Thus if the quantity or quality of available energy declines significantly—either because of supply problems or because more energy is required to achieve the same ends—the civilization is in trouble.
This one seems especially pertinent today, especially if I have any readers in Texas or Nebraska.
This book completes the task I set myself many years ago—to find a humane and effective political response to the challenge of ecological scarcity.
For all its disregard for human rights, China is more fully part of the international order than the Soviet Union ever was.
In a different vein, but like Polanyi, Stephen Toulmin judged formal logic to be a misleading and inadequate representation of how humans acquire knowledge, and he proposed a gradualist Darwinian model for conceptual advance in the sciences. [From the Forward by Mary Jo Nye.]
From what impression, as Hume asks, is this idea [causation] derived? I answer, from impressions received in our social life, in the practical relations of man to man; specifically, from the impression of causing (in sense I) some other man to do something when, by argument or command or threat or the like, we place him in a situation in which he can only carry out his intentions by doing that thing; and conversely, from the impression of being caused to do something. Why, then, did people think it appropriate to apply this idea to the case of actions in which we achieve our ends by means, not of other human beings, but of things in nature?
The utilitarian view of action, since its essence is to be abstract, results not only in the false abstraction of the will from the intellect, but in the inevitable consequence of this false abstraction, the arbitrary distinction of men of thought from men of action.
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