separating and balancing parts of our lives. England was the first country which successfully held the demands of the State, the Church, the Family and the Economy in some kind of balance where none came to dominate. This leads to personal responsibility and freedom. It also leads to endless contradictions and confusions. So perhaps the great contribution of England is to show that muddle, confusion, contradiction and paradox should be welcomed.'

synthetic phase

'...Thus did Constantin Brancusi describe the ceaseless accrual of detail in the realist tradition in its terminal phases, immediately before its fracture by the movement that has come to be called modernism. So what was the alternative to such unfocusing proliferations? ‘Simplicity,’ said the Romanian sculptor, ‘is complexity resolved’. Not evaded then, but resolved. Such resolution required dynamic and expressive form, a form that could cut through the infinite attenuation of detail of late realism and naturalism. It occurred to the most radical artists of modernity that there was a precedent here: not their immediate precursors in the western artistic tradition, but those from ages before, who had not even been known as artists. The ‘primitives’, whose vision was unconstrained  by any protocols involving single vanishing-point perspective or three-dimensional illusionism.'

barbarous gold

'Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.'

contradictory features

'..., the essence of the modern world is that there is no defining infrastructure. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is not loosed upon the world, but certainly chaos and confusion is often there. Basically the four spheres of our life are constantly in productive tension – politics, religion, economy and society. So there is an everlasting struggle, with no sphere triumphant. In such a situation adults have to live in a world of endless compromise, of endless situations where the best is the enemy of the good, in an Einsteinian world of relativity where all principles can be bent by some other force. It is a Dirac or Schrödinger quantum world where a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. It is a world perfectly caught by the Oxford mathematician Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) when he took a child, full of absolutes, into the magical world down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass..

figuratively

'An art, I believe, of which most male smokers are true masters only when either they don't care a hoot whether or not the butt goes into the basket or the room has been cleared of eyewitnesses, including, quite so to speak, the cigarette snapper himself. I'm going to try hard not to chew on that illustration, delectable as I find it, but I do think it proper to append - to revert momentarily to curb marbles - that after Seymour himself shot a marble, he would be all smiles when he heard a responsive click of glass striking glass, but it never appeared to be clear to him whose winning click it was. And it's also a fact that someone almost invariably had to pick up the marble he'd won and hand it to him.'

Ritournelle

Le Boléro n'est pas une pièce musicale comme les autres. Il est une prophétie. Il raconte l'histoire d'une colère, d'une faim. Quand il s'achève dans la violence, le silence qui s'ensuit est terrible pour les survivants étourdis

Französischer Garten

Duminícă

Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.

(Thomas J. Watson)

Advienne que pourra

The human brain is prepackaged with a series of innate preferences widespread, from culture to culture. In terms of music we prefer repetition to randomness, consonance to dissonance, tonality to atonality, and predictability to unexpectedness. Differences in music exist around the world, but like food, there are several essential ingredients the brain is programmed to pay special attention to. Contrary to the modernist, what’s pleasurable to the ear is not arbitrary.

étrange chose

'...combien la conscience cesse vite de collaborer à nos habitudes qu'elle laisse à leur développement sans plus s'occuper d'elles et combien dès lors nous pouvons être étonnés si nous constatons simplement du dehors et en supposant qu'elles engagent tout l'individu, les actions d'hommes dont la valeur morale ou intellectuelle peut se développer indépendamment dans un sens tout différent. C'était évidemment un vice d'éducation, ou l'absence de toute éducation...'

disenchantment

'We cannot be seamlessly situated in the present moment, and also be simultaneously situated so as to create a representation. The creation of a representation requires a separation from that which is represented; we cannot simply merge into the perception. We disengage from the present and absorb ourselves...'

foreigners

'The synthesis between the desire to retain the past and the urge to forget it, to restlessly seek the new while also not wanting to throw aways the old, is described as a characteristic of modern democratic societies by Tocqueville. ‘I am not making out that the inhabitants of democracies are by nature stationary; on the contrary, I think that such a society is always on the move and that none of its members knows what rest is; but I think that all bestir themselves within certain limits which they hardly ever pass. Daily they change, alter, and renew things of secondary importance, by they are very careful not to touch fundamentals. They love change, but they are afraid of revolutions.'

Expectations in Story

'..good writing is mostly familiar with moments of unforeseen yet sophisticated new ideas, plot lines or characters. What we consider novel is relative to our experience; the more exposure we have to a genre the higher are standards are. Novelty is important because it counters habituation and influences moments of mirth, which are particularly difficult to instill in the mind of an expert.'

cohérence quantique

'...ces recherches fondamentales sur les mécanismes intimes de la physique quantique sont directement liées à la future révolution de l’informatique. La maîtrise de la superposition d’état est en effet à la base des fameux bits quantiques ou qbits qui seront les briques élémentaires des ordinateurs quantiques. Contrairement aux bits classiques qui prennent successivement la valeur 0 ou 1, les qbits fonctionnent avec une superposition de ces deux états. Et voici le chat de Schrödinger qui pointe à nouveau son nez....'

