A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 am and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 pm to make th...is molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led eith...er to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo- scholarship which actually destroys its object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
the moderate Aristotelian city Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry... And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience, And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A pseudo-event ... comes about because someone has planned it, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an ea...rthquake, but an interview.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more fami...liarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realiti...es; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo pro...blems.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that anyone born an Aristotelian can become a Platoni...st; and I am sure that no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are two classes of man, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality or attribute; the other considers it a power.... Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding--the faculty judging by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both were predominantly ethical in aim and doctrine; theory of knowledge (logic) and of nature (physics) served rather as the scaf...folding rather than as an integral portion of their philosophic structure, while metaphysics, the kernel of Platonic and Aristotelian speculation, receded altogether into the background.... When we ask as to the nature of the philosophic life, the two schools give widely different answers. To the Stoic, it consists in following virtue, in obedience to an authoritative law of nature or reason; the sage, by subjugating emotion, and by detachment from the restless world of circumstance, disciplines his soul to self-sufficiency and inward independence. To the Epicurean, the good life is that of rational enjoyment of all the satisfactions which the world affords.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »