My personal page.

Put a Barbie next to just about anything and meaning will rear its ugly head. This little pink lady is just too well known, and way to voluptuous to be perceived as just an object. She leaps into our psyches and roams freely in our subconscious, along with mom, the mother superior and the Virgin Mary (yes, I was raised Catholic).

Mencius (280BC)China "The people are the most important element in a nation; the spirits of the land and grain come next; the sovereign counts for the least." He also quoted for all to hear from the Shu Ching ("Classic of History"), one of the Five Classics of Confucianism, the saying "Heaven sees as the people see; Heaven hears as the people hear." The outspoken sympathies of Mencius made him a champion of the common people and an advocate of democratic principles in government.

Suárez, Francisco, byname DOCTOR EXIMIUS (b. Jan. 5, 1548, Granada, Spain--d. Sept. 25, 1617, Lisbon), Spanish theologian and philosopher, a founder of international law, often considered the most prominent Scholastic philosopher after St. Thomas Aquinas, and the major theologian of the Roman Catholic order, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). His principal study in philosophy is the Disputationes Metaphysicae (1597), which was used for more than a century as a textbook at most European universities, Catholic and Protestant alike. In this work, which treats especially the problems of human will and the concept of general versus particular phenomena, Suárez drew upon Aristotle and Aquinas, although he took into consideration the criticisms of other Scholastic philosophers such as Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308) of Britain and Luis de Molina (1535-1600) of Spain. His departures from Aquinas' positions have been considered significant enough to warrant the separate designation of his system as Suárezianism.

He opposed the Anglican theologians who defended the claim of kings to rule as God's earthly representatives. This theory, the divine right of kings, was advanced in England at the time by James I, who subsequently burned Suárez' Defensio on the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. On the question of man's ability to effect his own salvation by his works, Suárez, in his De Vera Intelligentia Auxilii Efficacis (1605, pub. 1655), supported the view of the Congruist movement, which held that God gave man sufficient grace to achieve the virtuous conduct congruent to, or in harmony with, his own will.

Suárez expounded his political theory and philosophy of law in De Legibus (1612; "On Laws") as well as in the Defensio. Having refuted the divine-right theory of kingly rule, he declared that the people themselves are the original holders of political authority; the state is the result of a social contract to which the people consent. Arguing for the natural rights of the human individual to life, liberty, and property, he rejected the Aristotelian notion of slavery as the natural condition of certain men. He criticized most of the practices of Spanish colonization in the Indies in his De Bello et de Indis ("On War and the Indies"). The islands of the Indies he viewed as sovereign states legally equal to Spain as members of a worldwide community of nations.

– M.C. Escher Holland, His work went almost unnoticed until the 1950’s, but by 1956 he had given his first important exhibition, was written up in Time magazine, and acquired a world-wide reputation. Among his greatest admirers were mathematicians, who recognized in his work an extraordinary visualization of mathematical principles and ideas. This was the more remarkable in that this Dutch artist had no formal mathematics training beyond secondary school.

TESSELATIONS Regular divisions of the plane, called “tesselations,” are arrangements of closed shapes that completely cover the plane without overlapping and without leaving gaps. His interest began in 1936, when he traveled to Spain and viewed the tile patterns used in the Alhambra. He spent many days sketching these tilings, and later claimed that this “was the richest source of inspiration that I have ever tapped.” In 1957 he wrote an essay on tesselations, in which he remarked:

In mathematical quarters, the regular division of the plane has been considered theoretically . . . Does this mean that it is an exclusively mathematical question? In my opinion, it does not. [Mathematicians] have opened the gate leading to an extensive domain, but they have not entered this domain themselves. By their very nature thay are more interested in the way in which the gate is opened than in the garden lying behind it.

"Life is a sexualy transmitted disease that always proves fatal."

The impeccable man who has never done a cowardly thing, nor a mean thing, is no kinsman of mine! We love men for their limitations and weaknesses, no less than for their virtues. Robert Ingersoll

JAIME TORRES BODET

Nunca

Nunca me cansará mi oficio de hombre. Hombre he sido y seré mientras exista. Hombre no más : proyecto entre proyectos, boca sedienta al cántaro adherida, pies inseguros sobre el polvo ardiente, espíritu y materia vulnerables a todos los oprobios y las dichas ...

