G Berkeley Quotes

The term “escalation of commitment” was first coined by Barry Staw, a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley.4 It’s defined as a decision-making pattern in which a person—for our purposes, a business leader—continues to support or believe in a strategy even after it has continually failed. Escalation of commitment is often described as the inability to let go, or as an obsessive need to try to succeed even when failure is inevitable.

A degree from UC Berkeley will never change the fact that I cannot understand my grandfather when he asks for more coffee.” —Esther G. Belin (Navajo) from In the Cycle of the Whirl. L

Nathan Myrhvold had been a protégé of the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking before forming a software company in Berkeley, California, with some fellow Princeton University Ph.D’s. What drew Myrhvold, or any physicist, to programming? The outer reaches of science increasingly relied on computers; the days of a genius scribbling formulas on the back of an envelope had almost vanished. Physicists usually saw programming as a means to an end. Myrhvold found that his attachment to software superseded his fascination with physical science. His company gained wide notice when he and his friends wrote a faster, smaller clone of IBM’s TopView graphics program. IBM briefly considered making TopView the software interface—the piece seen by customers—for PCs. Trying to keep pace with IBM, Gates wanted a clone of TopView, so he bought Myrhvold’s company. Since

Subletting may create a different problem for the tenant who sublets. Under some [rent control] ordinances, a tenant who sublets for a fixed term (e.g., a 3-month vacation) may not be able to evict the subtenant at the end of the subletting. This situation would arise if only persons with a specified record interest in the property have a right to evict for owner occupancy. The tenant (the seblessor) would not be able to evict the subtenant to reoccupy the premises, because the seblessor is defined as a "landlord" in the ordinance but not as an "owner." (If there is no other cause to evict, the owner-landlord could not evict the subtenant unless he or she planned to occupy the unit.) Counsel representing a subtenant should review the local ordinance to ascertain whether it defines a tenant as the "landlord" of the subtenant or if the definition of "tenant" includes any "subtenant." If so, the subtenant would have all the rights of a tenant under the ordinance. At least one ordinance specifically addresses this problem by providing that any landlord (not just an owner) may evict to recover possession for his or her own occupancy "as a principal residence" if the landlord previously occupied the unit and reserved the right to recover possession under the rental agreement. See Berkeley Mun[icipal] C[ode] §§13.76.040, 13.76.130. See also SF Rent Bd Rules & Regs §6.15C(1), discussed in §17.5. (In San Francisco, a well-informed tenant who is subletting will expressly reserve continued exclusive "possession" of some limited space so that the tenant can immediately enter on returning to the premises. Then, if necessary, and with proper compliance with the regulations, the tenant can evict the subtenant without cause.) It is unclear whether the Berkeley ordinance prohibits a landlord from evicting an unapproved subtenant and recovering possession, especially in light of the Costa-Hawkins Act (see §§17.1A–17.1G). If the landlord may not, then apparently the tenant who sublets may not object to further subletting by the subtenant. Such further subletting might, however, bar the tenant's right to recover possession. Berkeley Mun C §13.76.130 specifies that the right to recover occupancy must be in "an existing rental agreement with the current tenants." (Emphasis added.) A tenant who takes in a roommate by subletting must be distinguished from one who takes in a roommate with the landlord's consent, i.e., a cotenant. The roommate becomes a tenant of the landlord rather than a subtenant of the original tenant. In this situation, the original tenant has no right to evict the roommate. Only the landlord may evict and must have just cause [as defined by the ordinance] to do so if the roommate is found to be a tenant under the local eviction control ordinance.

The largest, longest study of experts’ economic forecasts was performed by Philip Tetlock, a professor at the Haas Business School of the University of California–Berkeley. He studied 82,000 predictions over 25 years by 300 selected experts. Tetlock concludes that expert predictions barely beat random guesses. Ironically, the more famous the expert, the less accurate his or her predictions tended to be.

The third preliminary problem for every theory of reality is that of the experience of transcendence. We saw in the case of Berkeley that his erroneous principle *percipi est esse*, and his assertion that any being which we think, just for the reason that it is thought, cannot at the same time be regarded as subsisting independently of thinking, incorporate a failure to recognize the consciousness of transcendence peculiar to all intentional acts. This is an instance of the failure to recognize that not only all thinking in the narrower sense, in the sense of grasping an object on the basis of “meanings” and grasping a state of affairs through judgments, but *every* intention in general, whether perception, representation, remembering, the feeling of value, or the posing of ends and goals, points beyond the act and the contents of the act and intends something other than the act [*ein Aktfremdes*], even when what is thought is in turn itself a thought. Indeed, *intentio* signifies a goal-directed movement toward something which one does not have oneself or has only partially and incompletely. Berkeley (following Locke, who was the first to make the basic philosophical error which introduced “psychologism” into epistemology) arrived at the principle *esse est percipi* by making the idea [*Vorstellung*] (and even the sensation) into a thing, an immaterial substance, and by failing to distinguish between the act, the content of an act, and the object. Furthermore, Berkeley confused the being of objects with the fact of being-an-object, even though the latter has only a loose and variable connection with the former. On the other hand, the transcendence of the intentional object with respect to both the *intentio* and its present content is common to every instance of being-an-object. It is, for instance, proper to objects of pure mathematics which are certainly not real but ideal (for example, the number 3). These are produced from the *a priori* material of intuition in accordance with an operational law governing the steps of our thought or intuition. Transcendence is further proper to all fictitious objects and even to contradictory objects, for instance, a square circle. All these sorts of objects, e.g., the golden mountain or Little Red Riding Hood, satisfy the basic principle of the transcendence of objects over and above that aspect of them which is, at any moment, given in consciousness, just as much as do real objects existing independently of all consciousness and knowledge." ―from_Idealism and Realism_

