Thesis Defended Quotes

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.

In Plato's time, dialectics was a debating technique subject to precise rules. A "thesis" was proposed-an interrogative proposition such as: Can virtue be taught? One of the two interlocutors attacked the thesis; the other defended it. The former attacked by interrogating-that is, he asked the defender skillfully chosen questions with the aim of forcing him to admit the contradictory of the thesis he wanted to defend. The interrogator had no thesis, and this was why Socrates was in the habit of playing that role.

As your days, so shall your strength be.’ When I’m lying awake the night before having to make one of those speeches, I say that to myself. It reassures me.” “What does that mean to you, that text?” “That when the trials of life come, you’ll be given the strength to cope with them, day by day. So often I’ve thought at the start of a dreaded day—having to defend my Ph.D. thesis, giving a talk to an intimidating audience, or even just going to the dentist!—‘Well, of course, I shall get through this because I have to. I will find the strength. And, anyway, by this time tomorrow it will be over.

Politeness provides a way where you can back down with dignity. In nature there is only ever one reason you cede the high ground – you are acknowledging defeat. You are bowing before a superior power. But under the rules of politeness, you let the other person off not because you are a weakling, a coward or a failure, but because you value calm over chaos. Politeness makes it easier to apologise, because apologising isn’t just an act of pure submission. Politeness is founded on a major insight into human nature and a big positive thesis about what civilisation is and why we need it. It’s a view that was advanced particularly by the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. Hobbes was acutely conscious that our normal, unrestrained instincts are far from being wholly nice. We may be quite inclined by nature to damage or destroy our rivals; to take advantage of those who are weaker than us; to grab more than our fair share of anything good if we can; to humiliate those who we feel are in some way alien; to revenge ourselves on anyone we feel has upset or disappointed us and to enforce our opinions and beliefs on others if we can. These are natural inclinations, Hobbes argues; therefore, we positively require a set of constraining conventions that artificially induce better ways of dealing with other people. Politeness is not mere decoration. It is directed at dealing with a major human problem: we need manners to restrain the beast inside.

[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.) What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine." A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?

The erroneous belief that science eventually leads to the certainty of a definitive explanation carries with it the implication that it is a grave scientific mis- demeanour to have published some hypothesis that eventually is falsified. As a consequence scientists have often been loath to admit the falsification of such an hypothesis, and their lives may be wasted in defending the no longer defensible. Whereas according to Popper, falsification in whole or in part is the anticipated fate of all hypotheses, and we should even rejoice in the falsification of an hypo thesis that we have cherished as our brain-child.

It is commonplace to note that the Homo economicus model, so defi ned, does not accurately describe human agents. Like Homo economicus, we have preferences. Unlike Homo economicus, we have preferences directly relating to the welfare of others. Some may regard this as controversial. Psychological egoism is the thesis that all human behavior is purely self-regarding. Responding to obvious counterexamples, defenders of psychological egoism sometimes say we act in apparently other-regarding ways only because we reap “psychic” rewards from helping others. As philosophers well know, psychological egoism thus embellished becomes airtight at a cost of becoming literally inconsequential. It does not tell us that soldiers will never give their lives for their countries or that people will never make anonymous donations to charity. It does not predict that Ebenezer Scrooge will never buy Bob Cratchit a Christmas turkey. It offers no testable predictions. Instead, it avoids having false implications by having no implications whatsoever. It merely expresses a determination to stretch the concept of self-regard as far as necessary to fi t all behavior, no matter how diverse observed behavior actually turns out to be. Insofar as there is any real content to the claim that we get psychic rewards from helping others, we can admit that, of course, we tend to feel good about helping others. But this fact does not begin to suggest that our real objective is psychic benefit rather than other people’s welfare. On the contrary, there can be no psychic reward for helping others unless we care about others. Imagine Bob helping someone across the street and then saying to her, “Other things equal, I would rather you had been hit by a bus. Unfortunately, helping you is the price I have to pay in order to reap psychic rewards.” The fact that we get psychic rewards from helping others proves we are directly concerned with the welfare of others. The mark of a purely self-regarding person is not that he really wants to help others but rather that he really doesn’t. That is the obvious and much celebrated difference between Homo economicus and us.

