Tags / 51 quotes from 18 sources
#history
A Nation Without Nationalism
Nationalism
What geography made possible, history made inevitable. Gilmour, at least in this book, is not one for nuanced or qualified judgements. Italy as he views it can be numbered among the world’s failed states, indeed he believes it was ‘impossible to create a successful…
Adesso basta (Simone Perotti)
La prima generazione senza sventure collettive
Chiunque, dall’uomo di Neanderthal a oggi, è vissuto in condizioni di forte precarietà, di privazioni almeno parziali, assistendo magari a periodi di forte sviluppo economico, ma sempre viziati da mancanze, lacune, difficoltà diffuse. Noi siamo i primi che, per un periodo…
Né il comunismo né il capitalismo sono assoluti
Il motivo risiede nel fatto che il mondo (e noi con lui) è andato in una certa direzione. Quando pensiamo a comunismo e capitalismo siamo sempre tentati di dare risposte assolute. Il comunismo è fallito. Vero. Il capitalismo restava l’unica soluzione, e sta fallendo anche lui…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Strong AI versus weak AI
Building an intelligent machine that can match the cognitive capabilities of humans has been the dream of artificial intelligence researchers since the middle of the last century, when Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann built the theoretical foundation upon which…
AI returns to the question of consciousness
Initial excitement about creating machine consciousness in the field’s early days faded when it was realized that creating an artificial mind would be a far greater challenge than was originally believed. AI research has since focused on the development of specialized…
Shannon and the birth of the bit
A binary digit can be in one of two states. And this is the basis of the “bit”—which is a shortening of “binary digit”: 0 or 1. The information contained in a bit is a measure of how likely it is that the digit is one or zero. With all the talk about infinity so far, it should…
Leibniz withdraws his binary essay
Leibniz came up with binary numbers in about 1679, when he wrote a letter to a colleague about a “new science of numbers” on which he was working. Leibniz was soon invited by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris to contribute to their new annual publication, the Histoire de…
LSD and the Summer of Love
The decade’s radical movements that were influenced by LSD helped with the expansion of women’s and minority rights, with the most effective anti-war movement in American history, and with new genres of literature and music. The cultural, psychedelic, and geographical locus was…
Bicycle Day and the origin of the trip
Soon after he ingested the drug, his entire world began to transform—the colors, the forms—and he felt his ego begin to dissolve. Hofmann grew afraid he had taken too much, and asked his assistant to help him home by bicycle. While trying to bike home, Hofmann pedaled and…
Dio odia il Giappone (Douglas Coupland, M. Howatson and Anna Mioni)
In Giappone la storia è morta
andammo a Kobe con dei biglietti gratuiti che Suehiro aveva ricevuto da sua zia. Volevamo capire se il terremoto del gennaio 1995 aveva lasciato delle tracce, ma non trovammo molto, e credo che per una volta volessi davvero vedere qualcosa che rispecchiasse fisicamente e in…
Eichmann In Jerusalem - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
The banality of evil
Arendt's book introduced the expression and concept "the banality of evil."[1] Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state…
History And The Second Decade Of The Web
Historians should think in verbs, not nouns
Although technologists constantly praise computers as ‘universal machines’, and while it is true that they are remarkably flexible and powerful, this does not mean that we should use them for every kind of historical effort or production. We can truly begin to think about…
Http://neh.gov/whoweare/legislation.html
The humanities
As the National Endowment for the Humanities puts it: “According to the 1965 National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, ‘The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
The early failure of machine translation
In 1963, after spending $20 million on research into machine translation, the US funding agency concluded: “There is no immediate or predictable prospect of useful machine translation” – National Academy of Sciences National Research Council, 1963. Faced with a hard problem, AI…
