Niche Philosophy Quotes

This 'web of discourses' as Robyn called it...is as much a biological product as any of the other constructions to be found in the animal world. (Clothes too, are part of the extended phenotype of Homo Sapiens almost every niche inhabited by that species.An illustrated encyclopedia of zoology should no more picture Homo Sapiens naked than it should picture Ursus arctus-the black bear- wearing a clown suit and riding a bicycle.

Here we immediately face the danger of slipping into another but equally untenable romanticism, namely a call for humans to be humble and come to terms with or appreciate their finitude. The acknowledgement of the inherent lack of unity in the metabolism of humans and the rest of nature should not lead us to conceive of humans as fragile, vulnerable and ontologically homeless creatures destined to remain caught in opaque mediations. Such a way of thinking amounts to a secularisation of the religious demand for humans to display their submissiveness and obedience to God. One finds examples of this in existentialist philosophies of the Heideggerian variant or in Arnold Gehlen's conservative philosophical anthropology, according to which the natural incompleteness of human beings justify the call for stable social institutions (i.e., the shepherd-God is replaced with the shepherd-State). The key to avoid such an ideology of finitude is to recall that it is the very fragility and porosity of the human metabolism which has made humans so evolutionarily successful. Human corporeal organisation is the source of an immense flexibility and has enabled this animal to "break out of a narrow ecological niche". Far from being the sign of an inherent finitude of the human being, the loss of immediacy at the centre of its being is rather a sign of its infinity in the sense that it enables humans to socially mediate their relation to the rest of nature in an infinite number of ways.

Checklist for Targeting Publishers Does your manuscript fit the publisher's commercial and literary philosophy? Does your manuscript fit into a line of books the publisher is already producing? Is your manuscript too similar to something the publisher has just published? Is the subject matter taboo to the publisher for any reason? (Some religious publishers might object to a book about Halloween, for instance.) Does the manuscript match the publisher's particular niche in terms of age level and subject matter? Is the style of the manuscript in line with the publisher's needs and with the other books the publisher is publishing? Does the length of the manuscript match the publisher's guidelines?

Suppose that, through legislation (an artificial means) and through a government-run school voucher program (an artificially created market), public schools are privatized. "Natural evolution" will then take place: Schools will have to compete, only the best competitors will survive, and those schools that cannot compete will cease to exist. The surviving schools, by the Folk Theory of the Best Result, will be the best schools. It is an argument entirely based on two metaphors and a folk theory, all of which derive from Strict Father morality. Many people do not notice that Evolution Is Survival Of The Best Competitor is, indeed, a metaphor, much less a Strict Father metaphor. One way to reveal its metaphorical character is to contrast it with a metaphor for evolution that takes the perspective of Nurturant Parent morality: Evolution Is The Survival Of The Best Nurtured. Here "best nurtured" is taken to include both literal nurturing by parents and others and metaphorical nurturing by nature itself. Where fitting an ecological niche is being metaphorized as winning a competition in one case, it is metaphorized as being cared for by nature in the other. Both are metaphors for evolution, but they have very different entailments, especially when combined with the metaphor Natural Change Is Evolution and the folk theory that evolution yields the best result. Putting these together yields a very different composite metaphor for natural change, namely, Natural Change Is The Survival Of The Best Nurtured, which produces the best result. Applied to the issue of whether public schools should be privatized, this metaphor would entail that they should not be. Rather, public schools need to be "better nurtured," that is, given the resources they need to improve: better-trained and better-paid teachers, smaller classes, better facilities, programs for involving parents, community involvement, and so on.

My philosophy is that, by getting out of the rut, you not only advance your professional and personal life forward, but also find your own niche and a long lost sight of your uniqueness...The choice is yours!

In many ways, our consciousness is a trainer. A large part of its function is to train the unconscious to do things that would be impossible if the unconscious were directed purely by instinct. Animals can never change their basic instinctual repertoire, which is why all animals belong to narrow evolutionary niches. Humans, by contrast, can train themselves to do almost anything. That’s because they are conscious. With consciousness, they can plan new activities entirely unknown to instinct. That’s why humans escaped from their original niche and became the masters of the earth, able to dominate the niches of all other species. Consciousness overcomes instinct. That’s the point of consciousness. If we couldn’t break from instinct, we would still be living in the trees, or in caves, and scarcely be any different from apes. Consciousness is the greatest power in the animal universe, because it can allow any animal that becomes conscious to transform its destiny. Only humans have. Why did Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) go extinct and Homo sapiens didn’t? Was it because the latter became conscious and the former didn’t? The latter were able to solve problems that the former could not. Leibniz said, “… it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God.” You cannot do systematic reasoning unless you have a mind space in which to conduct it. You need a space where you can deal with relations of ideas, truths of reason, universals, holism, coherence, pure logic, and so on.

Negative, or prohibitory, rules are especially appropriate to the Open Society. Prohibitory rules seem especially adept as facilitating the constant searching for, and learning about, new niches that are constitutive of the autocatalytic diversity of the Open Society. A prohibitory rule helps trim the set of eligible options open to a complying agent, but by no means determines action. There are innumerable ways of not littering (including, as Smith pointed out, by sitting still and doing nothing.) The benefit of this is that such rules, while giving others form expectations about what you will not do, nevertheless allow you to explore new possibilities.

