Archives for December 2025

"How can one learn the truth by thinking? As one learns to see a face better if one draws it.” Ludwig Wittgenstein (Zettel) “Bacon had died in 1626, but that did not mean that his message was out of date. On the contrary, it had a kind of actuality for eighteenth-century France which made him, to a greater extent even than Locke or Newton, a prophetic figure for the whole French Enlightenment. For Bacon was the first philosopher of science. It was not that Bacon made any scientific discoveries of his own; he simply proclaimed the doctrine that science could save us…. Once men knew how nature worked, they could exploit nature to their advantage, overcome scarcity by scientific innovations … [Read more...]

"Ray! When Someone Asks If You're a God, You Say YES.” Ghostbusters (1984, dir. Ivan Reitman) "...in Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, the Florentine astronomer had his spokesman, Salviati, assert that ‘we are trying to make [the Earth] more noble and more perfect… and in a sense to place it in heaven, from which your philosophers have banished it." Seb Falk (The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery) "People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them--that does not occur to them." Ludwig Wittgenstein (Culture and … [Read more...]