You can tell #Kuhn is thinking of #Wittgenstein, PI here: "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life." This is from "Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product," 1977, first essay in The Essential Tension and also in The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn.
"Conceit is epilepsy and eyesight is a lying sense."
— #Heraclitus (dubious) fragment 46
"All humans by nature desire to know. An indication of this is our liking for the perceptual capacities. For even apart from their utility, these are liked because of themselves — and most of all the one because of the eyes."
— #Aristotle, (dubious) #Metaphysics, 980a21
Words as "mere expressions." In this passage of the #PaliCanon of #Buddhism (Samyutta Nikaya 1.25), the question is: Does the "Arahant" (who has attained the goal) use the word "I"? The answer is yes, but only conventionally:
Words as "makeshift description." In the #Tao Te Ching, 15 (D.C. Lau):
> Of old he who was well versed in the way
> Was minutely subtle, mysteriously comprehending,
> And too profound to be known.
> It is because he could not be known
> That he can only be given a makeshift description:
An anti-linguistic thread, in which words are described as "mere expressions," as "servants," and as "makeshift description" in three different areas of #philosophy: #Taoism#Buddhism and #Greek philosophy @philosophy
(Yes, I know the Lau translation of the #Tao is a bit unlike other translations of this passage)
Anyone know Dickens well enough to point me to some of his best ephemeral characters? I.e. the ones that are described in a page or two then never mentioned again #literature
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." I wrote a piece about Isaiah Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox," how he divides up thinkers and writers, and the effects of dichotomies like these https://bryankam.com/d2#literature#philosophy@philosophy@literature
Finally got a decent laptop, an AMD one for the first time in probably decades. Lenovo, Ryzen 7.
I'm dual-booting Windows 11 and Arch Linux, again for the first time in decades. Seems to be working well. Less of a hassle than I thought.
Yumi helped get multiple ISOs on one drive. In this case an SD card. I dunno why I used USB sticks for years when I could have used a USB card reader and microSD cards.
EFI is not as much of a nightmare as I feared, works quite well