to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen
Garrison takes a moment to question why White Americans would want to slowly eradicate slavery. In natural disasters and other emergency situations no one would push moving slowly to secure others safety or rectify the problem. Garrison is saying that something as serious as the enslavement of other human beings shouldn't be taken lightly.
like putting one wild deer in an iron cage, where it will be secured, and hold another by the side of the same, then let it go, and expect the one in the cage to run as fast as the one at liberty.
At this point in the text I believe that Walker is calling out Jefferson. After all, enslaved African Americans were not given opportunities to flourish and coexist with White people. As a result, they struggle to fit in with the rest of society, just like a formerly enclosed deer being let out into the wild.
because these ques-tions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation;
This part of the text stood out to me personally because it highlights why I'm interested in philosophy. It's not the fact that I can answer all of these complex questions, it's the fact that I can expand my thinking and become more open to different things, this challenging my beliefs.
The fact is that, logically speaking, philosophy begins before science does, and goes on after science has completed its work.
After reading this sentence, it immediately reminded me of the process of writing a research paper. Near the end of the paper the person conducting the research will address questions they could not answer. Going off of the sentence, philosophy dives deeper to the things unknown/unexplained by science.
Whole-brain deathi.e., the loss of function of the entire brain:
This section reminds me of one of the tensions found in my philosophical health check.
"Statements 22 and 15: What is the seat of the self? ...You agreed that: Severe brain-damage can rob a person of all consciousness and selfhood. And also that: On bodily death, a person continues to exist in a non-physical form"
It can be connected to the first section as well when the author is taking about the possibility of the soul surviving after death.
3. self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control);
When I was reading this definition, I looked over this line a lot. Sometimes we might say to others that "lack" or "don't have the motivation to do anything." Since this concept of self-motivated activity is needed for one to be considered a human, what does it mean for us when we no longer have the drive to do certain things? Does that make us less human?