The philosophical roots of AI
Many of the concepts central to Al have their roots in the work of philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, as we have seen, and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951):
Life, The Multiverse And Everything: An Introduction To The Ideas Of Humberto Maturana Interpreting Maturana
Language is not an abstract phenomenon
It is important to note that no particular behaviour or movement or gesture or sound constitutes languaging. Rather, it is an ongoing process because it is defined in the history of the coordination of actions. Just a word or gesture does not constitute languaging. Furthermore…
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Genji non è un playboy
Trascurando i fattori storici, si rischia di scambiare Genji per un playboy, come avviene oggi nelle frontiere del cyberspazio. Che il protagonista passi da una donna all’altra è un «dovere» della nobiltà del tempo, imputabile al rango principesco. Sarebbe stato anomalo il…
Come lo Zen arrivò in Giappone
La storia della diffusione giapponese dello Zen inizia con il viaggio in Cina di Dosho (598-670), allievo del pellegrino Hsüan-tsang. Studia con il maestro la dottrina Yogacara, per poi rivolgersi al Ch’an, lo Zen cinese. Non lascerà un proprio lignaggio, ma impartisce a molti…
Eisai e lo Zen protettore del Paese
Eisai (1141-1215) avrà più fortuna. È lui il fondatore dello Zen nipponico. Anche questo monaco proviene dal Tendai, nel quale aveva ricevuto una iniziazione esoterica. Poi si volge allo Zen, in conseguenza di un fortunato secondo viaggio in Cina. Azzarda persino che lo Zen…
Il koan del giovane Dogen
Eihei Dogen nasce nel 1200. Gli dà i natali Kyoto, la città che per diversi secoli fu la capitale del Giappone. È un periodo difficile. I samurai hanno conquistato il potere, lasciando alla cricca imperiale una autorità puramente nominale: situazione che, salvo qualche…
Dogen sceglie di scrivere in giapponese
Tornato in Giappone, il monaco scrive un libello per elogiare lo zazen. Diversamente da Eisai, svincola lo Zen dallo Shingon. È coinvolto nella persecuzione del Tendai ai danni di tutte le correnti innovative del buddhismo, quali la Terra Pura e lo Zen. Deve abbandonare il…
Nishi Amane, pioniere dell'incontro con l'Occidente
Nishi Amane (1829-1897) è unanimamente riconosciuto come il pioniere dell’incontro tra la filosofia giapponese e la filosofia occidentale. Gli è dovuta la traduzione del termine «filosofia» (philosophia) con tetsugaku, impostosi nella cultura giapponese. Nishi, figlio di un…
Al Giappone è mancata una classe media
Lo storicismo rappresenta il fulcro dei suoi interessi. Egli concepisce la storia come progresso, nei termini di una continua espansione civile e culturale. Nishi aveva espresso convinzioni analoghe. Anche Fukuzawa accusa il confucianesimo di aver inibito il progresso…
I tre stadi della civiltà
Fukuzawa divide la storia in tre periodi: lo stato di natura, una condizione di civiltà parziale ai confini con la barbarie, e la civiltà vera e propria. Nel primo stadio vige il diritto del più forte, e manca un nucleo sociale; il filosofo è influenzato dai giusnaturalisti del…
La storia non si conclude mai
A differenza di Comte e di altri positivisti, ritiene che lo stadio positivo non sarà definitivo: l’umanità dovrà evolversi ancora, in direzioni per il momento neppure prevedibili. La scienza imboccherà nuove vie, e finiranno per imporsi altre metodologie, determinando nuovi…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
In philosophy there is no escaping history
In philosophy there is no escaping history. Ideally, I sometimes think, I would just like to tell my students the truth about a question and send them home. But such a totally unhistorical approach tends to produce philosophical superficiality. We have to know how it came about…
The greatest single disaster in the history of philosophy
Descartes presents very little by way of an argument to show that we cannot directly perceive tables, chairs, mountains, etc. but can only perceive our ideas of these things. He makes the transition from perceiving real objects to perceiving only the contents of our own minds…
Forget the history and state the facts
My method in philosophy is to try to forget about the history of a problem and the traditional ways of thinking about it and just try to state the facts as far as we know them.