Undertone

As soon as the jury had a little recovered from the shock of being upset, and their slates and pencils had been found and handed back to them, they set to work very diligently to write out a history of the accident, all except the Lizard, who seemed too much overcome to do anything but sit with its mouth open, gazing up into the roof of the court. -`What do you know about this business?' the King said to Alice. -`Nothing,' said Alice. -`Nothing WHATEVER?' persisted the King. -`Nothing whatever,' said Alice. -`That's very important,' the King said, turning to the jury. They were just beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit interrupted: -`UNimportant, your Majesty means, of course,' he said in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke. -`UNimportant, of course, I meant,' the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, --`important-unimportant-- unimportant-important--' as if he were trying which wordsounded best.

syllables

'If you took a page at random from an Ernest Hemingway novel, it's likely to have many more words than a random page of the same size from a Henry James novel, because Henry James used words that were on average about 45 percent bigger than those of Hemingway. Hemingway, in our example here, is English. And Henry James is Finnish.'

Constitutive

'...from the middle of the twentieth century there was a reaction and it was suggested that theoretical science had little effect on technology until the middle of the nineteenth century, well after the industrial revolution had been achieved.  More recently, as historians have looked more deeply at the ways in which science fed into discoveries and innovations of a practical kind, this revised view has been challenged again.'

Interactions

'...facial expressions express seven emotions - fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, enjoyment, and contempt. These seven emotions individually represent a "family of emotions." In other words, there are many different variations to the type of anger someone might be feeling, and expressing. These emotions and their corresponding micro expressions are shared across cultures.  Since these expressions show our true emotions, our faces often betray us.'

Motivating

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

   Steady thy laden head across a brook;

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.'

philosophical tendencies

'The second development was the inauguration of a long period of mathematicians’ catching up with the intuition of physicists to produce what has become the subject of differential geometry. Thus, when the Special Relativity of Einstein and Minkowksi consigned the aether and all the properties with which it had been ingeniously endowed to scientific irrelevance, this was seen as a triumph of mathematical model-making.

vraiment précis

White King

Alice looked on with great interest as the King took an enormous memorandum-book out of his pocket, and began writing. A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him. The poor King look puzzled and unhappy, and struggled with the pencil for some time without saying anything; but Alice was too strong for him, and at last he panted out, `My dear! I really must get a thinner pencil. I can't manage this one a bit; it writes all manner of things that I don't intend -' `What manner of things?' said the Queen, looking over the book (in which Alice had put `the white knight is sliding down the poker. he balances very badly') `That's not a memorandum of your feelings!'

Candlelit

'  It was a late summer morning, a pleasant bite in the September air aided by a southerly breeze.  He lived in a two family house on the edge of Hicks Woods’ small public park and saw with satisfaction as he walked that the stars and stripes were already flying from the flagpole.  Most mornings he drove to work, but he had put his SUV in the shop for its six month service the night before, and today he ambled across the park toward the train station, remembering as he did the countless carnivals, Christmas carolings

Upholding

'...creativity in the 21^st century has become a buzzword for pseudo-intellectuals, pseudo-entrepreneurs, and pseudo-artists who like to label themselves as “creative types” even though their level of commitment to their craft and their willingness to break from the herd is flimsy. TED and similar knowledge-hungry websites might be making it worse by attracting these individuals who, if it weren’t for the easy-to-digest science, wouldn’t care about their elusive creative genius. Or perhaps it is the Internet in general, where someone publishes an article about the “secrets to creativity” every hour.'

Contrapúnct

" — Anii nu sunt rotirile pământului după soare, anii sunt după ştirea trecerii timpului. Pe atunci, cred că aveam vârsta de o secundă. Când setea ţine loc însetatului, setei îi e sete de însetat.
— Când ai împlinit un an?
— La toamnă
— Ce faci între vârste?
—Ca şi cronicarul, zic: „Aicea, între vârste, şezum şi plânsem“. Dar asta numai dacă ar fi să fim ca şi cronicarul.
— Dar asemenea cui eşti?
— Păi a spus-o în numele nostru Eminescu: „Eu rămân, ce-am fost, romantic“. Deci, noi nu suntem ca Eminescu, ci ca şi romantismul."

