"All people by nature desire to understand." -Aristotle
ο δέ ανεξέταστος βίος ου βιωτός ανθρώπω* -Socrates
“The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.” -Hannah Arendt
Key Internet Resources for Philosophical Research
135 Free Philosophy Books - Open Culture
American Philosophical Association
Daily Nous (Professional Site)
Degree of Freedom - LOGIC CHECK
The Institute of Art and Ideas Philosophy Channel
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog (Professional Site)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
*"The unexamined life is not the life of a human being." -Socrates
James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind” (New Yorker, November 17, 1962 issue):
“. . . A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. “The problem of the twentieth century,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois around sixty years ago, “is the problem of the color line.” A fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there, or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything white Americans think they believe in must now be reëxamined. What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color. But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk—eviction, imprisonment, torture, death. For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion—and the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion. I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand—and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.”
Larry surveying a portion of the Joshua Tree, California landscape.
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