Sound thinking is man's greatest power, and his highest aptitude consists in the fact that he has the capacity to say what is, and that he can fashion creatively by hearkening to nature.Heraclitus, quoted on her slide
Techne is that knowledge and ability which is directed to producing and constructing, and thus occupies a sort of intermediate place between mere experience or know-how, empeiria, and theoretical knowledge, episteme. Techne differs from theoretical knowledge, episteme, in that the latter has to do with what is immutable, purely existent and primary, whereas techne, as productive knowledge, bears upon the domain of what is mutable, in the process of becoming, and comes to be.Schadewaldt on Aristotle, page 29, quoted on her slide
A knowledge that is likewise productive but which, however rich and diverse it may be, has a false idea of the thing itself remains simply atechnia, blunder.Schadewaldt, page 29. Atechnia is a false idea of the thing, held confidently.
Our modern conception of nature more and more abandoned the comprehensive wholeness of the ancient Greek physis, the wholeness and unity of form and motion, law and life, causality and purpose; and in developing the modern dualism between thought and extension we have separated nature and spirit, nature and freedom, subject and object, from one another. This reduction of nature to what is calculable has proven to be extraordinarily successful. It has brought us the most astounding discoveries, and placed in our hands the greatest means of power, although at the cost of an impoverishment that is hard to estimate.Schadewaldt, quoted on her slide
Education isn't what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes.Plato, page 11 of the extract, quoted on her slide
The Christian Creator God, the architect of the cosmos and the potter who shaped man from clay in his own image, commands man to rule the world and to help to fulfill the divine will in it as a creative cooperator with him. History, far from being cyclical as it is in most religions, in Christianity is unique and unilinear; it is accelerating toward a spiritual goal; there is no time to lose; therefore, work, including manual work, is an essential and pressing form of worship.Lynn White, page 513, quoted on her slide
The alchemists or empirics had been like the ant, only to store up and use things; the Aristotelians or dogmatists had been like spiders, spinning webs from their own entrails. The proper natural philosopher should proceed in the way of the bee, to gather material from the flowers and then to convert and digest it.Bacon's simile, Novum Organum I.95, quoted on her slide
Week 2 runs across two lectures. Each tab keeps its own notes and its own date, saved in this browser beside the highlights on the reading guide.
What each author argues goes in the notes by text on the reading guide. This page is for what was said in the room. The third tab holds what the professor posted, which is the closest thing there is to a list of what she thinks is worth knowing.
Type straight into a tab and it saves on its own. Cmd or Ctrl + B for bold, + I for italic, + H for the last colour you used, and again to take it off. Selecting text brings up a small bar with bold, italic, a bullet list and the colours. Typing - or 1. starts a list, ### starts a heading, and Tab inside a list indents.