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66905b0
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One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.
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modernism
innovation
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Peter Watson |
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2152a0a
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for example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss' 'Freudian' operas such as Salome and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf? It doesn't render these works less beaut..
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woolf
kafka
thomas-mann
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Peter Watson |
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a3b6839
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For many scientists, as Lyotard concedes, scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge there is, but if so, how then do we understand fairy stories and law?
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science
lyotard
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Peter Watson |
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e5f9f05
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Doubt is an awful snake of an emotion. Once it has you in it's grip, it won't let go. It spoils everything.
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Peter Watson |
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cca534d
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Live with the consequences of your deeds and enjoy the warmth they create. The only warmth in the cold, indifferent universe is that which we create ourselves. And that is what a work of art is, it is what a constructed life is, a fulfilled life, the warmth of acts.
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existentialism
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Peter Watson |
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7184afc
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The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have s..
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Peter Watson |
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b8bf54a
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a useful coorective to the triumphalism of some scientists. For example, Maddox went out of his way to emphasise the provisional nature of much physics - he referred to black holes as 'putative' only, to the search for theories of everything as 'the embodiment of a belief, even a hope' and stated that the reason why the quantum gravity project is 'becalmed' right now is because 'the problem to be solved is not yet fully understood' and that..
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theory-of-everything
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Peter Watson |
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0e490cb
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From 1781, by which time Goethe had been in Weimer for six years, he confided to Charlotte that he no longer felt able to address her as "Sie," and must use the more intimate "du." This brought about a sea change. As one critic put it, Goethe's letters now became "prose poems of happy love with few parallels in any literature."
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Peter Watson |
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fe650d5
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Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), who thought that the French Revolution was the dividing line between the past and a 'glorious future', believed there were three outstanding issues in history - the destruction of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within one and the same nation, and the perfecting of mankind.
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Peter Watson |
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e32a733
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Grief is an ocean where the waves obey their own rhythm, their own tide, where we are just thrown about to stay afloat as best we can. Where there is in fact no guarantee that we will keep our heads above water.
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Peter Watson |
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32454eb
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Even by the end of the seventeenth century, fifty years before our starting point, there was no shortage of people in Europe who felt that the Christian religion had been gravely discredited. Protestants and Catholics had been killing each other in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, for holding opinions that no one could prove one way or the other. The observations of Kepler and Galileo transformed man's view of the heavens, and the fl..
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Peter Watson |
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d6141b6
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The discipline of history is particularly important in this context because while science has had a direct impact on how historians write, and what they write about, history has itself been evolving. One of the great debates in historiography is over how events move forward. One school of thought has it that 'great men' are mostly what matter, that the decisions of people in power can bring about significant shifts in world events and menta..
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Peter Watson |
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4d778aa
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Genetic evidence, of individuals across the world, alive now, shows that all non-African people are descended from one small group that must have passed through the Arabian peninsula.
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Peter Watson |
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4a4d867
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Computable Numbers' into practice.21 This was
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Peter Watson |
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ec5e693
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At its most simple, the notion underlying The Great Chain of Being, as identified in the first instance by Plato, is that the universe is essentially a rational place, in which all organisms are linked in a great chain, not on one scale of low to high (for Plato could see that even 'lowly' creatures were perfectly 'adapted', as we would say, to their niches in the scheme of things) but that there was in general terms a hierarchy which range..
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Peter Watson |
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6113d69
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He adored talking about the rich.... But his real wealth was literary. He had read many thousands of books. He said that history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night's rest. Insomnia made him more learned.
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Peter Watson |
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a5e8a0d
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In some ways this was Goethe's greatest achievement: the search for the serial relationships in nature, emphasizing border experiences, the junctures where "the real joints of nature" are located, is most likely to reveal the process of change, development, organizing principles. This is also why it needed individuals who were both poet and scientist, who could combine "imagination, observation and thought in the act of language."
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Peter Watson |
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3219ad8
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has profoundly modified the whole trend of modern civilisation, imposing her thought, her standards, her literary forms, her imagery, her visions and dreams wherever she is known. But Germany is the supreme example of her triumphant spiritual tyranny. The Germans have imitated the Greeks more slavishly: they have been obsessed by them more utterly...
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Peter Watson |
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dd9207f
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Cardinal Bellarmino, whom we shall meet in Chapter 25 as the leader of the Catholic Church's resistance to Copernicus, also said: 'God wills that man should in some measure know him through his creatures, and because no single created thing could fitly represent the infinite perfection of the Creator, he multiplied creatures, and bestowed on each a certain degree of goodness and perfection, that from these we might form some idea of the goo..
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Peter Watson |