Defense mechanisms are everywhere and with every organisms to protect themselves from predators and other environmental or ecological stimulus, even music is a defense mechanism, even coding is defense mechanism, AI/ML is to understand defense mechanisms,/ But for me when i figure out Biological/ environmental/ecological stimuli responsible for specific reactions i e physiological dynamics, i observe, study, research and finally defend on thesis presentation or viva voce or laude ., Aspiring Biologist / Env/ecologist

MT: That's Régis Debray's thesis: the incarnation of Christ and the defeat of the iconoclasts gave the West mastery of images and thus of innovation. Here's a question that may be absurd: does a phrase like “if someone hits you on one cheek, turn the other” have anything to do with imitation? RG: Of course it does, since it's directed against “adversarial” imitation, and is one and the same thing as the imitation of Christ. In the Gospels, everything is imitation, since Christ himself seeks to imitate and be imitated. Unlike the modern gurus who claim to be imitating nobody, but who want to be imitated on that basis, Christ says: “Imitate me as I imitate the Father.” The rules of the Kingdom of God are not at all utopian: if you want to put an end to mimetic rivalry, give way completely to your rival. You nip rivalry in the bud. We're not talking about a political program, this is a lot simpler and more fundamental. If someone is making excessive demands on you, he's already involved in mimetic rivalry, he expects you to participate in the escalation. So, to put a stop to it, the only means is to do the opposite of what escalation calls for: meet the excessive demand twice over. If you've been told to walk a mile, walk two; if you've been hit on the left cheek, offer up the right. The Kingdom of God is nothing but this, but that doesn't mean it's easily accessible. There is also a pretty strong unwritten tradition that states that “Satan is the ape of God.” Satan is extremely paradoxical in the Gospels. First he is mimetic disorder, but he is also order because he is the prince of this world. When the Pharisees accuse him of freeing the possessed from their demons by the power of “Beelzebub,” Jesus replies: “Now if Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself; so how can his kingdom last? […] But if it is through the Spirit of God that I drive out devils, then be sure that the kingdom of God has caught you unawares.” This means that Satan's order is the order of the scapegoat. Satan is the whole mimetic system in the Gospels. That Satan is temptation, that Satan is rivalry that turns against itself—all the traditions see this; succumbing to temptation always means tempting others. What the Gospel adds, and what is unique to it, I think, is that Satan is order. The order of this world is not divine, it's sacrificial, it's satanic in a certain sense. That doesn't mean that religions are satanic, it means that the mimetic system, in its eternal return, enslaves humanity. Satan's transcendence is precisely that violence temporarily masters itself in the scapegoat phenomenon: Satan never expels himself once and for all—only the Spirit of God can do that—but he more or less “chains himself” by means of the sacrificial order. All medieval legends tell you: the devil asks for but one victim, but as for that victim, he can't do without it. If you don't obey the rules of the Kingdom of God, you are necessarily dependent on Satan. Satan means “the Accuser.” And the Spirit of God is called Paraclete, that is to say “the Defender of Victims,” it's all there. The defender of victims reveals the inanity of Satan by showing that his accusations are untruthful. Oedipus's parricide and incest, which give the plague to a whole community—they're a joke, a very bad joke that helps cause quite a bit of damage among us when we take it seriously, as, in the final analysis, is the case with…the psychoanalysts: they take the lie of the Accuser seriously. Our whole culture is dominated by mythical accusation to the extent that it does not denounce it. Psychoanalysis endorses the accusation.

So now I found myself having to defend my thesis to an entire bar of sports fanatics. I was merely trying to kill the man's passion by arguing an opposing viewpoint - an ill conceived viewpoint I hadn't given any thought to until that moment. I was now fully committed.

McRaven’s thesis, which would become part of the curriculum at the Naval Postgraduate School, set out the core concept of special ops: that a small, well-trained force can deliver a decisive blow against a much larger, well-defended one. He defined such a mission as one “conducted by forces specially trained, equipped, and supported for a specific target whose destruction, elimination, or rescue (in the case of hostages), is a political or military imperative.” Refining the key elements to success for such missions, he prescribed, in a nutshell, “A simple plan, carefully concealed, repeatedly and realistically rehearsed, and executed with surprise, speed, and purpose.