Nunca me sentiré rey destronado ni ángel abolido mientras viva, sino aprendiz de hombre eternamente: hombre con los que van por las colinas hacia el jardín que siempre los repudia, hombre con los que buscan entre escombros la verdad necesaria y prohibida, hombre entre los que labran con sus manos lo que jamás hereda un alma digna, porque de todo cuanto el hombre ha hecho, la sola herencia digna de los hombres el el derecho de inventar la vida !

Mendelssohn, Moses (b. Sept. 26, 1729, Dessau, Anhalt [Germany]--d. Jan. 4, 1786, Berlin, Prussia), German-Jewish philosopher, critic, and Bible translator and commentator who greatly contributed to the efforts of Jews to assimilate to the German bourgeoisie.

In 1750 Mendelssohn became tutor to the children of the silk manufacturer Issak Bernhard, who in 1754 took Mendelssohn into his business. The same year, he met a major German playwright, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who had portrayed a noble Jew in his play Die Juden (1749; "The Jews") and came to see Mendelssohn as the realization of his ideal. Subsequently, Lessing modeled the central figure of his drama Nathan der Weise (1779; Nathan the Wise, 1781) after Mendelssohn, whose wisdom had caused him to be known as "the German Socrates." Mendelssohn's first work, praising Leibniz, was printed with Lessing's help as Philosophische Gespräche (1755; "Philosophical Speeches"). That year Mendelssohn also published his Briefe über die Empfindungen ("Letters on Feeling"), stressing the spiritual significance of feelings.

In 1763 Mendelssohn won the prize of the Prussian Academy of Arts in a literary contest; and as a result King Frederick the Great of Prussia was persuaded to exempt Mendelssohn from the disabilities to which Jews were customarily subjected. Mendelssohn's winning essay compared the demonstrability of metaphysical propositions with that of mathematical ones and was the first to be printed under his own name (1764).

Through his own example Mendelssohn showed that it was possible to combine Judaism with the rationalism of the Enlightenment. He was accordingly one of the initiators and principal voices of the Haskala (q.v.; "Jewish Enlightenment"), which helped bring Jews into the mainstream of modern European culture. Through his advocacy of religious toleration and through the prestige of his own intellectual accomplishments, Mendelssohn did much to further the emancipation of the Jews from prevailing social, cultural, political, and economic restrictions in Germany. His son Abraham was the father of the composer Felix Mendelssohn.

President Ronald Reagan, "Everything is falling into place. It can't be too long now. Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God's people. That must mean they'll be destroyed by nuclear weapons...Gog, the nation that will lead all of the other powers of darkness against Israel, will come out of the north...Gog must be Russia...now that Russia has set itself against God...it fits the description of Gog perfectly."

Montaigne, (1580) seeks to humble man's pride: "...there is a plague on Man, the opinion that he knows something." This skepticism is connected with the doctrine of Christian "folly" which says that God's wisdom is to be found in the lowly and the meek, and that the belief that one has knowledge prevents one from accepting the truths of religion. (One can find this tradition in Pico della Mirandola and Erasmus and others as well).

Jung said that dreaming goes on continuously but you can't see it when you are awake, just as you can't see the stars in the daylight because it is too bright.

Developments in the Empiricist tradition: Bacon's attempt to formulate a new scientific method, Hobbes's theory of knowledge.

Rationalism, in philosophy, a method of inquiry that regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge and, in contrast to empiricism, tends to discountenance sensory experience. It holds that, because reality itself has an inherently rational structure, there are truths--especially in logic and mathematics but also in ethics and metaphysics--that the intellect can grasp directly. In ethics, rationalism relies on a "natural light," and in theology it replaces supernatural revelation with reason.

