#reduction

...I believe there is a legitimate aim of transcendence that is more modest and perhaps more realistic. We may not be able to rule out the skeptical possibility, and we may not be able to ground our normal capacity for understanding on something in which we can have even greater confidence; but it may still be possible to show how we can reasonably retain our natural confidence in the exercise of understanding, in spite of the apparent contingencies of our nature and formation. The hope is not to discover a foundation that makes our knowledge unassailably secure but to find a way of understanding ourselves that is not radically self-undermining, and that does not require us to deny the obvious. The aim would be to offer a plausible picture of how we fit into the world. Even in this more modest enterprise both theism and naturalistic reductionism fall short. Theism does not offer a sufficiently substantial explanation of our capacities, and naturalism does not offer a sufficiently reassuring one. ↗

— Thomas Nagel

#radically-self-undermining #skeptical #nature

I think we ought to ban earmarks. I think we ought to give citizens the opportunity to designate up to 10 percent of their federal income tax toward debt reduction. If we did that, we would reduce our debt by $95 billion a year. ↗

— Carly Fiorina

#billion #citizens #debt #designate #did

Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. ↗

— Martin Heidegger

#bombs #camps #chambers #corpses #countries

The ideal of the 11th/17th century physicists was to be able to explain all physical reality in terms of the movement of atoms. This idea was extended by people like Descartes who saw the human body itself as nothing but a machine. Chemists tried to study chemical reaction in this light and reduce chemistry to a form of physics, and biologists tried to reduce their science to simply chemical reactions and then finally to the movement of physical particles. The idea of reductionsm which is innate to modern science and which was only fortified by the tehory of evolution could be described as the reduction fo the spirit to the psyche, the psyche to biological activity, life to lifeless matter and lifeless matter to purely quantitative particles or bundles of energy whose movements can be measured and quantified. ↗

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#life

Since the reduction of risk factors is the scientific basis for primary prevention, the World Health Organization promotes the development of an integrated strategy for prevention of several diseases, rather than focusing on individual ones. ↗

— Gro Harlem Brundtland

#development #diseases #factors #focusing #health

If workmen are denied any increase in real wages and they can look forward only to a better standard of living through reduction of prices, progress for them is terribly slow, and they become impatient and dissatisfied. ↗

— Charles E. Wilson

#become #better #denied #dissatisfied #forward

Synergies are not only about cost reduction. Synergies can be access to markets, exchange of products, avoiding overlaps, exchange of best practices. ↗

— Carlos Ghosn

#access #avoiding #best #cost #exchange

I do not intend to dispute in any way the need for defence cuts and the need for government spending cuts in general. I do not share a not in my backyard approach to government spending reductions. ↗

— Stephen Harper

#approach #backyard #cuts #defence #dispute

I voted for the Deficit Reduction Package with significant heartburn over the student aid provisions. ↗

— Bob Inglis

#deficit #deficit reduction #i #over #package

I think it's very important not to confuse the importance of dealing with Social Security in the long term with these short-term deficit reduction challenges. They're different issues. ↗

— Jacob Lew

#confuse #dealing #deficit #deficit reduction #different