ellauri096.html on line 136: Foundationalists reject (1). They take some propositions to be self-evident. Coherentists reject (2). They tolerate some forms of circular reasoning. For instance, Nelson Goodman (1965) has characterized the method of reflective equilibrium as virtuously circular. Charles Peirce (1933–35, 5.250) rejected (3), an approach later refined by Peter Klein (2007) and championed at book-length by Scott F. Aikin (2011). Infinitists believe that infinitely long chains of justification are no more impossible than infinitely long chains of causation. Finally, the epistemological anarchist rejects (4). As Paul Feyerabend refrains in Against Method, “Anything goes” (1988, vii, 5, 14, 19, 159).
ellauri096.html on line 191: Yes, there are infinitely many. Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem demonstrated that any system that is strong enough to express arithmetic is also strong enough to express a formal counterpart of the self-referential proposition in the surprise test example ‘This statement cannot be proved in this system’. If the system cannot prove its “Gödel sentence”, then this sentence is true. If the system can prove its Gödel sentence, the system is inconsistent. So either the system is incomplete or inconsistent. (See the entry on Kurt Gödel.)
ellauri111.html on line 303: “Exactly! It’s a performance. It’s not the heart speaking. The heart would say something very different. In fact, the heart wouldn’t need to say very much at all: it has only one thing to say, to love and to ask for love, to forgive and to ask forgiveness. We’ve been talking about people who commit crimes but won’t own up to what they’ve done, people who want to say to anyone who’ll listen: ‘Not guilty! My conscience is clear! Don’t blame me!’ But the real problem is not the evidence of the facts—did he or didn’t he do this or say that. The real problem is that this is completely back to front. The person who loves, even if they haven’t committed any crimes, is the person who wants to be guilty, who doesn’t just want to forgive but wants to be forgiven; the person who thinks of themselves not only as guilty but infinitely guilty, guilty of everything, before everyone, in fact the guiltiest one of all.”
ellauri119.html on line 336: God, the Cause of all, is one. This does not mean one as in one of a pair, nor one like a species (which encompasses many individuals), nor one as in an object that is made up of many elements, nor as a single simple object that is infinitely divisible. Rather, God is a unity unlike any other possible unity. This is referred to in the Torah (Deuteronomy 6:4): "Hear Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one."
ellauri150.html on line 695: But while God has given Man a soul and the ability to reason, Man is not God! God is "infinitely perfect" while Man is imperfect. As a result Man can be easily be tempted by "something which is not really good, but which has the appearance of good".
ellauri189.html on line 143: heterogeneous concept) man enacts the drama of his life. The borders of this realm are indicated by the movement of the sun, arising from behind the horizon and, after moving through half of its orbit, again setting beyond this infinitely receding meeting point between heaven and earth. In Malczewski’s
ellauri196.html on line 859: Man’s life is short and the life of the world can be almost infinitely long. Well not quite but very very long in comparison. Human life on earth nears its end like my boring speech.
ellauri408.html on line 386: Christians like to claim that the mass-murdering God of the Old Testament was “appeased” by the bloody crucifixion of Jesus, but in fact the New Testament version of God was infinitely worse than the Old Testament version of Jehovah, due to the introduction of an infinitely cruel, purposeless “eternal hell” that was never once threatened or even suggested in the Old Testament.
ellauri408.html on line 390: The supposedly “new and improved” God of the New Testament is, in fact, infinitely worse than the Devil, because the Devil does not condemn anyone to hell. According to Christian theology, if human beings end up in hell, it was Jesus who chose not to save them, making Jesus (if this were true) infinitely worse than the Devil. After all, Jesus was able to nod at the thief on the cross and send him directly to heaven, so why wouldn’t Jesus just nod at everyone, since no human being is worthy of heaven in his/her own right, according to the Christian religion? To fall an inch short of infinity is to fall infinitely short.
ellauri408.html on line 392: Think about it for a second. If all human beings fall short of the glory of God, as the Bible claims, then all human fall infinitely short and there is no difference between one fallible human being and another. If there is a heaven, to keep if from being like earth, God would either have to change human nature, or he would have to create a dimension where suffering and death are not possible. If suffering and death are not possible, evil is not possible. But a God who can do either, and who is able to “make the lion lie down with the lamb” doesn’t need a “hell.” Does this explain why there was no “hell” in the Old Testament?
xxx/ellauri123.html on line 769: One of the first things Nabokov makes a point of saying is that, despite John Ray Jr.'s claim in the Foreword, there is no moral to the story. Nabokov concludes the afterword with a reference to his beloved first language, which he abandoned as a writer once he moved to the United States in 1940: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian language for a second-rate brand of English." Alas, that 'wonderful Russian language' which, I imagined, still awaits me somewhere, which blooms like a faithful spring behind the locked gate to which I, after so many years, still possess the key, turned out to be non-existent, and there is nothing beyond that gate, except for some burned out stumps and hopeless autumnal emptiness, and the key in my hand looks rather like a lock pick. Or floppy prick."
xxx/ellauri166.html on line 229: He laughs at the defiant ones, for between them and Him there is an infinite distance; He derides them by allowing the boundless stupidity of the infinitely little one to come to a climax and then He thrusts him down to the earth undeceived.
xxx/ellauri225.html on line 325: Of course, Le Guin was writing daring stories decades before me, stories of women who loved women, of four-person marriages, of people without gender. Her stories offered possibilities that most of society hadn’t even imagined in the late 1960s; I knew she must have faced similar societal disapproval. So I wanted to know why she faded to black for her sex scenes. “There Arrad took me into his arms and I took Arrad into my arms, and then between my legs, and fell upward, upward through the golden light.” (“Coming of Age in Karhide”) There was plenty of sex in her books – sometimes tremendously important sex — but Le Guin didn’t dwell on the details. In fact her sex scenes were prudish and infinitely boring.
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