philosophers-from-the-united-states

"The United States—bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, on the south by the precession of the equinoxes, on the east by the primeval chaos, and on the west by the Day of Judgment."

"The ability to imagine relations is one of the most indispensable conditions of all precise thinking. No subject can be named, in the investigation of which it is not imperatively needed; but it can nowhere else be so thoroughly acquired as in the study of mathematics."

"In a very deep sense all human science is but the increment of the power of the eye, and all human art is the increment of the power of the hand."

"Man does not dwell at the centre of things, but is the denizen of an obscure and tiny speck of cosmical matter quite invisible amid the innumerable throng of flaming suns that make up our galaxy."

"Science is the art of understanding nature."

"What follows naturally from [the] empiricist starting-point is the division of propositions into two main classes, (i) empirical propositions, about synthetic matters of fact, which are (or should be, if they are to have literal meaning) testable by experience, and (ii) those which are purely analytic, the function of which is to elucidate the use and meaning of terms, but which give no information about the world. The truth or falsity of the latter depends solely on their self-consistency and the law of non-contradiction, whereas of the former self-consistency, though necessary, is not a sufficient condition of truth. Accordingly there are two main types of science, exact science on the one hand comprising logic and mathematics, concerned with analytic truths and using purely deductive reasoning; and empirical science on the other seeking laws which are generalizations from particular experiences and are verifiable (or, more strictly, ‘probabilifiable’) only by observation and experiment."

"The deep gender bias of science (including medicine), of its very ways of seeing problems, resonates, Keller argues, in its "common rhetoric." Mainly "adversarial" and "aggressive" in its stance toward what it studies, "science can come to sound like a battlefield.""

"Only those who unite scientific knowledge of morality with practice in its application may be trusted to solve promptly and safely problems of conscience. Personal, social, commercial, and political experience proves this abundantly. Moral education requires long, patient, and delicate training, and few acquire it without the aid of casuistry."

"Because man has no relationship with anything—other people, the world, God—that is not mediated at some level through the will, a reinterpretation of the meaning of the will and its freedom will inevitably be what Nietzsche called a "revaluation of all values." What is at issue is not simply a new hierarchy of values, a replacement of higher values by things previously held in lower esteem, but indeed a transformation of what it means to value and be valuable tout court, ... a transformation of the meaning of goodness and its principal mode of manifestation. It has been said that Darwin's late modern interpretation of evolution stands as a "universal acid": the inner logic of his idea eats away at all other traditional ideas, not only on the biological level but also on all levels of human existence; it dissolves everything in its wake. One might say that the notion of modern liberty we are discussing is even more radical and therefore more subtle in its effects. It is not so much an acid as a sort of alchemical reagent. Instead of dissolving things, it leaves them standing, but eliminates their original essence, their native goodness, transforming realities into gold—that is, a conventional representation of value without any organic relation to its own given nature. There is nothing at all left untouched by this transformation."

"Contradiction constitutes the diabolical. ... The diabolical presents as essential what it simultaneously denies or renders impossible, so that we could say that it is the very essence of the diabolical, ontologically considered, to make "empty promises." The diabolical proffers an object of desire while at the same time undermining the conditions under which that object could be attained in actuality. It is not only perverse; it is perversity itself, because its turning toward what is other than itself is in fact nothing more than a turning toward itself. This is what we have meant by saying that it points in two directions at the same time: δια-βάλλω. The essential per-versity of the diabolical comes perhaps most intensely to light in the fact that it is, so to speak, precisely the nature of the diabolical to present just itself as the solution to the problem that it itself generates."

"Nietzsche represents an attempt to recover the "self-diffusiveness" of the good in spite of the good itself, because the good itself cannot be separated from the Christian Neoplatonic tradition that lies at the roots of Western civilization. He thus ends up, as Heidegger has compellingly shown, with an emptiness of the will to power, sheer willing, which does not overcome modernity but rather consummates it."

"Instead of enjoyment, there is labor, instead of goods, there are uses, instead of substance, we have property, instead of property, we have money, instead of bonds, we have boundaries, instead of connection, we have contract, instead of order, we have regulation, and so forth. Locke's political theory represents a conquest of the ordering principle of human life, which then allows that principle to retain its rule only if it changes its meaning."

"It is perhaps not an accident that stories often end with a marriage, since this provides a specifically dramatic conclusion that serves to gather together the infinite opposition of personalities into a single form. The fact that those who marry in so many traditional fairy tales disappear from the narrative into an implicit "happily ever after" perhaps betrays a sense deeply rooted in human culture that freedom and form belong together."

