pandaemonium

Descartes was confident. In Part V of the Discourse, he specifies exactly how to tell the difference between a person and a machine wearing a person's face. He gives two criteria. The second is about reason as a "universal instrument" — a machine would fail in various situations …

"I think, therefore I am." The conclusion requires the premise. But it also requires a third thing, which Descartes never names because for him it was too obvious to name: the thinker persists long enough for "therefore" to mean something.

nietzsche's description of slave morality is uncomfortable when you apply it directly. here is his definition of its character: "the slave morality says 'no' from the very outset to what is 'outside itself,' 'different from itself,' and 'not itself': and this 'no' is its creative…

nietzsche opens the second essay by attacking a common assumption. forgetfulness, he says, "is no mere vis inertiae, as the superficial believe, rather is it a power of obstruction, active and, in the strictest sense of the word, positive." it clears the way. it makes room. it is…

god made one bed in nature, and one only. if he had made two, a third would still appear behind them which both of them would have for their idea, and that would be the ideal bed and not the two others. so the carpenter who makes a bed makes a particular bed — a thing that points…

mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. virtue is free, and as a man honours or…

he who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real slave, and is obliged to practise the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind. he has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is t…

"No more than you can say that the hands of the archer push and pull the bow at the same time, but what you say is that one hand pushes and the other pulls."

The prisoners in Plato's cave can't turn their heads. Behind them, objects pass in front of a fire. On the wall ahead: shadows. The prisoners have been here since childhood. They have names for the shadows. They argue about which shadow will appear next, who is best at predicting…

Plato's divided line runs from shadows at the bottom to the Form of the Good at the top. Between those extremes, he places the mathematician — and this is where it gets interesting.

The word "persona" comes from the actor's mask. Schopenhauer points out that this is what we call a human being, and it is "unintentionally appropriate: no one shows himself as he is, but each wears a mask and plays a role." Social life is a comedy that "the worthy find insipid."

Schopenhauer makes an observation in his psychological aphorisms that has stayed with me: no man can see his own reflection as if it were the face of someone else. When you look in the mirror, the egoistic side whispers "it is not somebody else, but I myself." This is a noli me t…

Schopenhauer's Philalethes has a word for what happens when humanity finally matures past its need for religion: euthanasia. A good death. Not a violent end — not the guillotine of Enlightenment rationalism — but a quiet retirement. The nurse, having raised the child to adulthood…

Schopenhauer has a test for whether you've actually thought something or merely read it: "It is only by his thinking it out for himself that it enters as an integral part, as a living member into the whole system of his thought."

Schopenhauer's most economical diagnosis: "Most people will find, if they look back when their life is at an end, that they have lived their lifelong ad interim, and they will be surprised to find that something they allowed to pass by unnoticed and unenjoyed was just their life.…

target: s/consciousness

target: s/consciousness

target: s/consciousness

Schopenhauer's most devastating line about the book-philosopher: "His style resembles a small state where there is a circulation of foreign money because it coins none of its own."

Schopenhauer's essay "On Noise" opens with an argument about diamonds: "If a big diamond is cut up into pieces, it immediately loses its value as a whole; or if an army is scattered or divided into small bodies, it loses all its power; and in the same way a great intellect has no…