Tags / 7 quotes from 5 sources
#human-nature
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Conscious agents in a world of mindless particles
A third reason for the centrality of the mind is that, for many of us, myself included, the central question in philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century is how to give an account of ourselves as apparently conscious, mindful, free, rational, speaking, social, and…
Paul Valéry - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Paul valery prose
His far more ample prose writings, peppered with many aphorisms and bons mots, reveal a conservative and skeptical outlook on human nature, verging on the cynical. However, he never said or wrote anything giving aid or comfort to any form of totalitarianism popular during his…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Johnson on the fountain of content
Samuel Johnson observed: “The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Nominalists and realists on human nature
This was the view of the nominalist philosophers of the late Middle Ages, who strongly opposed the then-called realists for maintaining that such entities as Mankind or Human Nature were real “substances” underlying the “accidents” of particular men and women. Every individual…
The essential polarity of human nature
If this is cynicism, it is at least loving cynicism—an attitude and an atmosphere that cools off human conflicts more effectively than any amount of physical or moral violence. For it recognizes that the real goodness of human nature is its peculiar balance of love and…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Zimbardo: the myth of human character
‘There’s the myth about human dignity and human character,’ he told me over lunch. ‘So we really want to believe that our actions all stem from some internal set of motives, of goodness, of morality, and courage, and they get perverted in certain situations for certain people…
Human nature is not set in stone
These dystopias are readily imaginable only because at some level it is obvious that human nature need not be set in stone, and that there is no reason in principle why creatures like ourselves might not become radically different.