Critics such as Slavoj Žižek accuse him of being a poster child for the cultural excesses of postmodern capitalism (“Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution’”). A recent round of denunciations underwritten by a mix of wonderment and red-baiting exclaim, “The founder of BuzzFeed wrote his senior thesis on the Marxism of Deleuze and Guattari!,” adding to a long list of guilty associations—“the Israeli Defense Force reads A Thousand Plateaus!,” “Deleuze spouts the fashionable nonsense of pseudoscience!” Deleuze’s defenders are correct to dismiss such criticisms as either incomplete or outright spurious. Yet there is a kernel of truth that goes back to an old joke—a communist is someone who reads Das Kapital; a capitalist is someone who reads Das Kapital and understands it.

Contrary to what we may think, the greatest difficulty of men is not in believing what the Church teaches at the moral level; the most difficult thing for the postmodern world is to believe in God and in his only Son. This is why Benedict XVI defends the thesis of the “crisis of God”. The absence of God from our lives is more and more tragic. The Council’s intention—not the “spirit” of those who misinterpret it—was to give back to God all his primacy. This is why the Council Fathers wished for a deepening of the faith, which was losing its savor in the ever-changing society of the postwar era. In this sense, the problem of the Council remains entirely unsolved in some regions of the world where the absence of God has unceasingly widened. I

(Present-day anthropologists defend the thesis that the American Indians were in fact originally Mongolians who crossed over by the Bering Strait.)

To begin with, one might wonder whether the gender associations claimed for these two cosmologies are really as univocal as the feminist critics claim. 22 (After all, the main defender of the geocentric worldview — the Catholic Church — was not exactly a female-centered enterprise, its adoration of the Virgin Mary notwithstanding.) But let us put aside this objection and grant these gender associations for the sake of argument; for the principal flaw in the Merchant–Harding thesis is, once again, not historical but logical. Margarita Levin puts it bluntly: Do Merchant and Harding really “think we have a choice about which theory is correct? Masculine or feminine, the solar system is the way it is.”23 The same point applies not only to astronomy but to scientific theories quite generally; and the bottom line is that there is ample evidence, independent of any allegedly sexist imagery, for the epistemic value of modern science. Therefore, as Koertge remarks, “if it really could be shown that patriarchal thinking not only played a crucial role in the Scientific Revolution but is also necessary for carrying out scientific inquiry as we know it, that would constitute the strongest argument for patriarchy that I can think of!

Putting aside the florid accusations of rape and torture, the argument of Merchant and Harding boils down to the assertion that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century displaced a female-centered (spiritual, hermetic, organic, geocentric) universe in favor of a male-centered (rationalist, scientific, mechanical, heliocentric) one. 21 How should we evaluate this argument? To begin with, one might wonder whether the gender associations claimed for these two cosmologies are really as univocal as the feminist critics claim. 22 (After all, the main defender of the geocentric worldview — the Catholic Church — was not exactly a female-centered enterprise, its adoration of the Virgin Mary notwithstanding.) But let us put aside this objection and grant these gender associations for the sake of argument; for the principal flaw in the Merchant–Harding thesis is, once again, not historical but logical. Margarita Levin puts it bluntly: Do Merchant and Harding really “think we have a choice about which theory is correct? Masculine or feminine, the solar system is the way it is.”23 The same point applies not only to astronomy but to scientific theories quite generally; and the bottom line is that there is ample evidence, independent of any allegedly sexist imagery, for the epistemic value of modern science. Therefore, as Koertge remarks, “if it really could be shown that patriarchal thinking not only played a crucial role in the Scientific Revolution but is also necessary for carrying out scientific inquiry as we know it, that would constitute the strongest argument for patriarchy that I can think of!

The general thesis to be defended concerning altruism is that one has a direct reason to promote the interests of others—a reason which does not depend on intermediate factors such as one’s own interests or one’s antecedent sentiments of sympathy and benevolence.

