Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition Quotes

“Ten shockingly arty events What arty types like to call a ‘creative tension’ exists in art and music, about working right at the limits of public taste. Plus, there’s money to be made there. Here’s ten examples reflecting both motivations. Painting: Manet’s Breakfast on the Lawn, featuring a group of sophisticated French aristocrats picnicking outside, shocked the art world back in 1862 because one of the young lady guests is stark naked! Painting: Balthus’s Guitar Lesson (1934), depicting a teacher fondling the private parts of a nude pupil, caused predictable uproar. The artist claimed this was part of his strategy to ‘make people more aware’. Music: Jump to 1969 when Jimi Hendrix performed his own interpretation of the American National Anthem at the hippy festival Woodstock, shocking the mainstream US. Film: In 1974 censors deemed Night Porter, a film about a love affair between an ex-Nazi SS commander and his beautiful young prisoner (featuring flashbacks to concentration camp romps and lots of sexy scenes in bed with Nazi apparel), out of bounds. Installation: In December 1993 the 50-metre-high obelisk in the Place Concorde in the centre of Paris was covered in a giant fluorescent red condom by a group called ActUp. Publishing: In 1989 Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses outraged Islamic authorities for its irreverent treatment of Islam. In 2005 cartoons making political points about Islam featuring the prophet Mohammed likewise resulted in riots in many Muslim cities around the world, with several people killed. Installation: In 1992 the soon-to-be extremely rich English artist Damien Hirst exhibited a 7-metre-long shark in a giant box of formaldehyde in a London art gallery – the first of a series of dead things in preservative. Sculpture: In 1999 Sotheby’s in London sold a urinoir or toilet-bowl-thing by Marcel Duchamp as art for more than a million pounds ($1,762,000) to a Greek collector. He must have lost his marbles! Painting: Also in 1999 The Holy Virgin Mary, a painting by Chris Ofili representing the Christian icon as a rather crude figure constructed out of elephant dung, caused a storm. Curiously, it was banned in Australia because (like Damien Hirst’s shark) the artist was being funded by people (the Saatchis) who stood to benefit financially from controversy. Sculpture: In 2008 Gunther von Hagens, also known as Dr Death, exhibited in several European cities a collection of skinned corpses mounted in grotesque postures that he insists should count as art.”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“All the art experts, all the big galleries, if not maybe quite all of the humble folk who look at them, agree Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings do indeed count as great art. And JP intended it to be art too. But what’s curious about most of the most radical artists of the post-Second World War period is that they came from nowhere to prominence with the support of . . . the CIA! Yes, the American secret services actively promoted (through books, funding schemes, newspapers and of course galleries) radical art as part of a labyrinthine strategy to undermine the Soviet Union. This was all part of a special strategy to win over intellectuals – including philosophers – described as ‘the battle for Picasso’s mind’ by one former CIA agent, Thomas Braden, in a television interview in the 1970s. Tom Braden was responsible for dispensing money under the heading Congress for Cultural Freedom. Naturally, most of the people he gave money to had no idea that the funds, and hence the artistic direction, actually came from the CIA. Intellectuals and great artists, after all, hate being told what to think. And what was the communist empire doing meanwhile? They were promoting, through galleries, public funding and so on, a very different kind of art supposedly reflecting communist political values. ‘Soviet realism’ was a kind of reaction to ‘Western Impressionism’ (all those dotty – pointilliste the art-experts call them – landscapes and swirling, subjective shapes) and ensured that people in the paintings looked like people, decent, hard-working types too, and what’s more were doing worthy things – like making tractors or (at least) looking inspirationally at the viewer. When Soviet art wasn’t figurative (as this sort of stuff is called), it was very logical and mathematical, full of precise geometrical shapes and carefully weighted blocks of colour.”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“But a more deadly example of why rights matter was shown by what happened in the early years of the United States to America’s unfortunate Cherokee Indians. These were one of the continent’s original races, who had on paper become a recognised partner in the newly United States. The Americans confiscated the Cherokee’s land under a special law called the Indian Removal Act, and whose idea was that? None other than Thomas Jefferson who’d written those glowing words for the Declaration of Independence that I start the chapter with!”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“The Communist Manifesto (like anarchism, the rival ideology at the time) requires of its adherents a great deal of blind faith. In this, it’s more of a religious doctrine than a scientific theory. For this reason, it’s not surprising that the words of the Manifesto actually took root among the pre-industrial societies of Africa, China, South America and Russia – among the ‘rural idiots’, as Marx and Engels used to refer to people who worked on the land.”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“Plutarch on eating flesh Plutarch would have spoilt many a traditional Christmas Dinner . . . imagine him there, grim faced as the turkey is brought out: It all began the same way that tyrants began to slaughter men. At Athens the first man they put to death was the worst of their informers, who everyone said deserved it. The second was the same sort of man, and so was the third. But after that, the Athenians were accustomed to bloodshed and looked on passively when Niceratus, son of Nicias, and the general Thramenes, and Polemarchus the philosopher were executed. In the same way the first animal was killed and eaten was a wild and mischievous beast, and then a bird and a fish were caught. And murder, being thus tried and practised upon creatures like these, arrived at the labouring ox, and the sheep that clothes us, and the cock that guards our house. And little by little, our desires hardening, we proceeded to the slaughter of men, wars and massacres. Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds . .”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“Many New Testament verses call for obedience and subservience on the part of slaves (Colossians 3:22–25; Ephesians 6:5–9; I Peter 2:18–25; Titus 2:9–10; I Timothy 6:1–2), and people used the verses to justify human slavery.”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“As long ago as the early 1980s, a UK government poster depicted a human being as a 2,048,000 kilobyte memory. (That’s only two megabytes – about one song on an iPod – but at the time it sounded a lot!)”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organised by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organise it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“jiggery pokery – which is the ancient nomadic term for doing things with words.”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“Politics and the English Language Orwell says the following on the use of euphemism by politicians: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“Finally, the word important derives straightforwardly from the practical activity of trade, and emportas and exports. The implication is that something imported is noteworthy and interesting.”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“Another curious case is that of the word assassin, which you may use to describe a certain kind of politically motivated killer. The word derives from the historical case of a certain religious sect that used to murder people while under the influence of hashis. The word for someone who smokes hashish is hashashin.”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“I really believe that languages are the best mirror of the human mind, and that a precise analysis of the significations of words would tell us more than anything else about the operations of the understanding. – Leibniz”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognised, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is there that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversible animal than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old? But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“However, it’s in a less formal book by Bentham, The Commonplace Book, that you find the phrase ‘the happiness of the greatest number’, which really sums up the philosophy. (‘commonplace books’ being a kind of posh scrapbook popular at the time with intellectuals to copy out their favourite poems and so on.)”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition

“In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison.”
― Martin Cohen, Philosophy For Dummies, UK Edition