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
The wrong thing for the right reasons
‘But sometimes …’ I protested, ‘you know, what about self-defence? What about killing to defend yourself?’ ‘Yes, a good point, Lin. I want you to imagine a scene for me. You are standing in a room with a desk in front of you. On the other side of the room is your mother. A…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Two centuries of success literature
I was also deeply immersed in an in-depth study of the success literature published in the United States since 1776. I was reading or scanning literally hundreds of books, articles, and essays in fields such as self-improvement, popular psychology, and self-help. At my…
Kuhn and paradigm shifts in science
The term paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his highly influential landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn shows how almost every significant breakthrough in the field of scientific endeavor is first a break with tradition, with old ways of…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Psycholytic versus psychedelic therapy
Dosage was finally established around the mid-1950s. One hundred micrograms was low, 200 was medium, 300 and above, high. And the two major schools of LSD psychotherapy that evolved were defined primarily by the dose range they employed. The first school used relatively low…
The best history of the sixties counterculture
While researching this book, I reread Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion. Not only is the book the best history of LSD, it’s the best history of ’60s counterculture as a whole: an eyewitness account of just how close the West, in…
The backlash after failed revolts
Perhaps revolts that fail always create this murderous backlash. Ringleaders are either dead or thoroughly discredited; and the rest, however sick at heart, have little option but to try to pick up the pieces and lead some semblance of normal life, to curl up with a lover and a…
Seeking the magic mushroom
By the time I had read a couple of books and looked through some underground magazines, I realized that this was far from being the case. Both LSD and MDMA had been eclipsed by the plant hallucinogens, in particular by magic mushrooms and dimethyltryptamine. A large proportion…
Schultes finds natural LSD in morning glories
The dispute was to be resolved from an entirely different quarter: from the fieldwork of the Harvard botanist Richard Evans Schultes. Richard Schultes was the last of the great explorer/botanists of an earlier age. As a graduate student he had researched the peyote cult in the…
Discovering Ockeghem's Requiem
During the trip when I caught my first glimpse of the sacred, I had been listening to a CD of Hildegard of Bingen. The music must have touched me more deeply than I realized, because when I returned the CD to the library I borrowed two further discs of late medieval/ early…
A mescaline trip filmed by the BBC
During the mid-1950s Christopher Mayhew, former journalist and author (and at the time a member of Parliament), took mescaline under the supervision of Humphry Osmond, the same Osmond who had been responsible for Aldous Huxley’s first trip. The entire session was filmed by a…
Toynbee's two proletariats
In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon declared famously that Rome was destroyed by Christianity and the barbarians; and Toynbee’s analysis could be seen as an extended commentary on the thesis. For him, as for Gibbon, the untold millions of people enslaved by the…
Psychedelics culturally vindicated
A well-established, even well-heeled cult I had been expecting, but not one thriving like this. The hall was so packed you could barely move. Of all the revolutionary groups of my youth—the hippies, the New Left, the students, the blacks, the feminists—it was, however…
Judges Walk at sunset
Reputedly, these are all that remain of a once-fashionable eighteenth-century mall marking the northern boundary of the village. Beneath the trees, to your right, the ground drops steeply to a small oval meadow. The secret about Judges Walk is that it’s probably the best spot…
Where to find first-hand trip reports
The ’60s and ’70s high tide of firsthand reports is a thing of the past. Today the only popular compilation in print is Charles Hayes’ Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures (2000). Despite patchiness, the fifty accounts make gripping reading. While I was…
The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon)
Tiedemann's history of philosophy starts with the Greeks
The idea that philosophy has a uniquely Greek source and that everything prior to the Greeks is simply not philosophy finds its most powerful modern expression in Dietrich Tiedemann’s six-volume Geist der spekulativen Philosophie (The Spirit of Speculative Philosophy, 1791–7)…
Against Hegel's westering as bestering
My approach is therefore deeply at odds with that of Hegel. I do not see the history of philosophy as the progressive logical unfolding of ‘Spirit’, which culminates in showing that it has its destiny in the Western philosophy of the present. This is ‘westering’ as ‘bestering’…
The Cidoc Conceptual Reference Module: An Ontological Approach To Semantic Interoperability Of Metadata
Historical data cannot be verified or falsified
Historical data - it means any description done in the past about the past, be it scientific, medical or cultural – is normally unique and cannot be verified, falsified nor completed in an absolute sense. In history, any conflict resolution of contradictory records is nothing…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
The rejection of meta-narratives
Postmodernism rejected all that. The world has no real essence that is just waiting for us to describe. Reality is constituted by our understanding of it. History is created by the stories we tell about the past, and there are innumerable different such stories we can tell…
Moral luck under the Third Reich
corollary: the same person, with the same character, if now put into a life where a different range of situations was normal, could have the following cloud: Now the overall description of the exact same person would be ‘mean’, not ‘generous’. What this shows is that there is…
Husserl: the ego constitutes itself in a history
Husserl wrote: ‘The ego constitutes himself for himself in, so to speak, the unity of a history,’ and ‘Since, by his own active generating, the Ego constitutes himself as identical substrate of Ego properties, he constitutes himself also as a “fixed and abiding” personal Ego.’
Reincarnated lamas are just Tibetan culture
Ringu says that the whole idea of reincarnation is ‘just Tibetan culture’. As he explains, the idea of lines of reincarnated lamas is not something that goes back more than two millennia to the life of the Buddha, but one that actually only started in the twelfth century with…
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
Dewey's Laboratory School and progressive education
Dewey’s Laboratory School established the University of Chicago as the center of thought on progressive education, the movement toward more democratic and child-centered education. Progressive education was a reaction to the rigid, more formal style of traditional education…
Don't bemoan the good old days
In 1899 John Dewey gave a talk to the parents of children in his school. The parents were worried about the changing times. On the edge of the industrial age, these parents of one hundred years ago were old enough to remember the “agricultural era” in the United States. They…