3 ideas
| 23123 | Basic to human culture are binary oppositions, such as eating raw or cooked [Levi-Strauss, by Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: Lévi-Strauss made canonic to French structuralism the idea that human culture could be understood through a series of binary oppositionsn - the difference between what could be eaten raw and what cooked being one of the most fundamental. | |
| From: report of Claude Lévi-Strauss (works [1950]) by T.H. Green - Prolegomena to Ethics 1 | |
| A reaction: My guess is that such oppositions can often be illuminating, but will always be eventually judged as too simplistic. |
| 21570 | Numbers are just verbal conveniences, which can be analysed away [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Numbers are nothing but a verbal convenience, and disappear when the propositions that seem to contain them are fully written out. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Is Mathematics purely Linguistic? [1952], p.301) | |
| A reaction: This is the culmination of the process which began with his 1905 theory of definite descriptions. The intervening step was Wittgenstein's purely formal account of the logical connectives. |
| 7903 | The six perfections are giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom [Nagarjuna] |
| Full Idea: The six perfections are of giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom. | |
| From: Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnaparamitashastra [c.120], 88) | |
| A reaction: What is 'morality', if giving is not part of it? I like patience and vigour being two of the virtues, which immediately implies an Aristotelian mean (which is always what is 'appropriate'). |