Chris Via > Recent Status Updates

"We get so used to patterns of interpretation we forget the patterns are there" (98).

"Everybody wants their children to be valedictorians, but nobody is supposed to be better than anybody else" (87).

"...the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals... It doesn't matter what the moral code is...they're all the same. The moral code changes but the meanness and the egotism stay the same" (83).

The problem wasn't that it wasn't true. The problem was that nobody was interested (57).

The moral codes change but the meanness and egotism stay the same (83).

Couldn't help it--I needed more Pirsig.

"At one time [Plotinus] formed a project of founding Plato's Republic in the Campania, and building for the purpose a new city to be called Platonopolis. The Emperor, at first, was favourable, but ultimately withdrew he permission" (287).

"Scepticism was a lazy man's consolation, since it showed the ignorant to be as wise as the reputed men of learning" (234).

"The Stoic ethic suited the times of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, because its gospel was one of endurance rather than hope" (262).

"In philosophy, the Arabs were better as commentators than as original thinkers" (283).

The Arabs preserved classical Greek culture.

The perfect cure for writer's block!

Moving into cynics, sceptics, stoics, and Epicureans: "Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat" (232).

"The conception of 'substance,' like that of 'essence,' is a transference to metaphysics of what is only linguistic convenience" (201).

"...when we take away the properties, and try to imagine the substance by itself, we find that there is nothing left" (201).

"We come now to the famous doctrine of [Aristotle's] the golden mean. Every virtue is a mean between two extremes, each of which is a vice" (173).

"..an individual cannot fulfill his purpose unless his is part of a State" (186).

"[Aristotle] came at the end of the creative period of Greek thought, and after his death it was two thousand years before the world produced any philosopher who could be regarded as approximately his equal" (159).

"It was the imperialism of Athens in the age of Pericles that made it possible for Athenians to study philosophy" (138). Compare, for example, the life of a Spartan, who values war-readiness above all else.

Plato: "...all things which have opposites are generated from their opposites" (139). "...knowledge is recollection, and therefore the soul must have existed before birth" (139).

"...Plato was the most important in early Christianity, Aristotle in the medieval Church; but when, after the Renaissance, men began to value political freedom, it was above all to Plutarch that they turned" (101).

"The close connection between virtue and knowledge is characteristic of Socrates and Plato" (92).

"...no man sins wittingly, and therefore only knowledge is needed to make all men perfectly virtuous" (92; Russell explaining the position taken in the Platonic Socrates).

Russell's view of Plato is that he is not only a philosopher, but an "imaginative writer of great genius and charm" (84). He casts doubt on the historical person of Socrates, but heralds Plato's creation.

"The atomists, unlike Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, sought to explian the world without introducing the notion of PURPOSE or FINAL CAUSE [i.e. teleology]" (66-67).

"...experience has shown that the mechanistic question leads to scientific knowledge, while the teleological question does not" (67)

"The doctrine of perpetual flux, as taught by Heraclitus (Panta Rhei), is painful, and science, as we have seen, can do nothing to refute it. One of the main ambitions of philosophers has been to revive hopes that science seems to have killed. Philosopher, accordingly, have sought, with great persistence, for something not subject to the empire of Time. This search begins with Parmenides" (47).

"It has only been very slowly that scientific method, which seeks to reach principles inductively from observation of particular facts, has replaced the Hellenic belief in deduction from luminous axioms derived from the mind of the philosopher" (39).

"In all history, nothing is so surprising or so difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece" (3).

"When they [the Greeks] discovered how to make beer, they thought intoxication divine, and gave honor to Bacchus. When, later, they came to know the vine and learn to drink wine, they thought even better of him" (14).

"Every community us exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; and on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible" (xxiii).