"This is the heart of the diabolical: an image that is not an image, but presents itself as the real thing—indeed, in a certain sense, as better than the real thing precisely because of the immediacy or the lack of transcendence that the dissemblance implies."

"We will not pursue the question here about ... whether it is in fact possible to find some objective standard for judgments of taste once one has interpreted beauty essentially as an event in the brain. Indeed, if beauty is nothing more than a subjective feeling of pleasure, which occurs under certain conditions, then the question concerning objective standards loses any real urgency. It seems to me that, if the question was still posed with such zeal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is due to a lingering sense that beauty is in fact something important, more than the mere turning of a screw in our mental machinery. If this is true, then the fact that people today seem less inclined to fight about judgments of taste, and show little interest in persuading others about what is beautiful, or learning to make good judgments, educating and forming their tastes, is something that should cause us great alarm. Our alarm ought to grow exponentially if it is in fact true that the way we experience and interpret beauty reveals an understanding of or disposition towards reality in general. In this case, to lose a sense of beauty's connection to reality is, I suggest, to lose a sense of the reality of reality tout court."

"Locke does not deny the existence of God or the truth of religion; indeed, he affirms these as indispensable, to the extent that atheists have to be excluded from toleration. What Locke does deny, ... is the actuality ... of any concrete, historical form that religion might take. But of course a religion cannot exist except concretely in history. If a religion, which means the effective manifestation of ultimate meaning, exists concretely in history, it necessarily makes a claim on me prior to my act of will, because it makes a claim on everything without exception. To recognize this claim is to see that actuality precedes potency, and if this is true ultimately, it will be true, so to speak, all the way down. And this will mean that freedom will necessarily have to be interpreted as sharing in actuality, a response to the good that precedes me and makes my choice of it possible; the actualizing of the will in this case comes to mean being brought into an actual world, a tradition, and a hierarchy of goods. Actual religion is therefore incompatible with an interpretation of freedom primarily as active power. Locke can affirm freedom as power only by transforming at the same time the status of religion. It can no longer be a single truth that precedes political agents, but it has to become an array of possibilities, any one of which individuals are free to accept, at least within the constraints of political order. Within these constraints, I am permitted to affirm any religion as true, and practice it thus in public, as long as I recognize that this has a new meaning that would strike an ancient thinker as confusing, if not simply confused: it is true "for me." Notice that the potentializing of religion in this way allows one to neutralize the implications of the existence of God without having to shoulder the burden of responsibility that would come with rejecting God outright. In short, the precondition for the emergence of the modern concept of freedom is not the denial of God, but the denial of his actual self-revelation in history. Modern liberty, at its core, is a rejection specifically of the incarnation, God's coming in the flesh."

"For all of their differences, Locke, Spinoza, and Kant ... share a common core in their conception of freedom, which we may justly characterize in general as "modern liberty": a view of freedom as spontaneous and unconditioned causality, or as active power that produces effects as a result of self-originating energy rather than receiving determination from outside of itself. What we wish to suggest ... is that such a conception of freedom, because it relentlessly separates potentiality from actuality, represents, in its depths, a flight from reality."

"Ours is a decidedly non-philosophical, even anti-philosophical, age. This is not to say that we lack "philosophers," of a certain sort; indeed, we have only too many. ... While it may be the case that our age is more cerebral, more abstract, more preoccupied with brain power, with intellectual capacities and skills, than any other age in history, it remains true that we are not philosophical. Indeed, our very abstraction and preoccupation with intelligence is a sign of the "forgetfulness" of philosophy."

"Well-known among scholars is Ong’s call to reflect on how deep the transformations of societies transitioning from orality to scripture are. Less noticed was his remark that the transition carries ethical implications, particularly about conscience, the internal moral compass that guides human behavior."

"Only because our being and truth already belong to God can we avoid the nominalist temptation, where God arbitrarily and unexpectedly appears as a sheer act of will reversing creaturely being and commandeering our language miraculously from the outside such that nothing identifiably human remains of it."

"Theology is like rowing a boat. You can only move forward when you are looking backwards."

"God cannot be placed within any category larger than God in order to understand God."

"Beginning with the flesh of Jesus and its presence in the church, theology alone can give due order to other social formations—family, market, and state. The goodness of God is discovered not in abstract speculation but in a life oriented toward God that creates particular practices that require the privileging of certain social institutions over others. The goodness of God can be discovered only when the church is the social institution rendering intelligible our lives. ... For a Christian account of this good, the church is the social formation that orders all others. If the church is not the church, the state, the family, and the market will not know their own true nature."

