Ideas Quotes

“At the same time the government must not be too strong to threaten the liberty of its citizens or the prosperity that derived from local government.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

“conocimiento”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: Historia intelectual de la humanidad (Serie Mayor)

“This complex structure, in which people were required to predict the behaviour of others in social situations, is generally regarded as the mechanism by which consciousness evolved. In predicting the behaviour of others, an individual would have acquired a sense of self.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

“Above all we get by in societies where the often anonymous state is there to guard against the crude selfishness of human nature.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“Un zoológico es una mejor ventana desde la cual observar el mundo humano que un monasterio”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

“Dado el triunfo del enfoque aristotélico tanto en el pasado remoto como inmediato, ¿no ha llegado quizá el momento de enfrentar la posibilidad, e incluso la probabilidad, de que la noción platónica del "Yo Interior" sea equívoca? Esto es, la posibilidad que no exista ese yo interior. Al buscar "dentro", no hemos encontrado nada-- nada estable en cualquier caso, nada perdurable, nada sobre lo cual podamos establecer un consenso, nada concluyente-- porqué no hay nada que encontrar. Los seres humanos somos parte de la naturaleza y, por tanto, es muy probable que aprendamos más sobre nuestro "ser interior"-sea sobre nosotros mismos, buscando fuera de nosotros atendiendo al lugar que tenemos en ella como animales. En lo cual, en palabras de John Gray <>”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

“Dado el triunfo del enfoque aristotélico tanto en el pasado remoto como inmediato, ¿no ha llegado quizá el momento de enfrentar la posibilidad, e incluso la probabilidad, de que la noción platónica del "Yo Interior" sea equívoca? Esto es, la posibilidad que no exista ese yo interior. Al buscar "dentro", no hemos encontrado nada-- nada estable en cualquier caso, nada perdurable, nada sobre lo cual podamos establecer un consenso, nada concluyente-- porqué no hay nada que encontrar. Los seres humanos somos parte de la naturaleza y, por tanto, es muy probable que aprendamos más sobre nuestro "ser interior"-sea sobre nosotros mismos, buscando fuera de nosotros atendiendo al lugar que tenemos en ella como animales. En lo cual, en palabras de John Gray .”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

“The Praise of Folly.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–c. 1525)”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“Poterunt discussis forte tenebris Ad puram priscumque iubar remeare nepotes Tunc Elicona noua reuitentem stripe iudebis Tunc lauros frondere sacras; tunc alta resurgent Ingenia atque animi dociles, quibus ardour honesti Pyeridum studii ueterem geminabit amorem.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“The proper concern of natural science is not what God could do if he wished, but what he has done; that is, what happens in the world “according to the inherent causes of nature”.’30 Aristotle had said that ‘to know . . . is to understand the causes of things’.31 We see here, in Albertus, the first”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“Another aspect of that legacy was the buoyant optimism in the schools. All the masters shared the view that man, even in his fallen state, was ‘capable of the fullest intellectual and spiritual enlargement’, that the universe was ordered and therefore accessible to rational inquiry, and that man’s mastery of his environment through his intellect, cumulative knowledge and experience was possible.22 Outside”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“John of Salisbury, an Englishman who had studied in numerous places, including Paris, placed logic central to understanding: ‘It was the mind which, by means of the ratio [reason], went beyond the experience of the senses and made it intelligible, then, by means of the intellectus, related things to their divine cause and comprehended the order of creation, and ultimately arrived at true knowledge, sapentia.’15 For us today, logic is an arid, desiccated word and has lost much of its interest.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“It seems to me a case of negligence if, after becoming firm in our faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“There were no lawns, flowers were never patterned – instead, individual plants were placed next to craggy rocks. And there was a complex symbolism of flowers. For example, the chrysanthemum, the flower of autumn, ‘stands for retirement and culture’; the water lily, ‘rising stainless from its bed of slime’, stands for purity and truth; the bamboo, ‘unbroken by the fiercest storm’, represents suppleness and strength but also lasting friendship and hardy age.65 ‘Asymmetrical and spontaneous, the Chinese garden is a statement of faith in Nature”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“This was due to the intervention of a benevolent ruler, King Sejong, who in 1403 issued an extraordinary decree, which sounds enlightened even today and must have been extremely so at the time. ‘To govern well,’ he said, ‘it is necessary to spread knowledge of the laws and the books, so as to satisfy reason and to reform men’s evil nature; in this way peace and order may be maintained.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus [AD 180]. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm and gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“Varro produced an influential encyclopaedia, Nine Books of Disciplines, in which he outlined nine arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine and architecture. Later writers omitted the last two arts.79 In Rome, by the end of the first century AD, education had been more or less standardised and the seven liberal arts identified. In turn, these would become the basis of medieval education,”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“Nor should we forget that, in Hebrew, the very name of Jesus (Ieshouah) means salvation. Allied”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“The significance of this is that it supports the view that the Bible was first assembled by Jews returning from the ‘second exile’ in Babylon (the ‘first’ being in Egypt), who compiled a narrative which was designed to do two things. In the first place, it purported to show that there was a precedent in ancient history for Jews to arrive from outside and take over the land; and second, in order to justify the claims to the land, the Covenant with God was invented, meaning that the Israelites needed a special God for this to happen, an entity very different from any other deity in the region.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“Nearly our entire intellectual education originates from the Greeks. A thorough knowledge of their origin is the indisputable prerequisite for freeing ourselves from their overwhelming influence.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“Epicurus, on the other hand, says something very different, ‘Man is not by nature adapted for living in civic communities.’98 Nothing, he adds, is an end in itself except individual happiness. Justice, taxes, voting – these have no value in themselves, other than their utilitarian value for what happiness they bring the individual. Independence is everything. In the same way, the Stoics, after Zeno, sought apathia, passionlessness – their ideal was to be impassive, dry, detached and invulnerable. ‘Man is a dog tied to a cart; if he is wise he will run with it.’99”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“For him, humans were born with potential and, given the use of reason and the right upbringing/education, could be ethically good. This was the very opposite of what would become the Christian view under St Augustine and the notion of original sin.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“This council was called the boule and it was scarcely less cumbersome, consisting of 500 citizens, not elected but chosen by ballot, the point being that in this way it never developed a corporate identity which might have corrupted and distorted the business of the Assembly.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“This contrasted with logos, which also meant ‘word’ but in the sense of a truth which can be argued and maybe changed (as in, ‘what’s the word on . . .?’). Unlike logoi, which were written in prose, myths were recorded in verse.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“reader is asked, for the moment, to accept this as a reasonable statement of fact, that in a part of the world that had for centuries been civilised, and quite highly civilised, there gradually emerged a people, not very numerous, not very powerful, not very well organised, who had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the first time what the human mind was for.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“he pugnaciously advanced his view that the study of ‘high culture’ has to be the main aim of education. Above all, he said, we must pay attention to ancient Greece, because it provided ‘the models for modern achievement’. Bloom believed that the philosophers and poets of the classical world are those from whom we have most to learn, because the big issues they raised have not changed as the years have passed.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra was the source of the ‘profoundest error in human history – namely the invention of morality’.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“the message and impact of the prophets and, second, the compilation of the Hebrew scriptures which, far from being the divinely inspired word of God, are, like all holy writings, clearly a set of documents produced by human hands with a specific aim.73”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“In Plato and in many Greek tragedies we learn that the Athenians did not seem to believe in rewards and punishments after death. ‘In fact, they do not seem to have expected very much at all. “After death every man is earth and shadow: nothing goes to nothing”.’ (This is a character in one of Euripides’ plays.) In Plato’s Phaedo, Simmias betrays his worry that at his death his soul will be scattered ‘and this is their end’.52”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud