[A] right, he said there, is only the hypostasis of a prophecy—the imagination of a substance supporting the fact that the public force will be brought to bear upon those who do things to contravene i...
Mixed with this frustration was the suspicion that Northern lives were being wasted because of mismanagement and political meddling, a suspicion reinforced by Lincoln’s firing of McClellan, who, despi...
What are the liberal arts and sciences? They are simply fields in which knowledge is pursued disinterestedly—that is, without regard to political, economic, or practical benefit. Disinterestedness doe...
If behaving as though we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.
If behaving as thought we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.
…in a universe in which events are uncertain and perception is fallible, knowing cannot be a matter of an individual mind ‘mirroring’ reality. Each mind reflects differently—even the same mind reflect...
The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence.
The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States is business. Twenty-two percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that field. Ten percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded in ed...
Scientific and religious beliefs are important to people; but they are (usually) neither foundational premises, backing one outcome in advance against all others, nor ex post facto rationalizations, d...
Of course civilizations are aggressive, Holmes says, but when they take up arms in order to impose their conception of civility on others, they sacrifice their moral advantage. Organized violence, at...
The broader appeal of statistics lay in the idea of an order beneath apparent randomness. Individuals—molecules or humans—might act unpredictably, but statistics seemed to show that in the aggregate t...
That to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.
Knowledge is cut off from the activity in which it has its meaning, and becomes a false abstraction.
In modern societies, the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of life are not thought to be given; they are thought to be discovere...
Active habit involving an exertion of will.
[Quatelet’s first claim to catch attention] was that since (as he believed he had shown) there is a ‘law’ governing the amount of crime in a society, moral responsibility for crime must lie with the s...
James believed that scientific inquiry, like any other form of inquiry, is an activity inspired and informed by our tastes, values, and hopes. But this does not, in his view, confer any special author...
[Addams’s] idea was that the conflict between Pullman and his workers was analogous to the conflict between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia in Shakespeare’s play: an old set of values, predicated...
The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to...
If you look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them up in a dictionary, leading to more words that can be l...
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