Carolina QuotesIf you believe that you are not a machine, but that I am (then) I do not know why you are reading this book".
Lewis White Beck Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Lewis White Beck, The Actor and the Spectator - book reviewed by Mary Midgley in The Philosophical Quarterly", Vol. 27, Issue 107, April 1977 p. 185-186 (1975), p. 29
- year
- 1975
- locator
- p. 185-186
Cite this record
“If you believe that you are not a machine, but that I am (th…” Lewis White Beck. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-FB52D29C2F. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/fb52d29c2f
More from Lewis White Beck
But somewhat like people who object to spending money needed in the ghettoes on exploring the moon, I think the best hope for our survival is to be based on understanding human predicaments here on earth, not expecting a saving message from super-human beings in the sky...Thinking about and even hoping to find extraterrestrial civilizations, however, sharpen our search for and appreciation of the peculiar virtues and vices of the only form of life we know.
Kant did not tell us his strategic secrets, and perhaps he was not fully aware of his stratagem. But in our own century, this stratagem has been formulated in what is sometimes called "Ramsey's Maxim". In cases where two opposed arguments seem internally sound but where their conclusions are incompatible and hence a stalemate is created, Frank P. Ramsey wrote, "It is a heuristic maxim that the truth lies not in one of the two disputed views but in some third possibility which has not yet been thought of, which we can only discover by rejecting something assumed as obvious by both the disputants."...We have now seen how Kant applied this maxim in the disputes concerning mathematics....We can illustrate this pattern again by referring to Kant's later attempt to resolve the space antinomy.
[T]he only species on earth which prides itself on its intelligence is the only one with the intelligence necessary, and possibly sufficient, to render itself extinct tomorrow.