Brain-computer metaphor

'Or not, this is a problem:

Whether this is a noble mind suffer

Outrageous slings and arrows of Fortune

Or take up arms against a sea of ​​troubles,

And opposing the closure, after they die, to sleep

A sleep to say we end'

'To be, or not to be- that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die- to sleep-
No more; and by a sleep to say we end'

Inepțía

'Când se vădeşte că visul utopic tot nu se realizează, că decimarea rituală nu a servit la nimic, observăm o alunecare de la utopie la simpla conservare a puterii. Duşmanul obiectiv fiind deja exterminat, trebuie vegheat să nu se reconstituie sau chiar să se ridice din rândurile partidului. Este momentul unei a doua terori, care pare absurdă pentru că nu corespunde unei rezistenţe sociale şi politice şi vizează un control absolut al tuturor oamenilor şi al tuturor gândurilor. Teama devine atunci universală, se răspândeşte până şi în partid, fiecare membru al său simţindu-se ameninţat. Toată lumea denunţă pe toată lumea, toată lumea trădează în serie. Urmează al treilea stadiu,

wishful thinking

'It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they Always purr. `If them would only purr for "yes" and mew for "no," or any rule of that sort,' she had said, `so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?' On this occasion the kitten only purred: and it was impossible to guess whether it meant `yes' or `no.' So Alice hunted among the chessmen on the table till she had found the Red Queen: then she went down on her knees on the hearth-rug, and put the kitten and the Queen to look at each other. "Now, Kitty!' she cried, clapping her hands triumphantly. `Confess that was what you turned into!' (`But it wouldn't look at it,' she said, when she was explaining the thing afterwards to her sister: `it turned away its head, and pretended not to see it: but it looked a little ashamed of itself, so I think it must have been the Red Queen.')

Restabilirea stabilirii

Les rides d’une nation sont aussi visibles que celles d’un individu. 

(La tentation d’exister)

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.'

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,

stepped back

“Party political strife cannot justify overriding core democratic principles.”

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.

Quantitative

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.

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.”

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,

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.

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.’

Persuasion

When it comes to literature’s place in education, the debate will always be fierce and political, but those works that lack some element of universality that gives them resonance beyond the time and place of their creation won’t stay in the curriculum for long, because students simply won’t read them.

think it through

Knowledge of logic and probability wasn’t important for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. But when it comes to writing about rationality and intuition we must remember that readers are going to jump to conclusions about how people jump to conclusions. The popular literature on cognitive biases is enlightening, but let’s not be irrational about irrationality; exposure to X is not knowledge and control of X. Reading about cognitive biases, after all, does not free anybody from their nasty epistemological pitfalls.

Darwinian algorithm

Intentionality doesn’t come from up high; it percolates up from below, from the initially mindless and pointless algorithmic processes that gradually acquire meaning and intelligence as they develop.

Dubito

'Alan Turing was the first to foresee this possibility in 1950, when he published the seminal essay on artificial intelligence, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which proposed a typewritten test to answer the question "Can machines think?" According to Jaron Lanier, the right way to understand the famous "Turing Test" is to understand that it "began in the mind of somebody who was very close to suicide." In other words, Alan Turing, who was born 100 years ago today, is the very embodiment of the philosophical issue we face as we integrate technology into every aspect of our lives, and the distinction

Misnomer

'Even if you look at values only one standard variation away from the mean, you are generally looking at some fairly diverse values.'

Individual worthiness

...'it is very difficult to ascertain the Faustian character of the explorers, extract its essential nature, and apprehend it for itself. I want to suggest, even so, that the history of exploration during and after the Enlightenment era offers us an opportunity to apprehend clearly this soul. For it is the case that, from about the 1700s onward, explorers come to be increasingly driven by a will to discover irrespective of the pursuit of trade, religious conversion, or even scientific curiosity. My point is not that the unadulterated desire to explore exhibits the Faustian soul as such. The urge to accumulate wealth and advance knowledge may exhibit this Faustian will just as intensively.

Utopian thinking

Lives in a fluid, not on solid rock.
The solid was an age, a period
With appropriate, largely English Furniture
Policed by a hope of Christmas.

Unethical category

'...happiness is a conformist category. And moreover, none of us really want it. Which is a good thing, since the pursuit of happiness is an Enlightenment value that gets at only one aspect of what it means to live a good life. "Let’s be serious: when you are in a creative endeavor, in that wonderful fever

-'My God, I’m onto something!' and so on  -happiness doesn't enter it..'

Faux gothique de Bahlui

imagery

'But in fact what was being metaphorized were two dissimilar phenomena, since the planetary system’s motions work in terms of gravity, whereas inside the atom it is electrical forces that obtain. And so the metaphor started growing ragged and incoherent very quickly; it went from positive analogy to negative analogy. If the model was a planetary one, then how come the electrons were not continually losing energy in their orbits, as one would expect? If the inside of an atom were really functioning according to its metaphoric other half then the electron would soon lose its necessary energy and spin counter-clockwise into the nucleus.'

Dissimilitude

Some philosophers maintain that if determinism holds in our world, then there are no objective chances in our world. And often the word ‘chance’ here is taken to be synonymous with 'probability', so these philosophers maintain that there are no non-trivial objective probabilities for events in our world. (The caveat “non-trivial” is added here because on some accounts all future events that actually happen have probability, conditional on past history, equal to 1, and future events that do not happen have probability equal to zero. Non-trivial probabilities are

interwoven

   'Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,
      Now are visions ne'er to vanish;
      From thy spirit shall they pass
      No more, like dew-drop from the grass.'