That whenever we identify some new market niche, all we do, in the long run, is dismantle it. This is like our guiding principle, our original philosophy. In the 1950s, Swanson saw that families ate meals together and wanted to get into that market. So they invented the TV dinner. Which made families realize they didn’t have to eat meals together. Selling the family dinner made the family dinner go extinct. And we’ve been pulverizing the market ever since.

Surely . . . Judaism is more than the history of anti-semitism. Surely Jews deserve to be defined—and are in fact defined, by others as well as by themselves—by those qualities of faith, lineage, sacred texts and moral teachings that have enabled them to endure through centuries of persecution. —GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB1 In many spheres of life, Jews have made contributions that are far larger than might be expected from their numbers. Jews constitute 0.2% of the world’s population, but won 14% of Nobel Prizes in the first half of the 20th century, despite social discrimination and the Holocaust, and 29% in the second. As of 2007, Jews had won an amazing 32% of Nobel Prizes awarded in the 21st century.2 Jews have excelled not only in science but also in music (Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg), in painting (Pissarro, Modigliani, Rothko), and in philosophy (Maimonides, Bergson, Wittgenstein). Jewish authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing in English, French, German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish and Hebrew.3 Such achievement requires an explanation, and an interesting possibility is that Jews have adapted genetically to a way of life that requires higher than usual cognitive capacity. People are highly imitative, and if the Jewish advantage were purely cultural, such as hectoring mothers or a special devotion to education, there would be little to prevent others from copying it. Instead, given the new recognition of human evolution in the historical past, it is possible that Jewish intellectual achievement has emerged from some pressure in their special history. Just as races have evolved in the recent past, ethnicities within races will also evolve if they are reproductively isolated to some extent from their host population, whether by geography or religion. The adaptation of Jews to a special cognitive niche, if indeed this has been an evolutionary process, as is argued below, represents a striking example of natural selection’s ability to change a human population in just a few centuries.

Może tak naprawdę on istnieje w wyższym wymiarze. Jeśli tak jest, to Bóg, projektowany do naszego wymiaru, mógłby wyglądać inaczej w zależności od tego, gdzie znajduje się patrzący. A różne na jego temat historie mogłyby wynikać z różnych punktów widzenia opowiadającego, mimo że pozornie sobie nawzajem przeczą. Może trzeba zebrać wszystkie elementy, by móc z nich wywnioskować jakąś większą całość. Bo to zupełnie, jakby dokonać projekcji trójwymiarowej piramidy na płaszczyznę. Dwuwymiarowa istota żyjąca na płaszczyźnie podstawy utrzymywałaby, że piramida to kwadrat. Podobna istota egzystująca na poziomie równoległym do płaszczyzny bocznej piramidy twierdziłaby, że wcale nie, bo trójkąt. Z perspektywy innych płaszczyzn trójwymiarowa figura mogłaby wyglądać jak prostokąt, równoległobok lub trapez. Dwuwymiarowe istoty nieustannie by się ze sobą kłóciły, przekonane, że obiekt, na który patrzą, nie może być równocześnie kwadratem, trójkątem, prostokątem, równoległobokiem i trapezem. Gotowe byłyby ruszyć na wojnę i bić się o swoją prawdę. Bo nie wiedziałyby, że istnieje wyższy wymiar, w którym wszystkie ich opisy okazują się równoprawne. Rzeczywistość innego rzędu, w której zawiera się świat ich własny i wiele innych światów.

Důležité je, že život a každá živá individualita se zde pojímá nikoli jako forma či vývoj formy, ale jako komplexní poměr mezi rozdílnými rychlostmi, mezi zpomalením a zrychlením částic; jako skládání vyšších a nižších rychlostí na rovině imanence. (...) Právě díky rychlosti a pomalosti vklouzáváme mezi věci a spojujeme se s některou z nich. Nezačínáme nikdy na začátku, nezačínáme jako nepopsaná deska, mezi věci vklouzáváme, vstupujeme do prostředí, přízpůsobujeme se určitému rytmu nebo ho sami udáváme.

If we focus on substance over size, sustainability over consumption, we can create a solo business that is efficient and profitable. This may seem entirely conceptual (and it is), but changing your philosophy from “Bigger is Better” to “Business Edited” will allow you more freedom, flexibility, and profit. Living Business Edited You may want to grow your business into a thriving company. And that’s a great goal. But the philosophy can be the same. Create a business based on substance over size. Bigger is not better. Become an expert in efficiency and embrace the less stuff, less overhead philosophy. Here are a few examples of how to live Business Edited: Focus on a niche instead of trying to do everything for everyone (think small target market over large target market) Get rid of paper – no one reads brochures! Embrace technology that helps you integrate and organize (think iPad over PC) Choose sustainable and local whenever you can Create a leaner office space Choose dual purpose items Don’t purchase “stuff”  – purchase only what you truly need Minimalism