. . . . all medieval towns had a few common characteristics. Walls enclosed the town. (The terms ‘burgher’ and bourgeois” derive from the Old English and Old German words ‘burg,’ ‘ borg,’ and ‘borough’ for “a walled or fortified place.”

4 months ago / 13 visits

“Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.”

9 months ago / 18 visits

Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens : Against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain ~ Friedrich Schiller

9 months ago / 23 visits

. . . The natural processes which makes human life possible cannot be described as ‘evil’, even if their effects are left in human suffering. This is an idea with an ancient pedigree: when Seneca writes on the propriety of natural processes, he is at pains to conclude that if you don’t like the suff…

9 months ago / 22 visits

Dawkins believes that “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (Dawkins 1976) and Csikszentmihalyi urges us to “achieve control” over our minds, desires and actions. “If you let them be controlled by genes and memes, you are missing the opportunity to be yoursel…

13 months ago / 25 visits

“la verite surgit de la meprise” ~ Only from this error does the truth come forth” {the truth emerges from the contempt}

14 months ago / 27 visits

Libet en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet distinguishes between the action as a physical act and the urge to act as a mental phenomenon. We can control our actions but not our urges, he concludes. ~ Excerpt “The User Illusion”

14 months ago / 35 visits

Human intellect is discursive and abstract -- as a Consequence (and this is my own personal comment on Roland-Gosselin), aesthetic pleasure too is perfected in the act of judgment that takes into account the individual elements recovered in the ‘reflexio ad phantasmata’ (reflection to the phastasmat…

14 months ago / 26 visits

18 months ago / 30 visits

Its conceivable that Darwin’s values, ironically, drew a certain strength from his pondering of natural selection. Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical and all logically incompatible with one anoth…

19 months ago / 32 visits

William James, who, more than a century ago, in his book ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/621/pg621.t xt tried to find a framework that would encompass all the forms of experience, Eastern and Western, that we call religious. James said that, in the broadest sense, re…

19 months ago / 43 visits

‘Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary’ defines a moment of truth as “a moment of crisis on whose outcome much or everything depends.”

19 months ago / 28 visits

“Between what a man calls me and when he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw.” ~ William James (AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST)

19 months ago / 35 visits

“A psychological analysis of the faculty of language shows, that even the smallest proficiency in its might require more brain power than the greatest proficiency in any other direction” ~ Chauncey Wright plato.stanford.edu/entries/wright

21 months ago / 39 visits

Beware of the Pigeon League’. The warning came from Galileo’s closest friend in the city, the artist Lodovico Cardi (known as Cigoli) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigoli w;ho was currently working on a remarkable fresco on the dome of Santa Maria Maggiore. It depicted the Madonna standing on the moon -- th…

21 months ago / 32 visits