Michael Natkin

“A gang of burglars acting in the country might be expected to vary the scene of their operations, and not to crack two cribs in the same district within a few days.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes ebook: All 56 Stories and 4 Novels

“The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things; the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

“This is not antidemocratic. When the humanity of others who were previously invisible becomes apparent to us for the first time, I think it is because we have noticed something particular in them. By contrast, egalitarian empathy, projected from afar and without discrimination, is more principled than attentive. It is content to posit rather than to see the humanity of its beneficiaries. But the one who is on the receiving end of such empathy wants something more than to be recognized generically. He wants to be seen as an individual, and”
― Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

“Pippin puts Hegel’s point sharply when he writes, “You have not executed an intention successfully unless others attribute to you the deed and intention you attribute to yourself.”1”
― Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction