Zitat des Tages von Ian Hacking:
As a political metaphor, a revolution could, in that sense, mean only a return to better times, or to the true constitution: a ridding of excess or usurpers.
Many of us will be obsessed with one or another kind of secret or revelation, be it gossip about friends or ourselves, a fantasy about spies, or a worry about the most personal information now stored in data banks. But few of us think about secrets in general, or about the moral rights and wrongs of hiding or exposing them.
The debate about who decides what gets taught is fascinating, albeit excruciating for those who have to defend the schools against bunkum.
I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.
Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life.
If you are a researcher and want to publish a paper, if you are applying for money either from a private or public foundation, you have to have a DSM code.
Despite a certain amount of rhetoric, such as 'the second American Revolution,' there is a fair consensus about which events in the affairs of a people can rightly be called revolutions. It is also clear that such revolutions are proper objects of study for the historian.
The word 'revolution' first brings to mind violent upheavals in the state, but ideas of revolution in science, and of political revolution, are almost coeval. The word once meant only a revolving, a circular return to an origin, as when we speak of revolutions per minute or the revolution of the planets about the sun.
Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption.
Among the lesser effects of quantum theory are gaping holes in old ideas about causality.
Each of us becomes a new person as we re-describe the past.
Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be.
Antonio Damasio is a distinguished neuroscientist with a flair for writing about science and an enthusiasm for philosophizing.
Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things.
It is a general truth that students of language in every era try to colonize some or all of the other human sciences.
Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling it as is it is' insofar as talking about a process of 'tinkering' in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world.
Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.
It is possible to argue that our present conception of revolution was staked out more securely in science than in political action.
I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.'
Great books are rare.
Although some secrecy is odious, some is essential just to preserve our sense of self.
Foucault is one of many who want a new conception of how power and knowledge interact. But he is not looking for a relation between two givens, 'power' and 'knowledge.' As always, he is trying to rethink the entire subject matter, and his 'knowledge' and 'power' are to be something else.
All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them.
The social risks that worry us are not a random bundle of frights.
Life on a factory farm is well-nigh unbearable for the animals or birds, and it is often foul for the women and men who process the meat that results - especially in factories for chicken parts. But do not sentimentalize. Do not imagine barnyard life is a bowl of cherries.
Foucault's genius is to go down to the little dramas, dress them in facts hardly anyone else has noticed, and turn these stage settings into clues to a hitherto un-thought series of confrontations out of which, he contends, the orderly structure of society is composed.
