Dissident Veteran For Peace: Quotable: "facts of science are not enough"

Dissident Veteran For Peace

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." —Alexis de Tocquevile. Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter XV.

With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Quotable: "facts of science are not enough"

... when Logic congeals into all-encompassing and perfect-seeming theories, then it can actually become a very evil con trick. Wittgenstein has a point, you see: "All the facts of science are not enough to understand the world's meaning."

Source: Character of Bertrand Russell in Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009) p. 296.

Labels: art and literature, philosophy, quotations, religion and science, truth, Wittgenstein

# posted by VFPDissident @ 2/18/2010 01:05:00 PM

Comments:

meaning? what meaning? that statement assumes that the world HAS some "meaning".

# posted by

Jeannie : Friday, March 19, 2010 1:56:00 PM

Yes, Wittgenstein did assume the world had meaning. He wrote, "The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God."

# posted by

VFPDissident : Friday, March 19, 2010 6:25:00 PM

So... some hypothetical invisible sky wizard is the "meaning" of the world? Um.. yes, that would indeed be outside the realm of scientific fact.

# posted by

Jeannie : Saturday, March 20, 2010 4:59:00 AM

What evidence do you have that Wittgenstein understood God as an "invisible sky wizard". I'm guesing none. In my experience, the "invisible sky wizard" is the phantasm of religious fundamentalists and their mirror image--the atheistic fundamentalist. The vanguard of this latter group is currently comprised of profoundly ignorant people such as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris. I've read their work and can say on those grounds that they are sadly ignorant of all but the narrowest, retrograde ideas of religion and theology.

# posted by

VFPDissident : Saturday, March 20, 2010 9:36:00 PM

I find the term amusing, for reasons of my own. However... to make an analogy.. if the purpose of the world is that which purportedly created it, then the purpose of a book, for instance, is the author?

# posted by

Jeannie : Sunday, March 21, 2010 1:42:00 PM