To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels l...ike knowledge--and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern organic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To a first approximation, the intentional strategy consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rationa...l agent with beliefs and desires and other mental states exhibiting what Brentano and others call intentionality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...if we would be and do all that as a rational being we should desire, we must resolve to govern ourselves; we must seek diversit...y of interests; dread to be without an object and without mental occupation; and try to balance work for the body and work for the mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would not... follow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Dada object reflected an ironic posture before the consecrated forms of art. The surrealist object differs significantly in th...is respect. It stands for a mysterious relationship with the outer world established by man's sensibility in a way that involves concrete forms in projecting the artist's inner model.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has ...some indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Treating 'water' as a name of a single scattered object is not intended to enable us to dispense with general terms and plurality ...of reference. Scatter is in fact an inconsequential detail.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantation...s. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No further evidence is needed to show that "mental illness" is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be el...ucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »