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3 ideas
20678 | The Scientific Revolution was the discovery of our own ignorance [Harari] |
Full Idea: The great discovery of the Scientific Revolution was that humans do not know the answers to their most important question. | |
From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 14 'Ignoramus') | |
A reaction: I think of that revolution as raising the bar in epistemology, but this idea gives a motivation for doing so. Why the discovery then, and not before? |
20686 | For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another [Harari] |
Full Idea: For millenia people didn't know how to convert one type of energy into another, …and the only machine capable of performing energy conversion was the body. | |
From: Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: brief history of humankind [2014], 17 'Intro') | |
A reaction: Hence the huge and revolutionary importance of the steam engine and the electricity generator. |
17651 | Without words or other symbols, we have no world [Goodman] |
Full Idea: We can have words without a world but no world without words or other symbols. | |
From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.3) | |
A reaction: Goodman seems to have a particularly extreme version of the commitment to philosophy as linguistic. Non-human animals have no world, it seems. |