Dinesh's most appreciated articles

• Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. • In all things, strive to cause no harm. • Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect. • Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted. • Live life with a sense of joy and wonder. • Always seek to be learning something new. • Test all t…

"On a microscopic piece of sand that floats through space is a fragment of a man's life. Left to rust is the place he lived in and the machines he used. Without use, they will disintegrate from the wind and the sand and the years that act upon them; all of Mr. Corry's machines -- including the one made in his image, kept alive by love, but now obsolete ... in the Twilight Zone. ~ Steven Pinker PROBABLY THIS POEM GOES WITH IT: Puffed like an adder. Deflated like a balloon. Tiny or huge, y…

I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportions to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions -- only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of…. This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

In all history, nothing is so surprising or so difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece. Much of what makes civilization had already existed for thousands of years in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, and had spread thence to neighbouring countries. But certain elements had been lacking until the Greeks supplied. What they achieved in art and literature is familiar to everybody, but what they did in the purely intellectual realm is even more exceptional. They invented mathem…

The humility required for good judgment is not self-doubt -- the sense that you are untalented, unintelligent, or unworthy. It is intellectual humility. It is a recognition that reality is profoundly complex, that seeing things clearly is a constant struggle, when it can be done at all, and that human judgment must therefore be riddled with mistakes. This is true for fools and geniuses alike. So it’s quite possible to think highly of yourself and be intellectually humble. In fact, this comb…

Philosophy becomes tortured thinking. Thinking that devours itself -- and continues intact and even flourishes, in spite of these repeated acts of self-cannibalism. Or because of them, perhaps? The thinker plays both roles in the passion-play of thought. He is both protagonist and antagonist, both suffering Prometheus and the remorseless eagle who consumes his perpetually regenerated entrails. . . . . Wittgenstein’s idea that philosophy is something like a disease and the job of the philosop…

"Philosophy is the education of grown-ups ~ Stanley Cavell

Craft, Collingwood plato.stanford.edu/entries/collingwood-aesthetics argued, is skilled work purposefully directed toward a final product or designed artifact; the ‘craftsman knows in advance’ what the end product will look like. The craftsman’s foreknowledge is required by the very idea of a craft. . . . . . Art is in this respect an entirely different domain. Like craft, art requires the exercise of skill and technique, but the artist does not have anything resembling the craftsman’s…

Tragedy is not injustice ~ Ihab Hassan

The incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the human heart

'Demagogue' comes from 'demos,' the people, and 'agogos', leading: it means a leader who plays upon popular prejudices.

All war is based on deception ~ Sun Tzu, in the 'Art of War' When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. - Oscar Wilde, in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray

Nostalgia (from ‘nostos’ -- return home, and algia -- longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is double exposure, or a superimposition of two images -- of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, i…

Perhaps the greatest of Newton's defenders among philosophers was the late-eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant. In 'The Critique of Pure Reason,' Kant tried to show that when it came to physics, Newtonian mechanics was the only game in town. But he insisted no one could ever do for biology what Newton did for physics -- banish purpose and design from it. In 1790, he famously wrote, "It is absurd to hope that another Newton will arise in the future who will make comprehensible by us the…

The xenophobia, racism, and patriarchy that rules long before the advent of the nation-state, when it arrived, was just a more efficient means to raise the death toll of narratives. The Old Testament is only the best known of these vehicles of in-group bonding and out-group enmity. As you'll see, stories emerged in human prehistory as practices that were able to move humans from the bottom of the food chain on the African savanna to the top in a matter of a thousand centuries or so. These cultur…

No one approaches the condition of a sage if he has not had the good luck to be forgotten in his lifetime.

*Reading does not make a man wise; it only makes him learned. *Respectability is the cloak under which fools cover their stupidity. *No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention *The man who in these conditions listens tolerantly to your opinion and allows that you may be as right as he, is a friend indeed. ~ Page 16 *How happy life would be if an undertaking retained to the end the delight of its beginning, if the dregs of a cup of wine were as sweet as…

What separates prior from subsequent is exactly nothing; for in every obstacle to be cleared there is something positive which gives itself as about to be cleared. The prior consciousness is always there (though with the modification of "pastness") It constantly maintains a relation of interpretation with the present consciousness, but on the basis of this existential relation it is put out of the game, out of the circuit, between parentheses -- exactly as in the eyes of one practicing the pheno…

Carl Gustav Jung [1875-1961] established an analytic psychology that emphasized the self -- the achievement of harmony among the various strands of personality. He displayed an early ambivalence in his approach to psychology: on the one hand, he developed a method of determining emotionality from associative reaction times to words; on the other, he studied occult phenomena and alchemy. Just was closely associated with Freud's more constrained model of personality. Jung's approach to individual…

Aristotle could speak of human technologies and institutions as being inevitably reinvented over and over because he regarded human nature as fixed and the human species, along with all other species, as eternal: the world itself had always existed, and human beings had always walked upon it. In this he differed from his pre-Socratic predecessor Anaximander, who speculated that human beingd has evolved out of the mud, as descendants of fish. Today we view human nature -- the genetically endow…