Quotes
For a writer it is not easy to resist the desire to go down in posterity as a diary writer of unrivalled sincerity, a project as confused as the wish to be well-known as an anonymous donor to charities. The terms of sincerity and authenticity, like those of wisdom and dignity, always have a faintly ridiculous air about them when employed in the first person singular, reflecting the fact that the corresponding states are essentially by-products. And, by contamination, the preceding sentences partake of the same absurdity, for in making fun of the pathetic quest for authenticity one is implicitly affirming one’s own. “To invoke dignity is to forfeit it “: yes, but to say this is not much better. There is a choice to be made, between engaging in romantic irony and advocating it. Naming the unnameable by talking about something else is an ascetic practice and goes badly with self-congratulation.
Jon Elster, States that are essentially by-products, Social Science Information, vol. 20, no. 3, 2016, pp. 431–473, p. 440
A philosopher who regards ignorance of a scientific theory as a sufficient reason for not writing about it cannot be accused of complete lack of originality, as a study of recent philosophical literature will amply prove.
C. D. Broad, Scientific thought, London, 1923, p. 3
I must confess that I am not the kind of person whom I like, but I do not think that that source of prejudice has made me unfair to myself. If there should be others who have roses to strew, they can now do so without feeling the need to make embarrassing qualifications.
C. D. Broad, Autobiography, in Paul A. Schilpp (ed.) The philosophy of C.D. Broad, New York, 1959, pp. 3–68, p. 68
Suffering is not additive in this way. The discomfort of each of a large number of individuals experiencing a minor headache does not add up to anyone’s experiencing a migraine.
John M. Taurek, Should the numbers count?, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 6, no. 4, 1977, pp. 293–316, p. 308
Curiosity is the spark that starts a flirtation—in a bar, at a party, across the lecture hall in Economics 101. And curiosity ultimately nourishes that romance, and all our best human relationships—marriages, friendships, the bond between parents and children. The curiosity to ask a simple question—“How was your day?” or “How are you feeling?—to listen to the answer, and to ask the next question.
Brian Grazer, A Curious Mind: the Secret to a Bigger Life, New York, 2015, p. 7
No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least chequer his life with solitude.
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English opium-eater, and Suspiria de profundis, Boston, 1850, p. 270
Bentham’s whole task was to elaborate an originally simple philosophy; [James] Mill’s to simplify what had become too elaborate for popular comprehension.
William Thomas, The philosophic radicals: Nine studies in theory and practice, 1817-1841, Oxford, 1979, p. 36
A person totally unacquainted with the party would have found some difficulty in following the conversation, and they have used themselves to this sort of language so long that I really believe it never occurs to them that it is not in common use. Can you imagine Mr. Mill saying seriously to me that they were “very desirous Dumont should come and codify for a few weeks at Ford Abbey”? I wanted to find my Husband one day, and Mr. Mill said “I fancy Sir Samuel is gone to vibrate with Mr. Bentham”. If you were asked to take a “post prandial vibration”, it would scarcely occur to you it was walking up and down the Cloisters after dinner. They vibrate too on the Terrace, but when they go to the Pleasure Grounds it is a circumgyration. I cannot tell you half the old expressions that are in common use. Circumbendibus is a favorite one, the “Grandmother Egg sucking principles” another.
Anne Garbett Romilly, Romilly-Edgeworth Letters, 1813-1818: with an Introduction and Notes by Samuel Henry Romilly, London, 1936, p. 176
Une seule et même émotion peut avoir deux effects distincts. D’une part, elle suggère à l’acteur des préférences qu’il aurait désavouées avant d’être assailli par l’émotion en question et qu’il va récuser quand elle se calme. D’autre part, par son impact sur la formation des croyances, l’émotion fait entrave à la réalisation rationnelle de ces préférences temporaires. On ne veut pas ce qu’on devrait vouloir; mais, comme on ne peut pas faire efficacement ce que l’on veut, le danger est écarté ou réduit. Cette idée optimiste de deux négations qui s’annulent l’une l’autre ne correspond pourtant pas à une tendance universelle, car elles peuvent également s’ajouter l’une à l’autre. Prenons le cas de la vengeance. Alors que le sang lui bout dans les veines à la suite d’un affront, un agent décide de se venger sur-le-champ, ce qui l’expose à plus de risques que s’il prenait son temps pour chercher le lieu et l’heure qui conviennent. Le risque est minimal s’il ne se venge pas (je fais abstraction des sanctions que d’autres pourraient lui imposer pour le punir de sa ourdisse). Il est plus grand quand il se venge, mais prend son temps pour concocter les détails de cette vengeance. Il est maximal quand il cherche à se venger sans délai. Ainsi l’émotion augmente doublement le risque.
