language

Protagoras observed a strange paradox about language. Despite the perpetual flux and change of the physical world, language lends the mistaken impression that the world is not in flux, that it is stable. As the Presocratic philosopher Empedocles had observed only a few years before, ‘there is no birth for any mortal thing, nor any cursed end in

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Moreover, we should embrace the fact that what we are witnessing is the creation of a new branch of engineering. The term “engineering” is often

invoked in a narrow sense — in academia and beyond — with overtones of cold, affectless machinery, and negative connotations of loss of control by humans. But an engineering discipline can be what we want... See more