3 ideas
| 1556 | By nature people are close to one another, but culture drives them apart [Hippias] |
| Full Idea: I regard you all as relatives - by nature, not by convention. By nature like is akin to like, but convention is a tyrant over humankind and often constrains people to act contrary to nature. | |
| From: Hippias (fragments/reports [c.430 BCE]), quoted by Plato - Protagoras 337c8 |
| 18285 | All translation loses some content (but language does not create reality) [Carnap] |
| Full Idea: I do not believe in translatability without loss of content, and therefore I think that the content of a world description is influenced to a certain degree by choice of a language form. But that does not mean that reality is created through language. | |
| From: Rudolph Carnap (Letters to Schlick [1935], 1935.12.04), quoted by J. Alberto Coffa - The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap 19 'Truth' | |
| A reaction: It is a mistake to think Quine was the first to spot the interest of translation in philosophy of language. 'Does translation always lose content?' is a very nice question for focusing the problem. |
| 21996 | Freedom only comes when labour is no longer necessary [Marx] |
| Full Idea: The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases. | |
| From: Karl Marx (Capital Vol. 3 [1873], p.496), quoted by Peter Singer - Marx 8 | |
| A reaction: This is a bit discouraging fo idealistic dreamers. Modern political thought needs an ecological dimension to this problem. If society always needs a fair degree of labour, there must be a way to maximise freedom in that context. |