Rationalism. The inspiration of rationalism has always been mathematics, and rationalists have stressed the superiority of the deductive over all other methods in point of certainty. According to the extreme rationalist doctrine, all the truths of physical science and even history could in principle be discovered by pure thinking and set forth as the consequences of self-evident premises. This view is opposed to the various systems which regard the mind as a tabula rasa (blank tablet) in which the outside world, as it were, imprints itself through the senses.

The opposition between rationalism and empiricism is, however, rarely so simple and direct, inasmuch as many thinkers have admitted both sensation and reflection. Locke, for example, is a rationalist in the weakest sense, holding that the materials of human knowledge (ideas) are supplied by sense experience or introspection, but that knowledge consists in seeing necessary connections between them, which is the function of reason (Essay Concerning Human Understanding).

Most philosophers who are called rationalists have maintained that the materials of knowledge are derived not from experience but deductively from fundamental elementary concepts. This attitude may be studied in René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Christian von Wolff. It is based on Descartes's fundamental principle that knowledge must be clear, and seeks to give to philosophy the certainty and demonstrative character of mathematics, from the a priori principle of which all its claims are derived. The attack made by David Hume on the causal relation led directly to the new rationalism of Kant, who argued that it was wrong to regard thought as mere analysis. In Kant's views, a priori concepts do exist, but if they are to lead to the amplification of knowledge, they must be brought into relation with empirical data.

Ethical rationalism is the application of epistemological rationalism to the field of morals. The primary moral ideas (good, duty) are held to be innate, and the first principles of morals (e.g., the Golden Rule) are deemed self-evident. It is further claimed that the possession of reason provides an adequate motive for moral conduct. In ethical rationalism, reason is generally contrasted with feeling or moral sense.

Religious rationalism asserts the claims of reason against those of revelation or authority. The fundamental principles of religion are held to be innate or self-evident and revelation unnecessary. Religious rationalism thus stresses the importance of natural as opposed to revealed religion.

Empiricism (from Greek empeiria: "experience"), in philosophy, an attitude expressed in a pair of doctrines: (1) that all concepts are derived from the experience to which they are applied; and (2) that all knowledge of matters of fact is based on, or derived from, experience. Accordingly, all claims to knowledge of the world can be justified only by experience.

A brief treatment of Empiricism follows. For full treatment, see Philosophical Schools and Doctrines, Western: Empiricism.

Empiricism argues that knowledge derived from a priori reasoning (involving definitions formed or principles assumed) either does not exist or is confined to "analytical" truths, which have no content, deriving their validity merely from the meanings of the words used to express them. Hence a metaphysics that seeks to combine the a priori validity of logic with a scientific content is impossible. Likewise there can be no "rational" method; the nature of the world cannot be discovered through pure reason or reflection.

In practice three different types of Empiricism are recognized, depending on the degree to which adherents admit a priori concepts or propositions. Absolute Empiricists admit neither a priori concepts nor a priori propositions, although they may recognize such analytical a priori truths as tautological definitions. Substantive Empiricists distinguish between formal and categorial a priori concepts. The existence of formal a priori concepts is admitted, provided such formal concepts are confined to the way ideas interact; categorial a priori concepts such as causation are denied. Substantive Empiricists argue that every a priori proposition is virtually a tautology, although it may take deduction to reveal this. Partial Empiricists claim that certain non-formal ideas may be a priori. Examples include the concepts of natural cause and effect, morality, etc. After granting this, however, the Partial Empiricist verifies everyday propositions about matters of fact by empirical means.

Historically, the first Western Empiricists were the ancient Greek Sophists, who concentrated their philosophical inquiries on such relatively concrete entities as man and society, rather than the speculative fields explored by their predecessors. Later ancient philosophers with Empiricist tendencies were the Stoics and the Epicureans, although both were principally concerned with ethical questions.

The majority of Christian philosophers in the Middle Ages were Empiricists. A notable thinker of the 14th century, for example, was William of Ockham, who argued that all knowledge of the physical world is attained by sensory means. In the 16th century another English Empiricist, Francis Bacon, believed in building up observed data about nature so as to arrive at an accurate picture of the world. To this extent he laid the foundations of the scientific method. John Locke in the 17th century was probably the leading Empiricist of the late- to post-Renaissance era. Later philosophers who subscribed to some degree of Empiricism included the Irish-born Bishop George Berkeley in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Scot David Hume in the 18th century, and the Britons John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. Mill (who denied that he was an Empiricist) and Russell on occasion even claimed that mathematical truths or logical concepts are essentially Empirical.

