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By one recent historical measure, China and India in 1750 produced three-quarters of the world’s manufactures. On the eve of the First World War their share had dropped to just 7.5 per cent.
“The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”
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“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”
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“The term persona comes to us from the Roman and Etruscan theater, where it denoted the mask worn by the actor and therefore the character whom the actor portrayed. The term was borrowed by Roman law to describe any entity that has judiciable rights and duties, including corporate entities and other more abstract constructions. It was borrowed again by early Christian theologians in order to explain the doctrine of the Trinity, by distinguishing the three persons of God. Discussions of the Trinity led to the view that personhood belongs to the essence of whatever possesses it, and the sixth-century philosopher Boethius took this as his cue in defining the essential nature of the human being. For Boethius the human person is “an individual substance of a rational nature.”19 That definition was adopted by Aquinas and remained in place until the Enlightenment, when two great philosophers—Locke and Kant—saw fit to reexamine the whole idea and untangle its many strands. According to Boethius’s”
― On Human Nature
― On Human Nature
“We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.”
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“In a broader sense, the value of heirlooms is always, as I have said, an historical value, derived from acts of production, use, or appropriation that have involved the object in the past. The value of an heirloom is really that of actions: actions whose significance has been, as it were, absorbed into the object’s current identity—whether the emphasis is placed on the inspired labors of the artist who created it, the lengths to which some people have been known to go to acquire it, or the fact that it was once used to cut off a mythical giant’s head. Since the value of the actions has already been fixed in the physical being of the object, it is perhaps a short leap to begin attributing the agency behind such actions to the object as well, and speak, as Mauss does, of valuables that transfer themselves from owner to owner or actively influence their owners’ fates. The”
― Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams
― Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams
Paul’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Paul’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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