OH, THE HAZARDS of being a teenage burglar/member of the Facebook Generation. There you are, in your victim’s house with a couple of her diamond rings worth hundreds of pounds in your pocket and a computer sitting temptingly on a nearby table. What to do? Scarper with just the expensive rings? Or take the computer as well? Or – just maybe – log on to the computer to update your Facebook status? Jonathan G Parker, of Fort Loudoun, Pennsylvania, chose a strange combination of options 1 and 3. According to the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Department, the homeowner got back to find a bedroom window broken, cabinets pulled open and two rings worth around £2,000 missing – but her computer was still there, it was still switched on and it was still open on Parker’s Facebook page. Better still, a friend of the victim recognised Parker and knew where he lived. He was arrested within hours.

[THESE two tracts formed Berkeley’s first published matter. They appeared anonymously in 1707, written in Latin. They cannot be said to have any value other than the author’s name gives them. The translation used here is that of the Rev. G. N. Wright (“Works of Berkeley”, 1843).]

Gerçek "Aydın" için akıl denen nesne, belli verileri ve örneğin gökten indiği söylenen emirleri ya da gerçek diye yerleşmiş şeyleri bellemek ve uygulamak bakımından değil ve fakat her şeyi araştırma, tartışma ve deneye vurma bakımından önem taşıyan tek değer sayılmıştır. 18. yüzyıl düşünürlerinden Lessing'in şu izlemi, aklın fonksiyonu konusunda gerçek aydın'ın tutumunu tanımlamaya yeterlidir: "...Şayet Tanrı karşıma dikilse ve bir elinde tüm gerçekleri tuttuğunu ve diğer elinde de gerçeklere götüren aracı bulundurduğunu söyleyerek bana 'Seç bunlardan birisini' dese, büyük bir meclûbiyetle ben ona: 'Ey Tanrım, sen bana gerçeklere götüren aracı ver, diğer elinde tuttuğun gerçekleri kendine sakla' derdim."* Lessing'in bu sözleri, Tanrı'nın elindeki hazır gerçekleri almaktansa, gerçeği araştırıp bulmak ve ortaya koymak isteyen "gerçek aydın"ın akılcılığını sergiler. Batı dünyasını bilimsel aşamada üstün yapan şey, işte bu akılcı davranıştır. Tanrı'dan geldiği sanılan "gerçekler" yerine, bilimsel gerçeklere ulaştıracak usullere sarılmak suretiyle Batılı aydın, kendi toplumunu karanlık çağdan aydınlık çağa yöneltebilmiştir. * Bu konuda bkz. G. E. Von Grunebaum, Modern Islam: The Search for Culture Identity, Berkeley, 1962, s.41.

done to show that this is not so (which is not to say that there are no points of difference between Thomistic and Aristotelian metaphysics). The dominant form of neo-Platonism in medieval Christian thought was Augustinianism. It is little wonder that the Platonic tradition should have seemed agreeable to the early Church Fathers, for it is not difficult to map Christian beliefs and practices into central elements of neo-Platonism. Most fundamentally, just as the Christian distinguishes between the physical cosmos and the eternal kingdom of God, so Plato and his followers distinguish between the material world and the timeless and unchanging realm of immaterial forms. Similarly, Christians commonly distinguish between body and soul and look forward to life after death in which the blessed will enjoy forever the sight of God; while Platonists contrast the mortal frame and the immortal mind that will ascend to eternal vision of the forms. Supreme among these forms is that of the One whose principal aspects are those of truth, beauty and goodness; a trinity-in-unity ready-made to assist Christians struggling with the idea that God is three persons in one divinity. The lesser Platonic forms, including those corresponding to natures experienced in the empirical world, became the ideas out of which God created the world. Even Christian mysticism found its rational warrant in the idea that the most noble experiences consist in inexpressible encounters with transcendental realities. Aristotle came into his own as a philosopher through his rejection of the fundamental tenets of Platonism and through his provision of a more naturalistic and less dualistic worldview. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the enthusiasm for Aristotelianism shown by Aquinas and by his teachers Peter of Ireland and Albert the Great was viewed with suspicion by the Augustinian masters of the thirteenth century. Even so, it is a serious mistake, still perpetrated today, to represent Aristotle as if he were some sort of scientific materialist. In one of the classics of analytical philosophy, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, Peter Strawson explains his subtitle by distinguishing between two types of philosophy, writing that ‘descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, [while] revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure’.7 He goes on to point out that few if any actual metaphysicians have been wholly of one or other sort, but that broadly speaking Leibniz and Berkeley are revisionary while Aristotle and Kant are descriptive. In these terms Aquinas’s thought and thomist metaphysics are fundamentally ‘descriptive’, notwithstanding that they are at odds with the materialism and scientism which some contemporary philosophers proclaim as enlightened common sense. The words of G.K. Chesterton quoted at the outset of this chapter