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"This book (especially the editor footnotes) is giving me a braingasm." — Mar 10, 2026 10:59AM
"This book (especially the editor footnotes) is giving me a braingasm." — Mar 10, 2026 10:59AM
“It would indeed seem more expedient to treat the history of thought in terms borrowed from biology..(, with) "evolution" .. a wasteful, fumbling process characterized by sudden mutations of unknown cause, by the slow grinding of selection, and by the dead-ends of overspecialization and rigid inadaptability.. New ideas are thrown up spontaneously like mutations; the vast majority of them are useless crank theories, the equivalent of biological freaks without survival-value. There is a constant struggle for survival between competing theories in every branch of the history of thought. The process of "natural selection", too, has its equivalent in mental evolution: among the multitude of new concepts which emerge only those survive which are well adapted to the period's intellectual milieu. A new theoretical concept will live or die according to whether it can come to terms with this environment..”
― The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe
― The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe
“..It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils...
From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race”
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From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race”
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“In the 1950s, at the very beginning of the integration process, Raymond Aron wrote that “the European idea is empty, it has neither the transcendence of messianic ideologies nor the immanence of concrete patriotism.” Aron was half right. The idea of Europe did not evoke emotional commitment. It did not stir people’s hearts as nations sometimes had done. It was not something for which many would have been willing to give their lives. But the European idea was not empty—or rather, it only seemed empty when compared to the traditional idea of the nation. The European idea was full, not of national enthusiasm and patriotic passion, but of a widespread commitment to escape the destructive antagonisms of the past..”
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“We are in the habit of visualizing .. the history of science as a steady, cumulative process,.. where each epoch adds some new item of knowledge to the legacy of the past, making the temple of science grow brick by brick to ever greater height.. In fact, .. the philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de-sac, regressions, periods of blindness and amnesia. The great discoveries .. were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after quite different hares. At other times, the process of discovery consisted merely in the cleaning away of the rubbish that blocked the path, or in the rearranging of existing items of knowledge in a different pattern.. Europe knew less geometry in the fifteenth century than in Archimedes' time.”
― The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe
― The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe
“..First, we need to get clear on the subject matter of mathematics. What is mathematics about? Is it really concerned with abstract objects..? We obviously need to listen to what mathematics itself has to say.. As Frege emphasized, however, the questions are also in part concerned with language. How should the language of mathematics be analyzed? Should apparent talk about numbers and sets be taken at face value? This concern with language means that we shall also need assistance from linguistics and perhaps also psychology. Second, we need to understand how mathematicians.. settle on their first principles (or axioms), and how do they use these to prove mathematical results (or theorems)? .. The challenge is to make our answers to these two sets of questions mesh. How is it that our ways of forming mathematical beliefs are responsive to what mathematics is about? How are the practices and mechanisms by which we arrive at our mathematical beliefs conducive to finding out about whatever reality mathematics describes? In short, why is it not just a happy accident that our mathematical beliefs tend to be true? There must be something about what we do that keeps us on the right track., Since the challenge is to integrate the metaphysics of mathematics (namely, what mathematics is about) with its epistemology (namely, how we form our mathematical beliefs), we shall call this the integration challenge.”
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