philosophy

"The appearance of Spinoza, however, fundamentally changes the entire religious picture in the West. He emancipated philosophy from theology and taught man to think in metaphysical and universalistic r…"

"Spinoza remained throughout his life, and well into the eighteenth century, a thinker whom one could admire only in secret, hiding one's sympathy just as his Marrano antecedents had concealed their wa…"

"“is the only archaeologically documented west-to-east movement of human populations in South Asia before the first half of the first millennium BC”, while the archaeological record shows “no significa…"

"When I was at Tek, I was frustrated that computer hardware was being improved faster than computer software. I wanted to invent some software that was completely different, that would grow and change …"

"This makes it all the more important that our fallible ideas be examined as all ideas are in the realm of reason, not as some doctrinal or racial heresy. None of us — none of us have been appointed by…"

"Not unexpectedly, no one believes that everything is useless, and with good reason. We all live in relative frameworks, and within those frameworks uselessness is far wide from the norm. A potato mash…"

"Five hundred years ago the notoriously savvy Henry VIII discovered an elegant way to solve both his theological problems and his personal liquidity crisis—he dissolved the monasteries and nicked all t…"

"Questions and Answers by Thich Nhat Hanh"

"It may be accepted that philosophical thoughts are universal in the sense of being of interest to humans from anywhere on the planet However, if we do not want to formulate this universality in metaph…"

"There is an extraordinary silence in the West. Basically, Christianity in the Middle East and in Africa is being wiped out – I mean not just ideologically but physically, and people are being enslaved…"

"Lampis, the sea commander, being asked how he got his wealth, answered, "My greatest estate I gained easily enough, but the smaller slowly and with much labour."

"If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years."

"Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal, so there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They are all mammals"

"Does the hon. Gentleman accept that some of us oppose the agreement for reasons other than those that he has given? We believe that the agreement strengthens rather than weakens the border between the…"

"Observations interpreted by reason. Few, if any, ideas have had such impact on the lives of men."

"Even if Melissus’s analysis of the concept of existence is faulty, his procedure is very interesting. He challenges the data of sense experience by appealing to conceptual truths, facts about what a c…"

"Two systems of Hindu thought propound physical theories suggestively similar to those of Greece. Kanada, founder of the Vaisheshika philosophy, held that the world was composed of atoms as many in kin…"

"The league at Allstedt wanted to establish this principle, Omnia sunt communia, ‘All property should be held in common’ and should be distributed to each according to his needs, as the occasion requir…"

"There's nothing wrong with being a loser, it just depends on how good you are at it."

"There is just no sensible, logical reason why we would not make use of stem cell research."