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“Leisure is the mother of philosophy; and Commonwealth, the mother of peace and leisure” (455)

Some serious logical sleight of hand in this book.

“in all things not contrary to the moral law (that is to say, the law of nature) all subjects are bound to obey that for divine law which is declared to be so by the laws of the commonwealth” (188).

"it is an easy thing for men to be deceived by the specious name of liberty and (for want of judgment to distinguish) mistake that for their private inheritance and birth right, which is the right of the public only" (140)

To my North Carolina friends: You might like to know that Joy Harjo (Former US Poet Laureate) will be giving a free public reading at Duke University Chapel on Tuesday, March 3rd at 6:00 pm. The event is ticketed, but tickets are free. Public registration begins on February 5th at https://chapel.duke.edu/news/former-p...

“The richer we get in a consumer society, the more acutely we become aware of how many grades of value—of both leisure and labor—we have climbed. The higher we are on the pyramid, the less likely we are to give up time to simple idleness and the apparently nonproductive pursuits” (80)

“The interlocked conceptual scheme of physical objects, identity, and divided reference is part of the ship which, in Neurath’s figure, we cannot remodel save as we stay afloat in it […] we are not in a position to jettison any part of it, except as we have substitution devices ready to hand” (123-124). Language is not merely referential but an integral medium of beliefs and ontological commitments.

“Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives” (13)

“If we can observe that an event of a certain kind is a sufficient condition of an earlier event of some other kind, it does not seem to matter much whether we choose to call that latter event the ‘cause’ of the earlier or not: the question rather is why we should not use this observed regularity as we use those that operate from earlier to later” (320)

From “Can an Effect Precede its Cause?”

“O is small;
If N is small, N + 1 is small;
Therefore, every number is small”

(256)

Wang’s Paradox, the inverse of the Greek paradox of the heap. Imagine a small number (N) such that N + 1 is not also a small number.

A problem in vague statements and the measurement of truth in bivalent terms.

"it seems that we ought to interpose between the platonist and the constructivist picture an intermediate picture, say of objects springing into being in response to our probing. We do not make the objects but must accept them as we find them [...] but they were not already there for our statements to be true or false of before we carried out the investigations which brought them into being" (185)

“The mental images that a word may arouse in the mind of a speaker or hearer are irrelevant to its meaning, which consists, rather, in the part played by the word in determining the truth-conditions of sentences in which it occurs” (94)

“We no longer explain the sense of a statement by stipulating it’s truth-value in terms of the truth-values of its constituents, but by stipulating the when it may be asserted in terms of the conditions under which its constituents may be asserted” (18). True is what is decidedly or determinantly true by reference to the situation of use.

“the city is a partnership of similar persons, for the sake of a life that is the best possible” (209)

“Spiritedness perverts rulers and the best men. Hence law is intellect without appetite” (114)

“The greatest injustices are committed out of excess, then, not because of necessary things—no one becomes a tyrant in order to get out of the cold” (68-69)

"You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it it a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!" (403)

“He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no—they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave them sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity“ (148)

On assessing the truth of propositions: “the objects we suppose our sentences to be about are nothing but the shadows of certain parts of speech, and shadows we do not need in explaining truth. Truth itself is not a relation between a statement and something the statement is about” (45-46).

“About Socrates no conventional literary work can be written, for Socrates does not treat the events around him as worthy of much regard. The only ‘plot’ in which he takes an interest is the unfolding of the argument” (64)

The unity of reason is the unity of a system, and this systematic unity does not serve reason objectively as a principle, extending it over objects, but subjectively as a maxim, in order to extend it over all possible empirical cognitions of objects (610)

“Every beginning is in time, and every boundary of the extended is in space. Space and time, however, are only in the world of sense. Hence appearances are in the world only conditionally, the world itself is neither conditioned nor bounded in an unconditioned way” (527)

“Everywhere, things snagged me. The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world” (160)

“If, therefore we say: The senses represent objects to us as they appear, but the understanding as they are, then the latter is not going to be taken in a transcendental but in a merely empirical way, signifying, namely, how they must be represented as objects of experience […]” (364)

“the categories [i.e., of analytic judgement] do not afford us cognition of things by means of intuition except through their possible application to empirical intuition, i.e., they serve only for the possibility of empirical cognition. This, however, is called experience” (255). An elegant argument that escapes the difficulties Locke and Hume faced in deriving understanding from experience.

“all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance” (185)

"we have immeasurably more reason to congratulate ourselves than to complain of our lot, since for most of our hardships we have only ourselves to blame. It would be especially wrong to complain of the deficiencies in our knowledge, when we make so little use of the knowledge which kindly nature does give to us" (388)

Settembrini: “I represent the world, the interest of this life, against a sentimental withdrawal and negation, classicism against romanticism” (249).

“And Hans Castorp saw, precisely what he might have expected, but what is hardly permitted a man to see, and what he never thought it would be vouchsafed him to see: he looked into his own grave” (218)