Goodreads rating 4.36. Spiritual enlightenment is not about mysticism or happiness, although the latter might follow from the former. It is not about the “true self” but about the non-self; about radical questioning and truth seeking that ditches all putative certainties; about watching the unfolding of life with joy and interest; about accepting contradictions.
Read More »Truth, Triviality, and Contradiction
Nils Bohr chose Contraria Sunt Complementa as motto for his coat of arms. According to his son and others, Bohr distinguished between the logical properties of trivialities on the one hand and profound truths on the other: The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. [Unsourced] There are two sorts of truth: Profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to...
Read More »Truth, Triviality, and Contradiction
Nils Bohr chose Contraria Sunt Complementa as motto for his coat of arms. According to his son and others, Bohr distinguished between the logical properties of trivialities on the one hand and profound truths on the other: The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. [Unsourced] There are two sorts of truth: Profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to...
Read More »The Case Against Democracy
In the New Yorker, Caleb Crain reviews the case. It’s a difficult case to make if most voters are uninformed. Jamming the stub of the Greek word for “knowledge” into the Greek word for “rule,” Estlund coined the word “epistocracy,” meaning “government by the knowledgeable.” It’s an idea that “advocates of democracy, and other enemies of despotism, will want to resist,” he wrote, and he counted himself among the resisters. As a purely philosophical matter, however, he saw only three valid...
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