Daniel Gill

“Big Sister Shen tells me this used to be a sleepy fishing village. But with the economic reforms and the opening up of China, urbanization brought construction everywhere. To get more compensation when the government exercised its eminent domain powers, villagers raced to build tall towers on their land so as to maximize the square footage of the residential space. But before they could cash in, real estate prices had risen to the point where even the government could no longer afford to pay compensation. These hastily erected buildings remain like historical ruins, witnesses to history.”
― Ken Liu, Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation

“Parmenides was offering a rational deduction. He starts from a basic principle—that you can have “is,” but you can’t have “is not”—and then proceeds to explore the consequences, whatever they might be. Whatever we make of his argument, this is a real quantum leap in the history of philosophy. Parmenides is not just offering explanations of what he can see around him, though he goes on to do that in the way of opinion. Rather, he puts all his trust in reason itself, and trusts the power of argument more than he trusts the evidence of his own eyes and ears. This is not to say that Parmenides is the first Pre-Socratic to offer arguments. Already with Thales, I suggested that he may have had implicit arguments for his views on water and the claim that everything is full of gods. Nonetheless Parmenides does represent something new. He tries to settle an abstract philosophical issue—the nature of being itself—with an explicit and complex deductive argument.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“If you think about it, nearly all argumentative discussion works like this: a topic for debate is identified, and the parties to the discussion try to find some point of agreement as a basis for further argument. If no point of agreement is found, then no argument is possible. Arguing without agreed premises isn’t rational disputation, it’s just posturing and shouting—I refer you to the political debating shows one sees on television nowadays.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“Socrates is without doubt the most influential and famous philosopher who never wrote anything.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy