Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
We have discussed how keywords lead to governing metaphors (“metaphors we live by”) and how those metaphors do a tremendous amount of underground work, directing our responses to others in ways that we’re often unaware of.
Alan Jacobs • How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds
“There has long been an assumed dichotomy between research-driven and personal writing, with the former [construed as] rigorous and intellectual and male, and the latter frivolous and easy and female.”
Sarah Menkedick
Comparing, differentiating and connecting notes are the basis of good academic writing, but playing and tinkering with ideas is what leads to insight and exceptional texts.
Sönke Ahrens • How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers
Dashiel Hammett’s The Glass Key poses different dilemmas when read as literature or as a popular detective story.
Henry Jenkins • Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
In regard to the state of nature, Locke was less original than Hobbes, who regarded it as one in which there was war of all against all, and life was nasty, brutish, and short. But Hobbes was reputed an atheist. The view of the state of nature and of natural law which Locke accepted from his predecessors cannot be freed from its theological basis;
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
Genuine historians therefore reverse the assumption of the observers of nature that the observation itself cannot be an act of nature. Historians who understand themselves to be historical abandon explanation altogether. The mode of discourse appropriate to such self-aware history is narrative.
James P. Carse • Finite and Infinite Games
Pocock argues that right through the nineteenth century this Old World preoccupation with virtue as a sacred, rational and timeless value persisted in America, and the vision of history as dynamic and creative in its “linear capacity to bring about incessant qualitative transformations of human life” struggled to emerge in pure form.