8 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2024
    1. humanity's seemingly unstoppable instinct toward creation. The psychoanalyst Gaston Bachelard coined a term that encapsulates this drive: the "Prometheus complex."

      for - progress trap - Prometheus complex - adjacency - progress trap - Prometheus complex - Gaston Bachelard - Gaston Bachelard - French philosopher

      adjacency - between - progress trap - Prometheus complex - Gaston Bachelard - adjacency statement - Prometheus complex and progress traps have much in common: - both look at the shadow side of innovation - The mythology of Icarus geting too close the sun is one common to both - Bachelard wrote a pith work on the analysis of the element of fire, in which he introduced the concept of the Prometheus complex - https://philpapers.org/rec/OSEPCA

    2. for - progress trap - Prometheus complex - Dan Carlin - Gaston Bachelard - philosopher

      summary - This short article brings up an interesting connection between - the Prometheus complex, - a term coined by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard and - progress traps, - the unintended consequences of progress - The key insight is that human beings may have an Achilles Heel - the desire to know, even at the cost of harm - could be such a powerful impulsive urge - that we throw caution to the wind and - Icarus mythology may be a self-fulfilling prophecy - This also echos the views of my colleague Gyuri Lajos, - that invention for invention sake possesses this very dark side. - This is an important adjacency - as it questions the ethics of knowledge for knowledge sake - As we know from - the history of - progress and its shadowy counterpart, - the progress trap - our impulsive urge to invent has harmful impacts on everyone, - and these continually compound with time

    1. Giambattista Vico (born Giovan Battista Vico /ˈviːkoʊ/; .mw-parser-output .IPA-label-small{font-size:85%}.mw-parser-output .references .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .infobox .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .navbox .IPA-label-small{font-size:100%}Italian: [ˈviko]; 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist during the Italian Enlightenment.
  2. Oct 2020
  3. Jan 2019
    1. Socrates

      Via Socrates Biography -- Britannica "Socrates was widely considered to be a Sophist, though he did not teach for money and his aims were entirely different from theirs. Although there is a late tradition according to which Pythagoras invented the word philosopher, it was certainly through Socrates—who insisted that he possessed no wisdom but was striving for it—that the term came into general use and was later applied to all earlier serious thinkers."

  4. Oct 2016
    1. Just as the professionalization of philosophy--and the endless need for doctoral students to find new topics--has brought us a large volume of scholarship on obscure figures of dubious philosophical merit associated with, e.g., 19th-century German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism, so too it is hard to imagine that there won't be for a long time scholarship on the central figures of 20th-century analytical philosophy, like Russell, Carnap, Quine, and Kripke.
    2. Near the end of the twentieth century, very few philosophers of the nineteenth are much read: Peirce and Frege, Mill, Bentham, and Sidgwick, Hegel, Nietzsche, and perhaps Schopenhauer.
    3. around mid-20th-century, the Harvard Philosophy Department, then clearly the dominant department in the U.S., included on its faculty (not all at the same time) a young W.V.O. Quine, a much older C.I. Lewis, as well as Donald Williams, Ralph Barton Perry, John Wild, William Ernest Hocking, Raphael Demos. Just a half-century later, almost all these (at the time) eminent and widely respected figures are largely forgotten.