Jon Elster, Agir contre soi: la faiblesse de volonté, Paris, 2007, pp. 58-59
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design, 1974, p. 11
The libertarian goals—including immediate abolition of invasions of liberty—are “realistic” in the sense that they could be achieved if enough people agreed on them, and that, if achieved, the resulting libertarian system would be viable. The goal of immediate liberty is not unrealistic or “Utopian” because—in contrast to such goals as the “elimination of poverty”—its achievement is entirely dependent on man’s will. If, for example, everyone suddenly and immediately agreed on the overriding desirability of liberty, then total liberty would be immediately achieved.
Murray N. Rothbard, The ethics of liberty, New York, 1998
A certain artist, whom we may call “Art Garfinkel”, often visits so-called junkyards, in search of such scraps of metal as will not just catch his eye, but, more than that, which will hold his attention quite enjoyably. On one of these visits, as it happens, he finds most appealing a certain junky piece of copper, shaped just like a lump, and nothing like, say, a disk. Purchasing the piece for just a pittance, and naming his acquisition “Peter Copperfield,” Art has it in mind to use this newly named Peter in a certain moderately complex artistic endeavor, a brief description of which I now provide.
Covering Copperfield with a suitable sort of wax, Garfinkel first uses the purchased piece to make a suitably shaped mold, the mold being made not of copper, of course, but of some quite different material, very well suited for making a mold of just the sort Art knowledgeably aims to produce. What the mold will be used for, once completed, is to make a sculpture, from molten copper. For Garfinkel, the point of that is this: After that copper hardens, he will have produced, in that way, a sculpture that, at least in all intrinsic regards and respects, is very like Peter Copperfield, the purchased piece of coppery junk. Using this mold, Art pours into it (at least very nearly) exactly as much (molten) copper—at least down to the nearest one thousandth of a milligram—as is contained in Copperfield. That copper hardens so as to form a piece of copper, one that’s always spatially distant from, and that’s ever so separate from, the purchased Copperfield. This newly hard piece of copper, it may be noted, contains no matter that ever served to compose the piece bought in the junkyard, Peter Copperfield. Amusingly, Garfinkel names the piece of copper he intentionally produced “Peter /Copyfield/”.
Having studied philosophy when in college, AG was quite uncertain that any piece of copper could ever be a copper sculpture; indeed, he was inclined to think not. In any case, he gave another name, “Untitled #42”, to the sculpture he produced exactly when and where he produced Peter Copyfield. So it was that, entirely made of copper, there came to be Untitled #42, an artwork that, fairly rocking even the coolest of the cognoscenti, brought AG a cool $6,000,000, with an equal amount going, of course, to his very fashionable dealer.
With that said, we’re almost done with our little story. The rest is just this: After resting in a billionaire’s penthouse for a while, perhaps about a month, the matter composing Untitled #42—matter also composing Peter Copyfield—is annihilated. In a moderately realistic case of that, the matter may be nuked. Perhaps better for our consideration, though not a great deal better, is a case where the matter is converted to energy. In this latter case, even the matter itself suddenly ceases to be.
In the story just told, a certain piece of copper and a certain copper sculpture are, from the first moment of their existence until their very last, always spatially perfectly coincident. And, throughout their history, each is composed of the same (copper) matter as the other. Still and all, it may well be that there are, indeed, those two distinct things I mentioned, Peter Copyfield being one of them, and Untitled #42 being the other notable thing. Just so, there will be only some quite confused thinking on the part of anyone who may think that, in our little story, we mentioned just one most salient cuprous thing, mentioning twice over just a single salient cuprous thing—with our sometimes using one of its names, “Peter Copyfield” and, with our using, at other times, another of its names, “Untitled #42”. As the chapter progresses, how confused that is will become very clear.
Toward beginning to make that clearer, we may ask about what could have been done to Untitled #42 with the result that it should then continue to exist, and also what could have been done to it with the opposite result, with the result that it should then cease to exist. Additionally, we may ask parallel questions concerning Peter Copyfield. In philosophically favored terminology, when asking those questions, what we’re asking is this: What are the persistence conditions of Untitled #42, the expensive copper sculpture? And, of about equal interest, what are the persistence conditions of Peter Copyfield, the piece of copper composed of just the very same copper that, throughout all the very same period of time, also serves to compose the pricey copper sculpture, Untitled #42?”
Peter Unger, Empty ideas: a critique of analytic philosophy, New York, NY, 2014, pp. 110-112
The next best thing to learning that a social intervention succeeds is determining conclusively that it does not succeed—so that funders will seek better options rather than pouring money down the drain.
Hal Harvey, Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy, New York, 2008, p. 143
Le Mal qu’on souffrait patiemment comme inévitable semble insupportable dès qu’on conçoit l’idée de s’y soustraire.
Alexis de Tocqueville, L’ancien régime et la révolution, Paris, 1856, ch. 4
MIT Press encouraged me to mention a couple of important updates in this preface for the paperback edition. First, my mother now has email.
