"In his 1981 article, “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes”, Paul Churchland presents several arguments in favor of dropping commonsense psychology that have shaped the modern debate about the status of ordinary notions like belief."

"is faced with special difficulties here, since its conception of learning as the manipulation and storage of propositional attitudes founders on the fact that how to formulate, manipulate, and store a rich fabric of propositional attitudes is itself something that is learned, and is only one among many acquired cognitive skills. Folk Psychology would thus appear constitutionally incapable of even addressing the most basic mysteries."

"Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience."

"also doubts that the correct neuroscientific account of human capacities will produce a neat reduction of our common-sense framework, but here the doubts arise from a quite different source. As the eliminative materialists see it, the one-to-one match-ups will not be found, and our common-sense psychological framework will not enjoy an intertheoretic reduction, because our common-sense psychological framework is a false and radically misleading conception of the causes of human behavior and the nature of cognitive activity. On this view, folk psychology is not just an incomplete representation of our inner natures; it is an outright misrepresentation of our internal states and activities. Consequently, we cannot expect a truly adequate neuroscientific account of our inner lives to provide theoretical categories that match up nicely with the categories of our common-sense framework. Accordingly, we must expect that the older framework will simply be eliminated, rather than be reduced, by a matured neuroscience."

"How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted – on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the major classes of mental illness... – is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain."

"The basic idea is that cognitive activities are ultimately just activities of the nervous system; and if one wants to understand the activities of the nervous system, then the best way to gain that understanding is to examine the nervous system itself."

"Your brain is far too complex and mercurial for its behavior to be predicted in any but the broadest outlines or for any but the shortest distances in the future."

"We do have an organ for understanding and recognizing moral facts. It is called the brain."

"The curiosity of Man, and the cunning of his reason, have revealed much of what Nature held hidden."

"Seeing our common-sense conceptual framework for mental phenomena as a theory brings a simple and unifying organization to most of the major topics in the philosophy of mind."

"You and I have a confidence that most people lack ... We think we can continue to be liberals and still move this forward."

"Nietzsche discovered the clue to esotericism early … “The fact of the pious fraud.”"

"The way of Socrates had shown itself to be a limited way because it concerned itself “only with the scientific investigation of justice and the virtues,” and it had shown itself to be an intransigent way because it chose “non-conformity and death.” Plato corrected the way of Socrates—he removed the limitation and tempered its intransigence."

"How can historicism consistently exempt itself from its own verdict that all human thought is historical?"

"Nietzsche’s arrival in modern philosophy signaled an unprecedented necessity: “probity”, “intellectual conscience”, Enlightenment radicalized by a new bravery that scorns any comforts like God."

"Strauss’ whole study indicates that noble nature as Nietzsche presents it—no, embodies it—replaces divine nature as Plato presents it."

"Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance."

"For every apparent gain, in short, we now observe a balancing danger. This is the world we have created."

"All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices."

"Dreams are evidence that we are creatures who produce more meaning than we can ourselves understand."

"It is only through a devoted attention to the details of objects and faces in the modern urban scene, he argues, that the commodity fetish of capitalism can be effectively dispelled."

"Socrates was likewise right that pissing people off is how we first, and maybe best, go about the business of provoking thought."

"We are capitalism made flesh."

"Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all."

"But what I mean is not as odd as it might sound - and is by no means intended as the last word on the subject, only the first."

"Friendship requires a leap, not of faith but of regard."

"Politics is rather the creation of the best possible polity out of the deep inner needs of its citizenry - who are only some of its members."

"It wasn't atheism and corruption they feared, but inquiry."

"Our desires are never wholly transparent, even to ourselves."

"Tyranny is abhorrent, freedom benefits all, whereas violence benefits no one for long."

"How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?"

"I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens."

"War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others."

"We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging."

"Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose."

"Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought."

"We don't know what the future will bring, but that's because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit."

"Northrop Frye / Whatta guy / Reads more books than you or I"

"Norrie is not struggling for his place in the sun. He is the sun."

"What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism."

"Giving further impetus to literary study of the Bible was the work of several scholars of English and comparative literature, who extended their expertise in the analysis of literature to biblical texts. Most prominent were Northrop Frye ( The Great Code: The Bible and Literature), Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Poetry), and Frank Kermode (The Genesis of Secrecy, a study of the Gospel of Mark)."

"One should have bigger & better conversions everyday, like a mechanized phoenix. (21.495)"

"The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology. (21.101)"

"Metaphor is the language of immanence; metonymy of transcendence. (11C.21)"

"Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody ever writes his dream book. (33.54)"

"The total simultaneous pattern always extend from alpha to omega. (21.190)"

"[What Poets Say:]"

"Continuous prose suggests complete identification with the representing, observing, immersing-in-object self. Aphorisms suggest a richer & varied personality made up more of internal conflicts and decisions. An epiphanic sequence suggests the highest mystery of personality. (33.47)"

"[Students] have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don’t know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach. (p. 746)"

"A literary critic of experience never defines anything. (p. 4)"