Archives for December 2022

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.” Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus) "The mind that knows must of necessity have a past." Gaston Bachelard (The New Scientific Spirit) “ It is said that astronauts returning from space carry with them a changed perspective on the world, the “overview effect,” in which, having seen the Earth from above, they can fully perceive how fragile our little oasis is and how unified we ought to be as a species, as perhaps the only thinking beings in the cosmos.” Katie Mack (The End of Everything) There is a famous and often quoted remark of Einstein's that goes like this: *the distinction between past, present and future is … [Read more...]

"The topic of religious, socioeconomic, and psychoanalytical fetishism concerns the concept of objects that stand in the place of a god, things that stand in the place of men, parts that stand in the place of the whole: that is to say, objects whose origin and sense of substitution have been lost or concealed." Alfonso Maurizio Iacono (The History and Theory of Fetishism) "Without wishing to detract from the grandeur of Pasteur's tenets, we can say without hesitation that the germ theory of contagious disease has certainly owed much of its success to the fact that it embodies an ontological represen­tation of sickness." Georges Canguilhem (The Normal and the Pathological) "The … [Read more...]