I want to block some common misunderstandings about 'understanding': In many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word 'understanding.'
There are clear cases in which 'understanding' literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.
Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples.
Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.
Berkeley had a liberal element in the student body who tended to be quite active. I think that's in general a feature of intellectually active places.
We need to put strong Democratic pressure on President Obama in the name of poor and working people.
A new kind of mind thus beings to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue.
And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call 'sustained incoherence.
But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.
We havent really paid much attention to thought as a process. we have engaged in thoughts, but we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process.
Here, the broader issues are already familiar, and discussion has focused at a more sophisticated and detailed level. Within the philosophy of mind, the problem of consciousness is no big news.
It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests.
It's when we start working together that the real healing takes place... it's when we start spilling our sweat, and not our blood.
Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.
I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.
In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.
These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.
Humanity may endure the loss of everything; all its possessions may be turned away without infringing its true dignity - all but the possibility of improvement.
Full surely there is a blessedness beyond the grave for those who have already entered on it here, and in no other form than that wherein they know it here, at any moment.
Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path... this is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am.
