Baroque Philosophy Quotes

. . . if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules.

Natural Philosophy cannot advance without attacking theories that are old, and beating back new ones that are wrong, neither of which may be accomplished without doing some injury to their professors.

Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. “This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it—which must have been a great spiritual struggle—and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination. It is most difficult.

Positive arguments for the natural possibility of absent qualia have not been as prevalent as arguments for inverted qualia, but they have been made. The most detailed presentation of these arguments is given by Block (1978). These arguments almost always have the same form. They consist in the exhibition of a realization of our functional organization in some unusual medium, combined with an appeal to intuition. It is pointed out, for example, that the organization of our brain might be simulated by the people of China or even mirrored in the economy of Bolivia. If we got every person in China to simulate a neuron (we would need to multiply the population by ten or one hundred, but no matter), and equipped them with radio links to simulate synaptic connections, then the functional organization would be there. But surely, says the argument, this baroque system would not be conscious! There is a certain intuitive force to this argument. Many people have a strong feeling that a system like this is simply the wrong sort of thing to have a conscious experience. Such a “group mind” would seem to be the stuff of a science-fiction tale, rather than the kind of thing that could really exist. But there is only an intuitive force. This certainly falls far short of a knockdown argument. Many have pointed out that while it may be intuitively implausible that such a system should give rise to experience, it is equally intuitively implausible that a brain should give rise to experience! Whoever would have thought that this hunk of gray matter would be the sort of thing that could produce vivid subjective experiences? And yet it does. Of course this does not show that a nation's population could produce a mind, but it is a strong counter to the intuitive argument that it would not. . . . Once we realize how tightly a specification of functional organization constrains the structure of a system, it becomes less implausible that even the population of China could support conscious experience if organized appropriately. If we take our image of the population, speed it up by a factor of a million or so, and shrink it into an area the size of a head, we are left with something that looks a lot like a brain, except that it has homunculi—tiny people—where a brain would have neurons. On the face of it, there is not much reason to suppose that neurons should do any better a job than homunculi in supporting experience.

I have given up hope, tonight, of ever understanding money.” “It’s simple, really…” “And yet it’s not simple at all,” Daniel said. “It follows simple rules—it obeys logic—and so Natural Philosophy should understand it, encompass it—and I, who know and understand more than almost anyone in the Royal Society, should comprehend it. But I don’t. I never will…if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than Alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules…

if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than Alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago,

The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that "Great Art" is "truth-disclosing," and therefore, following the thinking of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Heidegger asserted that Great Art only existed in the past. Indeed, even Heidegger would have wavered on whether Great Art - or Hegel's "art and the absolute" - survived into the seventeenth century, the time of St Peter's and the baroque. Just the same, Heidegger reasoned that in the modern era Great Art is dead; art may still exist but it is not great. It cannot be great because it is propelled by aesthetics rather than truth. Without truth there is no philosophy of art. To be true, art must, in Hegel's and Heidegger's terms, be accepted by a culture as a whole. I believe we can say with some certainty that the Catholic world as a whole accepted this building and saw it much as worshippers and pilgrims experienced Chartres Cathedral, for instance, in the thirteenth century: it is the Heavenly Jerusalem come to earth.

is develop “baroque” usages of signs such as those envisioned by Cusa and Bruno, where confidence in the adequacy of language can in turn be related back to the confidence of the hermetic tradition in the powers of emblems, symbols, and sigils to activate the deep, if always hidden character of nature. As we saw apropos Foucault, in the Renaissance, signs and symbols, although limited, could surpass the restrictions of ordinary perception and rationality by activating otherwise imperceptible sympathies, analogies, and connections. Deleuze's