Profile
Channel Views:
128
Total Upload Views:
0
Age:
24
Joined:
Sep 23, 2011
Latest Activity:
1 day ago
Subscribers:
0
"the greatest master of the art of reasoning that ever wrote, Bayle, great and wise, all systems overthrows." Voltaire
"I am most truly a protestant; for I protest indifferently against all Systems, and all Sects" Pierre Bayle
"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind." William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
"Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence." William Blake Ibid
"In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." David Hume 'An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding'
"The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has — from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness." Christopher Hitchens
"...
Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Christopher Hitchens
"I am most truly a protestant; for I protest indifferently against all Systems, and all Sects" Pierre Bayle
"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind." William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
"Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence." William Blake Ibid
"In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." David Hume 'An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding'
"The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has — from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness." Christopher Hitchens
"...
Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Christopher Hitchens
About Me:
But, if Protestantism was not the true solution of the problem, it was at least the true setting of it. It was no longer a case of the layman's struggle against the priest outside himself but of his struggle against his own priest inside himself, his priestly nature. And if the Protestant transformation of the German layman into priests emancipated the lay popes, the princes, with the whole of their priestly clique, the privileged and philistines, the philosophical transformation of priestly Germans into men will emancipate the people. But, secularization will not stop at the confiscation of church estates set in motion mainly by hypocritical Prussia any more than emancipation stops at princes. The Peasant War, the most radical fact of German history, came to grief because of theology. Today, when theology itself has come to grief, the most unfree fact of German history, our status quo, will be shattered against philosophy. On the eve of the Reformation, official Germany was the most unconditional slave of Rome. On the eve of its revolution, it is the unconditional slave of less than Rome, of Prussia and Austria, of country junkers and philistines." Karl Marx - A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
"We are all atheists about most of the gods humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." -- Richard Dawkins
"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.." George Orwell - Reflections on Gandhi
"In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies to liberty; and it is certain, that this steady conduct of theirs must have been founded on fixed reasons of interest and ambition. Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds, on which it is commonly founded; and, by an infallible connexion, which prevails among all kinds of liberty, this privilege can never be enjoyed, at least has never yet been enjoyed, but in a free government."
Essay 9 : Of The Parties of Great Britain David Hume
"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil." Socrates
"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, & as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions indeed generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of the government." Thomas Jefferson
"I didn't do any research at all on Adam Smith. I just read him. There's no research. Just read it. He's pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits." Noam Chomsky - Education is Ignorance
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense."
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" Nineteen Eighty Four
Country:
United Kingdom
Interests:
So immanent critique takes the historically accumulated concepts, for example the Bill of Rights tradition and it confronts them with the historically existent reality, to measure the gap between the practice and the promise. You are all familiar with this style of critique because it's, for example, Martin Luther King's paradigmatic style of critique, right? I mean, Martin Luther King didn't say "Look, I am a Maoist, that's why we should have civil rights" No, it wasn't because he was a Maoist; it was because there was a gap between the practices we engages in and our promises. Now, that's the method within which Marcuse criticises capitalist society. Not with external norms drawn from some utopian situation, but by its own terms, with its own terms. I also think that's not only a good strategy as a style of critique, but its utterly fair. I mean, in a way, it's like demanding of yourself that you do what you say... which you want to demand at least of your friends... that they do most of the time what they say they'll do. But it's certainly a good demand to place upon, ah, your society, its leaders, and so on. The trouble is, just as I have stated before, we are blocked. We are blocked in a way by an unprecedented structure of what I have called here... sort of... cynical, sceptical reason. To me it's historically unmatched. I have never read or heard of a period like this one.
Books:
God Is Not Great - Christopher HitchensAn Outline of Intellectual Rubbish - Bertrand Russel
Recent Activity
|
PierreBayle1697 liked a video
Hitchens responds to the first question from the Q&A session of the Hitchens/Mcgrath debate: "Without God, what basis do you have for declarin...
more
|
|
|
|
PierreBayle1697 favorited a video
|
|
|
|
PierreBayle1697 liked a video
Penn and Teller reveal that Mahatma Ghandi was a racist, Mother Teresa a religious zealot who was happy to see the poor suffer, and that the Dalai ...
more
|
|
|
|
PierreBayle1697 liked a video
Mother Teresa and her organization provided substandard care for patients, and were primarily interested in converting the dying to Catholicism. At...
more
|
|
|
|
PierreBayle1697 liked a video
|
|
Subscriptions
(7)
Channel Comments