Imagination, the ability to see things as images, is an ability of the heart, according to the influential Islamic philosophy of Ibn Arabi (d. 1240).
In distinction from fantasy, which dreams something, imagination is concerned with the particular darkness of the human heart and the peculiar density which surrounds everything that is real.
And if it can't literally happen now, the warrior sets precise deadlines. Sets them up now. He sets the deadlines NOW, so that they are still in the NOW. Deadlines soon become the warrior’s best friend.
By medieval standards, or even modern ones, the bourse of Antwerp [in early modern times] was remarkably free of regulation, and the atmosphere of speculation was intense. Little distinction was drawn between entrepreneurial activity and purer speculation like trading in grain futures or outright betting on such events as the next journey of Philip II to the Netherlands and the sex of unborn children.
In the philosophy of science, the progressive skepticism about the objective bearing of experimental evidence on theory, from Popper through Kuhn and Lakatos to Feyerabend, undermined the defenses science might have mounted against its irrationalist enemies.
[Sir Michael] Tippett lamented the loss of melody, described by Haydn as ‘that which is most difficult to produce – the invention of a fine melody is a work of genius’, and by Mozart as ‘the essence of music: I should liken one who invents melodies to a noble racehorse, and a mere contrapuntist to a hired post-hack.’
In the world of human affairs as known to the historian . . . [s]tructure is resolvable into function. There is no harm in historians talking about the structure of feudal society or of capitalist industry or of the Greek city state, but the reason why there is no harm in it is because they know that these so-called structures are really complexes of function, kinds of ways in which human beings behave; and that R.t when we say that, for example, the British constitution exists, what we mean is that certain people are behaving in a certain kind of way.
