ellauri096.html on line 116: The eliminativist has even more severe difficulties in stating his position than the skeptic. Some eliminativists dismiss the threat of self-defeat by drawing an analogy. Those who denied the existence of souls were accused of undermining a necessary condition for asserting anything. However, the soul theorist’s account of what is needed gives no reason to deny that a healthy brain suffices for mental states.
ellauri096.html on line 269: Binkley stipulates that the students do not forget. He needs to add that the students know that they will not forget. For the mere threat of a memory lapse sometimes suffices to undermine knowledge. Consider Professor Anesthesiology’s scheme for surprise tests: “A surprise test will be given either Wednesday or Friday with the help of an amnesia drug. If the test occurs on Wednesday, then the drug will be administered five minutes after Wednesday’s class. The drug will instantly erase memory of the test and the students will fill in the gap by confabulation.” You have just completed Wednesday’s class and so temporarily know that the test will be on Friday. Ten minutes after the class, you lose this knowledge. No drug was administered and there is nothing wrong with your memory. You are correctly remembering that no test was given on Wednesday. However, you do not know your memory is accurate because you also know that if the test was given Wednesday then you would have a pseudo-memory indistinguishable from your present memory. Despite not gaining any new evidence, you change your mind about the test occurring on Wednesday and lose your knowledge that the test is on Friday. (The change of belief is not crucial; you would still lack foreknowledge of the test even if you dogmatically persisted in believing that the test will be on Friday.)
ellauri192.html on line 287: Lastly, there is the rumor of the blacklist. No outside observer can show that any such list exists, let alone how and when it was explicitly arrived at. But there are stubborn, unsettling indications. Behind them stands the enigmatic figure and afterlife of Dag Hammerskjold. In one or two cases, the choice of laureate seems to have been largely his. His chill displeasures seem not only to have had great influence, but to persist beyond the grave. The list of lepers, for motives which may, in some masked degree, go back to Hammarskjold's own politics and arcane sexuality, is rumored to include Graham Greene, G"unter Grass and Borges, as it did Malraux (passed over, to de Gaulle's just anger, in favor of a French poet-diplomat close to Hammarskjold, viz. Saint-John Perse). The mere fact that the Nobel Prize in Literature has long passed Borges by suffices to put the whole institution in doubt. But whether any such blacklist is real remains baffled conjecture.
ellauri222.html on line 969: Ellsworth Huntington travelled continental Europe in hopes of better understanding the connection between climate and state success, publishing his findings in The Pulse of Asia, and further elaborating in Civilization and Climate. Like the political geographers, a crucial component of his work was the belief that the climate of North-western Europe was ideal, with areas further north being too cold, and areas further south being too hot, resulting in lazy, laid-back populations. These ideas have powerful connections to colonialism, and may have played a role in the creation of the 'other' and the literature that many used to justify taking advantage of less advanced nations. Who needs Proust or Tolstoy when it suffices to reach up to get a banana.
xxx/ellauri167.html on line 536: He believes the Free masons were originally possessed of the true principles & objects of Christianity, & have still preserved some of them by tradition, but much disfigured. The means he proposes to effect this improvement of human nature are `to enlighten men, to correct their morals & inspire them with benevolence. Secure of our success, sais he, we abstain from violent commotions. To have foreseen the happiness of posterity & to have prepared it by irreproachable means, suffices for our felicity.
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