#ontology

This ground itself needs to be properly accounted for by that for which it accounts, that is, by the causation through the supremely original matter – and that is the cause as causa sui. This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god. ↗

— Martin Heidegger

#music

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour an serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. ↗

— Donna J. Haraway

#feminism #irony #linguistics #ontology #politcs

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore. ↗

— John Shelby Spong

#epistimology #ontology #theology #theology

All major changes are like death. You can't see to the other side until you are there. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#change

What are you doing here, anyway?" "'Here' as in your bedroom or 'here' as in the great spiritual question of our purpose here on this planet? If you're asking whether it's all just a cosmic coincidence or there's a greater metaethical purpose to life, well, that's a puzzler for the ages. I mean, simple ontological reductionism is clearly a fallacious argument, but—" "I'm going back to bed." Clary reached for the doorknob. He slid nimbly between her and the door. "I'm here," he said, "because Hodge reminded me it was your birthday. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#jace-wayland #ontology #philosophy-of-life #sarcasm #age

One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes’ argument “I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#logic #metaphysics #ontology #philosophy #psychology

The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion. ↗

— Gareth J. Nelson

#darwin #darwinism #evolution #fossil-record #fossils

If we turn to palaeontology to tell us about our biological evolution it is to prehistory that we look for evidence of the evolution of specifically human patterns of behaviour. ↗

— John G. D. Clark

#behaviour #biological #evidence #evolution #human

No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific. ↗

— Henry Gee

#confessions-of-the-darwinists #darwin #darwinism #darwinist-confessions #evolution

You see, proteins, as I probably needn't tell you, are immensely complicated groupings of amino acids and certain other specialized compounds, arranged in intricate three-dimensional patterns that are as unstable as sunbeams on a cloudy day. It is this instability that is life, since it is forever changing its position in an effort to maintain its identity--in the manner of a long rod balanced on an acrobat's nose. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#ontology #change