My favorite part of Plato’s The Republic.
(via rigatonideology)
By way of fullerenes:
from Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Bantam, 1980), 14.
Fueled by amphetamines after a sleepless week, he choked on the written portion and turned in a blank sheet of paper. The same month, he was awarded a dismal 5 out of 20 on his qualifying exam for a license in philosophy. “The answers are brilliant in the very same way that they are obscure,” the examiner wrote, encapsulating a sentiment about Derrida’s work that has since become a commonplace:
“An exercise in virtuosity, with undeniable intelligence, but with no particular relation to the history of philosophy….Can come back when he is prepared to accept the rules and not invent where he needs to be better informed.”
Robert Paul Wolff reflects on reading and analyzing major and minor works by great philosophers:
[T]he distinctive mark of the truly great philosophers … is that they were able to see more deeply than they could say, and refused to relinquish their grasp on that deeper insight merely to achieve surface consistency. It was therefore always worthwhile to wrestle with them, struggling to liberate the deeper insights. Since it is inevitably a matter of judgment what is deep and what is not, what is worthwhile and what is not, we keep returning to those great texts, generation after generation.
A huevo, yo sabía. h/t: Profe
A brief conceptual history of Philosophy
Does philosophy make progress? Of course, but it does so differently from, say, science. Here is a brief conceptual history of how philosophy evolved over time, from the all-purpose approach of the ancient Greeks to the highly specialized academic discipline it is today.