The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, ‘Do not decide, but leave the question open,’ is itself a passional decision—just like deciding yes or no—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.

In the Republic, Plato tries to show that what makes a human life happy is to be found in being a good, virtuous person – something that the person has to achieve for herself, while wealth, status and other things commonly valued are irrelevant to happiness. This challenging thesis is defended by a claim that virtue consists in the proper ordering and structure of the person’s soul, one in which reason rules (see Chapter 1). A properly ordered and so virtuous soul, compared to a properly ordered and so healthy body, brings the person a happy life, while unhappiness results from the breakdown of the soul’s order. The framework of the book consists in Plato’s developing and defending this idea that, contrary to popular belief, happiness is to be found in virtue, the right ordering of the soul, even in the worst possible conditions of poverty and torture.

In the Heidelberg disputation of 1518, Luther defends the following thesis: “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened.”12 In other words, we cannot draw a straight line between the way things appear now and God’s kingdom and ultimate plan. Right now the rich prosper and the poor are downtrodden, for example, but we err if we think that this is a good indicator of God’s ultimate intention. In the next thesis Luther says, “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.

which is that “the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression.” James says it is the other way around: “My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.” We are accustomed, he says, to think that “we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect . . . We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike or tremble because we are sorry, angry or fearful.

Our next duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of affairs, is to ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological, or whether, on the contrary, we must treat it as a normal element in making up our minds. The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, "Do not decide, but leave the question open," is itself a passional decision,—just like deciding yes or no,—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth. The thesis thus abstractly expressed will, I trust, soon become quite clear. But I must first indulge in a bit more of preliminary work.

The conflict of perspectives and competing wills that is the true reality is obscured and flattened out by the social imposition of a common standpoint, in language, thought, morality, and politics, which presents itself as simply or cosmically true by concealing its true sources. The inquiry into the geneology of these ruling ideas is therefore a vital part of their unmasking. The proposed geneology of Christian morality, as the expression not of universal love but of the slave revolt of the base against the noble, motivated by fear, hatred, and envy, is Nietzsche’s most famous thesis, expounded in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Geneology of Morals. . . . He regarded modern morality, which speaks with the voice of the community or even of humanity as a whole, as particularly dangerous, because it requires suppression of the cruelty and recklessness that distinguishes the strong individual. The height of self-realization cannot be reached by someone who is too concerned with the reactions of others, or his effects on them. There is a fundamental conflict between the pursuit of individual creativity and perfection and the claims of the general welfare. For this reason, Nietzsche was not a democrat. Already at the time of writing The Birth of Tragedy, he defended slavery as a condition of the possibility of great cultural achievement by the few, as in ancient Athens. And he defended its modern counterpart, the economic oppression of the masses, for the same reason. He opposed shortening the workday from twelve hours to eleven when it was proposed in Basel, he approved of child labor, and he opposed the educational groups for workers. When in 1871 he heard the false rumor that the Paris communards had pillaged the Louvre, he called it ‘the worst day of my life.’ Equality meant nothing to him; he believed it would inevitably push everything down to the lowest common denominator, that of the ‘democratic herd animal.’ Life, he insisted, is tragic; it is necessary to choose between justice and aesthetic perfection. And in his latest writings he expressed fantasies of annihilation, with ‘degenerates’ being got rid of to make room for the highest type of man.

More importantly, he has applied this encyclopedic knowledge to his researches on African history. “While pursuing this research,” he told the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in September 1956, “we have come to discover that the ancient Pharaonic Egyptian civilization was undoubtedly a Negro civilization. To defend this thesis, anthropological, ethnological, linguistic, historical, and cultural arguments have been provided. To judge their validity, it suffices to refer to Nations nègres et culture …

We are marginally—but crucially—less likely to question the soundness of an article about a rationale for going to war when it comes presented beneath the neo-Gothic Cheltenham typeface of the New York Times, or to probe the coherence of a thesis defending a presidential budget when it is laid out in the sober yet sensuous columns of Le Monde's Fenway font. Brands alone dissuade us from picking sceptically at their underlying content.