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541101c
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"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?" Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way." A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
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religion
science
god
cosmology
epistemology
organized-religion
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Carl Sagan |
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6fc0df9
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Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.
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war
philosophy
empiricism
epistemology
military-philosophy
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Sun Tzu |
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988eddb
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Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.
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present
time
humanity
past
epistemology
trees
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George R.R. Martin |
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b1e5223
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Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be required. There must not be even a hint that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a foundation. The learner must be allowed to enter at any point without prejudice. This is why you shall never hear or see a television program begin with the caution that if the viewer has not seen the previous programs, this one will be meaningless. Television is a nongraded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away with the idea of sequence and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.
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television
learning
rational-thought
epistemology
knowledge
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Neil Postman |
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6bf5fc8
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I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.
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television
philosophy
public-discourse
epistemology
culture
ideology
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Neil Postman |
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725969c
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"Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think." That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless."
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tolstoy
modernism
epistemology
existentialism
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Milan Kundera |
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5f5b60b
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"I'm saying there is evil in the world," Master Kit said, hefting the box on his hip, "and doubt is the weapon that guards against it. Yardem took the box from the old actor's hands and lifted it to the top of the pile. "But if you doubt everything," the Tralgu said, "how can anything be justified?" "Tentatively. And subject to later examination. It seems to me the better question is whether there's any virtue in committing to a permanent and unexamined certainty. I don't believe we can say that."
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epistemology
skepticism
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Daniel Abraham |