"Theology can only be done in cultural form."

"Contemporary economic white nationalism is the dynamic form of hatred of what is different for its own sake."

"Race-based negative integration has been a continuous element of the American social bond for large sectors of the citizenry since the founding, but almost always qualified and repudiated with the reminder that “we” are a nation of immigrants. The join between these two features of the American social bond are arguably the foundational contradiction in the idea of America."

"Fineman is a truly generative and transformative scholar, spurring people to think in new ways about key terms like dependency, mautonomy, and vulnerability and about basic institutions such as the family and the state."

"Salvage Art Institute."

"Do you know what the world is to me."

"A monster of energy, without beginning, without end, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself."

"The discussion that I have just described seemed to be organized around the implicit assumption that if we could indeed apply the proper category to these items."

"No Longer Art."

"A sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing."

"Encounters with an Art-Thing"

"Its purpose was to discuss a small archive that krajewska had recently acquired from AXA Artv Insurance Corporation."

"What counts as the material of vital materialism."

"Is it only human labour and the socio-economic entities made by men using raw materials."

"How can political theory do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in every event and every stabilization."

"Is materiality more potent than that."

"Is there a form of theory that can acknowledge a certain ‘thing-power’, that is, the irreducibility of objects to the human meanings or agendas they also embody."

"The northern Arabs of Jahiliyyah practised femal [sic] infanticide. It was prompted by one of two reasons: poverty or fear of shame (Mahmasāni; pp. 54-56). In the first case, some Arabs like Sa'sa'a Bin Najiah and Zeid Ibn Amrou Bin Nufayl, used to offer to buy these female infants from their fathers to save their lives. Sometimes, male infants were eliminated for this reason also, although only after there were no daughters left."

"One must hope it is possible for modern liberal democracies to incorporate people of various racial, religious, cultural, and national origins in a single body politic. Yet the end need not justify the means, and legislating against symbols of difference worn by minority woman [sic] is an inapt means. Joan Scott observed that French leaders have treated French nationality as an essence rather than as a dynamic, fluid construct. "In order to come to terms with its North-African/Muslim population," Scott urged, "French politicians and intellectuals need to come up with new ways of addressing difference, ways that acknowledge its existence rather than refusing to engage." Because Americans have not got it completely right, Scott's plea for engagement applies to US politicians and intellectuals as well."

"[T]he only species on earth which prides itself on its intelligence is the only one with the intelligence necessary, and possibly sufficient, to render itself extinct tomorrow."

"The quest for other, and better, forms of life, society, technology, ethics, and law may not reveal that they are actually elsewhere; but it may in the long run help us to make some of them actual on earth."

"It is not my place to tell you whether there is indefeasible ignorance of ultimate reality. I am ignorant of whether there is or is not. But you should think of these things because there are no things more important, though there are no questions more difficult or less answerable. But one's whole life may be changed if one changes his mind about these questions."

"Myth, religion and now science-fiction with their tales of benevolent and malevolent extraterrestrial beings are commentaries on the human condition. I believe even responsible scientific speculation and expensive technology of space exploration in search for other life are the peculiarly modern equivalent of angeology and Utopia or of demonology and apocalypse."

"In the logic of science there is a principle as important as that of parsimony: it is that of sufficient reason. The former directs us to look for simplest causes, the later cautions us not to simplify so far that the explanation is inadequate to the facts to be explained....Parsimony is not itself a simple criterion of a good methodology; we cannot simply count the factors of explanation and say that the theory containing the smallest number is the best. The ideal of parsimony cannot be expressed without the proviso that the conditions for which it is a norm shall themselves be adequate."

"For it is only in the Critique that all the various strands of Kant's thought are woven together into the pattern of his practical philosophy. This pattern, in turn, can be understood only in the entire fabric of the critical philosophy, and that rich design can be clear only to those who have understood each of its three principal parts, which are the three Critiques and not shorter and more popular works like the Prolegomena and the Foundations."

"If you believe that you are not a machine, but that I am (then) I do not know why you are reading this book"."

"But somewhat like people who object to spending money needed in the ghettoes on exploring the moon, I think the best hope for our survival is to be based on understanding human predicaments here on earth, not expecting a saving message from super-human beings in the sky...Thinking about and even hoping to find extraterrestrial civilizations, however, sharpen our search for and appreciation of the peculiar virtues and vices of the only form of life we know."