quote – Page 2 – Philosophics

Whom do you serve?

Jan 1, 2021Posted in philosophyTagged holy grail, philosophy, quote2 Comments

Something happened to me which was outside my own plans, and after that I went where I was taken.
TH White, The Once and Future King

An Internet friend led me to this quote. I felt it was appropriate to share in reflection of 2020, not only for me but many people who were forced to go with the flow.

The quote reminded me of the mid-1990s, a time when I was steeped in the archetypal and depth psychology of Jung and Hillman. I also read a lot of works pertaining to the Holy Grail. I decided to composite the quote onto the cover image. I’m not asking for a holy grail. Let’s just hope 2021 fares better than 2020 by most accounts.

Judging Language

Jan 11, 2019Jan 10, 2019Posted in language, philosophyTagged language, philosophy, quote, Steven PinkerLeave a comment

Just a brief post today. I had forgotten about this Steven Pinker quote I shared elsewhere a few years back.

“Judges are not very good linguists. For better or worse, they try to find a way around the most natural interpretation of a sentence if it would stand in the way of the outcome they feel is just.”
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct

The fact is that they do not care about the lack of specificity of language. Politicos revel in the fact that they can torture language into submission to meet their own objectives. This is the power of rhetoric.

As I have reviewed my posts over the past couple of years, it seems I repeat myself, repeat myself, repeat myself, repeat… I get a sudden urge to capture a notion, and it turns out that I had already written about it before. I’d just forgotten.

What I need to do is to formulate a cogent distilled version, but I can’t quite seem to get there. For now, I’ll just share this.