Michael > Recent Status Updates

"We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant."

"Indeed we may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control."

"It's strange, isn't it?' the woman said in a pensive voice. 'Everything is blowing up around us, but there are still those who care about a broken lock, and others who are dutiful enough to try to fix it... But maybe that's the way it should be. Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart."

"Tobacco's a killer."
"Being alive is a killer, if you think about it"

“There were times he thought it would have been far better to never have known. Yet he continued to return to his core principle: that, in every situation, knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong.”

The sheer horror of possibly not grasping the "thing-in-itself." Wild that Kant, in trying to answer philosophical questions, helped lay some of the foundations for psychology.

This is such a well written, enlightening book. Kant's contribution to philosophy through the differentiation of analytic and synthetic judgments (and in particular the question of how we can know something without having encountered it) is incredible on its own. That Kant also helped shape our understanding of spacetime (event though his theory was incorrect) and basically pioneered nebula theory is astonishing.

Quite illuminating. Kant's writings on cosmopolitism not only were foundational to the development of international bodies such as a league o nations but also helped establish the idea of a refugee in his essay "Towards a perpetual peace."...