Weber’s understanding of values was indebted chiefly to Nietzsche and that Donald G. Macrae in his book on Weber (1974) calls him an existentialist; for while he holds that an agent may be more or less rational in acting consistently with his values, the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than that of any other. All faiths and all evaluations are equally non-rational; all are subjective directions given to sentiment and feeling. Weber is then, in the broader sense in which I have understood the term, an emotivist and his portrait of a bureaucratic authority is an emotivist portrait. The consequence of Weber’s emotivism is that in his thought the contrast between power and authority, although paid lip-service to, is effectively obliterated as a special instance of the disappearance of the contrast between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations.
The defense would argue, citing Descartes, Aristotle, Kant, or Popper, that humans err by not reasoning enough. The prosecution would argue, citing Luther, Hume, Kierkegaard, or Foucault, that they err by reasoning too much.
The purpose of a hypothesis in science is to propose an explanation for what we observe, either in nature or in the laboratory (ideally, a testable hypothesis): Why did this happen and not that? The more observations a hypothesis can explain or the more phenomena it can predict, the better the explanation, the better the hypothesis. This insistence that we get fat because we overeat is not even wrong, as the legendary physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a man with a gift for memorably pithy criticisms, might have put it. It explains nothing.
Entropy is a measure of the deadness of a system. Negentropy or information is a measure of the liveliness of a system.
He ["Phaedrus"] felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.
The great masterpieces of twentieth-century historical writing rarely mention dates. Think, in particular, of so-called cross-sectional studies, such as Fernand Braudel’s book on the Mediterranean world at the time of Philip II, which does not present us with a development over time but is instead content with describing what that world looked like at one specific temporal cross-section.
[John Ciardi:] In contrast with the turbulent complexity of Hell, Dante’s Purgatory is simple, regular, and serene. On the lower reaches below the gate are kept in exile for varying lengths of time those souls who, for various reasons and in various conditions, sought salvation at the last moment. Above, within Purgatory, we find not the multifarious crimes by which vice or sin manifests itself in Hell (or on Earth), but simply the seven Capital Vices that lead to sinful acts.