The antithetical position to that of Empiricism in philosophical arguments over theories of knowledge has usually been the Rationalist one. Discussion centres on the extent to which concepts are innate or acquired.

Another group of Empiricists, but one that operated outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition, consisted of the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle. Logical Positivists hold that metaphysical statements are meaningless because they are inherently unverifiable.

The following ideas may be attributed to Empiricist influence, although not all of them need be held by any particular Empiricist thinker: (1) Experience is intelligible in isolation, or atomistically, without reference to the nature of its object or to the circumstances of its subject. Hence an experience can be described without saying anything about the mind that has it, the thoughts that describe it, or the world that contains it. (2) The person who undergoes experience is in some sense the recipient of data that are imprinted upon his intelligence irrespective of his activity; the person brings nothing to experience, but gains everything from it. (3) All method is scientific method. To discover the nature of the world it is necessary to develop a method of experiment whereby all claims to knowledge are tested by experience, since nothing but experience can validate them. (4) Reductionism: All facts about the world can be reduced to what are facts inasmuch as experiences confirm claims to knowledge as facts; hence no claims to knowledge of a transcendental world can have any foundation.

Empiricism's influence may be seen in the broad thesis of Nominalism, according to which reality is held to reside in the particular rather than in the universal. Nominalists argue that the whole has no reality that is not derived from that of its parts.

In the metaphysical sphere Empiricism generates a characteristic view of causation, seemingly an almost inevitable consequence of the Empiricist theory of knowledge. According to Empiricist metaphysics the world consists of a set of contingently connected objects and situations, united by regularities rather than necessities, and unrelated to any transcendental cause or destiny. Science, according to this view, investigates connections, and its aim is to make predictions on the basis of observed regularities. Furthermore, judgments of value have no place in science, say the Empiricists, as such judgments are subjective preferences of the investigator.

Descartes is considered to be the father of modern philosophy in that he decisively broke with the basic philosophical assumptions of Scholastic philosophy, derived from the works of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, which had dominated European thought throughout the later medieval period. Descartes put at the centre of philosophical concern two related problems: first, whether a form of human knowledge that is immune to all skepticism is possible; and second, whether one can make sense of the nature of mind and its relationship to matter. These have remained central problems in Western philosophy and can be said to permeate systems of thought that are not normally described as Cartesian.

Cartesians have generally supported Descartes's central doctrines--namely, that reality can be divided into mind, the essence of which is thinking, and matter, the essence of which is extension in three dimensions; that the ideas of God, mind, and matter are innate and are not derived from experience; and that the correct method in arriving at philosophical truth is to doubt everything until one can find a proposition or idea that is indubitable, clear, and distinct. Most of Descartes's followers agreed also with Descartes in believing that there was at least one such proposition, namely the individual's recognition that he is thinking and that therefore he exists: Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am").

In recent years the American linguist Noam Chomsky has given new currency to Descartes's view that central ideas must be innate, arguing that only the existence of innate mental structures can explain how children quickly develop the ability to generate an infinite number of new, semantically correct sentences, most of which they have not encountered before.

Beyond these specific philosophical topics Cartesianism has remained an important, pervasive influence on Western philosophy, stressing as it does the importance of the quest for certainty based on reason alone, and the supreme virtue of mental and linguistic clarity.

Montaigne seeks to humble man's pride: "...there is a plague on Man, the opinion that he knows something." This skepticism is connected with the doctrine of Christian "folly" which says that God's wisdom is to be found in the lowly and the meek, and that the belief that one has knowledge prevents one from accepting the truths of religion. (One can find this tradition in Pico della Mirandola and Erasmus and others as well). Montaigne is famous for arguing that man is not in any way superior to the beasts, in fact, quite the contrary.

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