1,028 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2016
  2. May 2016
    1. p. 6 On knowledge fetishisation. Note he is writing in the period 1995-2000, before it became absolutely clear that this was vanishing and that it would become a fetish:

      One purpose [for acquiring information[ is simply possession and the satisfaction it gives; witness the pride some people take in their phenomenal memory for trivia, their extensive libraries, their collections of compact disks, maps, or computer programs. Possessing information also confers prestige. Erudition and especially initiation into the esoteric knowledge of a small sect or secret society--Freemasons, cosmologists, and the like--have conferred prestige and awed the ignorant throughout history.

  3. Feb 2016
    1. Al-Ghazali launched a philosophical critique against Neoplatonic-influenced early Islamic philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. In response to the philosophers' claim that the created order is governed by secondary efficient causes (God being, as it were, the Primary and Final Cause in an ontological and logical sense), Ghazali argues that what we observe as regularity in nature based presumably upon some natural law is actually a kind of constant and continual regularity. There is no independent necessitation of change and becoming, other than what God has ordained.

      God as a source of secondary causes, not just a prime mover. Probability/chance, tychism

  4. Jan 2016
  5. Dec 2015
    1. we did so, we solicited questions through various social media, and we made sure to address as many of them as we could. And then, we worked through the transcripts, again and again, clarifying our concepts, refining our arguments, shuffling the pieces to insure greater clarity and accessibility

      I appreciate this "explaining how we did this" as a process statement.

  6. Nov 2015
    1. such that they cannot be experienced in any meaningful way without the mediation of an electronic device

      Another way to say that, as they can be printed, e-books are not e-lit, even if they have never been published on paper, but just Digital Literature, isn't it?

  7. Sep 2015
  8. Aug 2015
    1. “I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”

      this is fascinating to me - i had no idea of his connections with education. Makes me wonder about Tesla's thoughts on education now. And how he'd feel about filmstrips, which are in essence super cheap motion pictures.

  9. Jul 2015
  10. Jun 2015
  11. Dec 2014
  12. Aug 2013
    1. なるほどこの孤独な行為はアンブロシウスと同じだなあと、感心して見とれていた。

      音読による読書は社会的な行為だったが、黙読は孤独で個人的な行為。