“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, April 15, 2012

Harman on Modularity

I like this line:

"There is a certain modularity of philosophical insights that doesn’t hold for geometrical or arithmetical proofs, where any antecedent errors spoil everything else that comes later. Philosophy doesn’t work like that. You can think that the metaphysical underpinnings of Aristotle or Spinoza are rubbish, but still profit greatly from all that emanates from the supposed rubbish."

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