Daniel Ginsburg
@dginsburg
Daniel Ginsburg
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. - James Baldwin
It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backward,” Kierkegaard sagely wrote in his journal, in 1843. “But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forward.”
the phantom limb was already there but revealed by the amputation
Oliver Sacks
Such a “glimmering perception” of nature’s interdependence, Humboldt observes, was always present in so-called “primitive” societies as kind of shadow form, intuited rather than investigated, until science emerged to illuminate its elemental truth through its process of “long and laborious observation.”
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
Science can, and does, get there eventually. It is just that the process is slow and laborious, and along the way dogmas can get stuck, and some people forget that that is all part of the process. But, that is all part of the process.
Galen Strawson, who claimed to have no sense of himself as a continuously evolving being—a creature whose self consisted of a coherent story about accumulating memories and distinctive traits. Strawson was, for that reason, uninterested in his past. He acknowledged that his life had shaped him, but he believed that whether or not he consciously... See more
For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs... why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? - Thomas Hobbes