Hugging the Horse

Once we accept pragmatic truth, we realize that since both reality
and our drives are constantly changing, our beliefs and conceptual schemes need to be in flux as well in order to keep our health or power on the rise. Ironically, this move is based on a correspondence claim about the true nature of reality. The move from correspondence to pragmatic truth is made on pragmatic grounds—correspondence truth is rejected because it’s useless—and then the pragmatic move to Pluralism is made on correspondence grounds—the fact is that the world out there is actually chaos which therefore is constantly throwing new challenges at us, requiring an epistemological flexibility in order to prosper.

—

Lee Braver - A thing of this world

I am always happy when someone points out that a rejection of identity thinking isn’t the kind of radical subversion of correspondence theories of truth that it claims to be, or a ‘post-metaphysical’ alternative to traditional western philosophy. As I joked about before, it’s more of a substitution of one view of the nature of the cosmos for another.

Anybody seen herding sheep after the feudal age in Age of Empires II should consider themselves a failure in life.

—Margaret Thatcher

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

When I was told stories as a kid the pessimism was there even then ’cos I never believed me mam when she finished a story with ‘And they all lived happily ever after’. ‘No, they didn’t. I don’t believe it,’ I’d say. I prefered Humpty Dumpty – nice and short, and a realistic ending. He never hurt anyone, but he had a little accident and died. Shit happens. That’s life, innit. No great life story, or love interest, just a dead egg.

—Karl Pilkington