A name can confirm understanding, or confound it, but never confer it.
Sep 282023
Thinking
Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
—Whitehead
Sep 132023
Positivism, n. A philosophy that makes one less and less positive.
Sep 062023
Complexity, randomness, inspiration, unconscious process — we bestow names as if they conferred understanding.
Sep 012023
The only way to escape the thrall of a philosopher is to read him.
Aug 242023
A surprisingly common tactic of philosophers is to solve their problem by denying that it exists: thus Parmenides on change, Berkeley on the external world, Dennett on qualia, or Rand on conflicts of interest. It works, if what you want is less correctness than renown.
Aug 212023
If you want to argue better, get better arguments.
Aug 032023
A new idea is almost always false, and persecuted with special zeal when it happens to be true.
Jul 072023
Natura non facit saltus, perhaps; but thought makes nothing else.
Jun 282023
It is possible to oppose, in private, absurdities to which one is obliged to show fealty in public, but easier just to start believing them.
Jun 262023
Endlessly we subdivide, periodize, punctuate — hours and minutes and seconds, phylum and family, genus and species, molecule and atom, hadron and quark, ancient and medieval and modern. Continuity surrounds us; yet we cannot abide it, can scarcely believe in it.