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In case you imagine that we Stoics are the only people who produce noble sayings, let me tell you something – see that you put this down to my credit, even though I have already settled my account with you for today – Epicurus himself, who has nothing good to say for Stilbo, has uttered a statement quite like this one of Stilbo’s. ‘Any man,’ he say

For Brandom, Hegel was trying to deal with two connected problems. The first comes from the skeptical argument that we cannot have genuine knowledge. Kant had shown that we can have knowledge of the phenomenal world, in the combination of the sensuous manifold and concepts. Straw-yellowness, ambrosiality, viscosity, coldness and so on all come toge

If I think or claim that the car is in the garage, then, built into that claim is the idea that this may be true or false. But when I think that, say, slavery is morally wrong, I think something that could not be otherwise than true (even if others should disagree). But then, according to the Tractatus, in ethical thought, I am not representing how

The credence that could no longer be given to realities understood in the form of images was now being given to realities understood to be images, illusions. In the preface to the second edition (1843) of The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach observes about “our era” that it “prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representa

Paul Goodman famously wrote, “Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!” It’s an argument for tiny and temporary victories, and for the possibility of partial victories

This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt. But at the same

Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own

There are many respectable and even conventionally moral people for whom there is no other reality in life than their body and its relationship with “things.” They have reduced themselves to a life lived within the limits of their five senses. Their self is consequently an illusion based on sense experience and nothing else. For these the body beco

I didn’t have any real proof. I was mostly just taking out my frustration. Yet I got stuck on that idea. I needed it. A color to paint my blank mind. Something to burn on the fuel of my feelings so I wouldn’t have to think.