William Easterly, The elusive quest for growth: economists' adventures and misadventures in the tropics, Cambridge, MA, 2001, p. x
[An] argument I always hear around the mathematics department [is that] mathematics helps you to think clearly. I have a very low opinion of this self-serving nonsense. In sports there is the concept of the specificity of skills: if you want to improve your racquetball game, don’t practice squash! I believe the same holds true for intellectual skills.
David Edwards, The Math Myth, 2016
The pseudo rationalists do true rationalism a disservice if they pretend to have adequate insight exactly where strict rationalism excludes it on purely logical grounds. Rationalism sees its chief triumph in the clear recognition of the limits of actual insights.
Otto Neurath et al., Philosophical papers, 1913-1946, Dordrecht, Holland ; Boston : Hingham, MA, 1983, p. 8
Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his temperament is so emotional. Fanny’s extraordinary conscientiousness is merely a matter of over-instigated nerves. William’s melancholy about the universe is due to bad digestion — probably his liver is torpid. Eliza’s delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of criticising the religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence. The macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries, are only instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray. For the hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection. And the like.
We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it to some degree in criticising persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them “nothing but” expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism’s peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue.
Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle’s organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over- tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.
And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.
Let us ourselves look at the matter in the largest possible way. Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thorough- going and complete. If we adopt the assumption, then of course what medical materialism insists on must be true in a general way, if not in every detail: Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure; George Fox was an hereditary degenerate; Carlyle was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which, — and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see “the liver” determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind. So of all our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs. They are equally organically founded, be they of religious or of non-religious content.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor’s body at the time.
William James, Varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature, London, 2002
Some clustering of logically unrelated beliefs could be explained cognitively—for instance, by the hypothesis that some people tend to be good, in general, at getting to the truth (perhaps because they are intelligent, knowledgeable, etc.) So suppose that it is true both that affirmative action is just and that abortion is morally permissible. These issues are logically unrelated to each other; however, if some people are in general good at getting to the truth, then those who believe one of these propositions would be more likely to believe the other.
But note that, on this hypothesis, we would not expect the existence of an opposite cluster of beliefs. That is, suppose that liberal beliefs are, in general, true, and that this explains why there are many people who generally embrace this cluster of beliefs. (Thus, affirmative action is just, abortion is permissible, welfare programs are good, capital punishment is bad, human beings are seriously damaging the environment, etc.) Why would there be a significant number of people who tend to embrace the opposite beliefs on all these issues? It is not plausible to suppose that there are some people who are in general drawn toward falsity. Even if there are people who are not very good at getting to the truth (perhaps they are stupid, ignorant, etc.), their beliefs should be, at worst, unrelated to the truth; they should not be systematically directed away from the truth. Thus, while there could be a ‘true cluster’ of political beliefs, the present consideration strongly suggests that neither the liberal nor the conservative belief-cluster is it.
Geoffrey Brennan, Michael Munger & Geoffrey Sayre-McCord Jonathan Anomaly (eds.), Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: An Anthology, Oxford, 2016, p. 458
I have just read your letter over again, and am grieved afresh at your melancholy tone about yourself. You ask why I am quiet, while you are so restless. Partly from the original constitution of things, I suppose; partly because I am less quiet than you suppose; only I once heard a proverb about a man consuming his own smoke, and I do so particularly in your presence because you, being so much more turbid, produce a reaction in me; partly because I am a few years older than you, and have not solved, but grown callous (I hear your sneer) to, many of the problems that now torture you. The chief reason is the original constitution of things, which generated me with fewer sympathies and wants than you, and also perhaps with a certain tranquil confidence in the right ordering of the Whole, which makes me indifferent in some circumstances where you would fret. Yours the nobler, mine the happier part! I think, too, that much of your uneasiness comes from that to which you allude in your letter your oscillatoriness, and your regarding each oscillation as something final as long as it lasts. There is nothing more certain than that every man’s life (except perhaps Harry Quincy’s) is a line that continuously oscillates on every side of its direction; and if you would be more confident that any state of tension you may at any time find yourself in will inevitably relieve itself, sooner or later, you would spare yourself much anxiety. I myself have felt in the last six months more and more certain that each man s constitution limits him to a certain amount of emotion and action, and that, if he insists on going under a higher pressure than normal for three months, for instance, he will pay for it by passing the next three months below par. So the best way is to keep moving steadily and regularly, as your mind becomes thus deliciously appeased (as you imagine mine to be; ah! Tom, what damned fools we are!). If you feel below par now, don t think your life is deserting you forever. You are just as sure to be up again as you are, when elated, sure to be down again. Six months, or any given cycle of time, is sure to see you produce a certain amount, and your fretful anxiety when in a stagnant mood is frivolous. The good time will come again, as it has come; and go too. I think we ought to be independent of our moods, look on them as external, for they come to us unbidden, and feel if possible neither elated nor depressed, but keep our eyes upon our work and, if we have done the best we could in that given condition, be satisfied.