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" A 'philosophical dictionary' is not a dictionary of philosophy that you use to look up obscure thinkers or recondite terms. It is a collection of brief and pithy essays on diverse topics, informed by one vision, and usually arranged in alphabetical order. "

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" The walking wounded, impaired in life and dissected in death, were our primary clues to where and how parts of the brain work. "

Ian Hacking

Work

Walking

Life

" The social risks that worry us are not a random bundle of frights. "

" It is so hard to make important decisions that we have a great urge to reduce them to rules. "

" The debate about who decides what gets taught is fascinating, albeit excruciating for those who have to defend the schools against bunkum. "

" The stability of what's called the Standard Model of particle physics and its ability to make so many clever predictions with immense precision suggests that we may just be stuck with it, and there may never be an overthrow of that. "

" Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption. "

" Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things. "

" Emotions come first, and in the most direct sense: you first have an emotion and then have a feeling. But also first in the history of the human race, for the ability to have emotions long preceded the ability to have feelings. "

" Although some secrecy is odious, some is essential just to preserve our sense of self. "

" Life on a factory farm is well-nigh unbearable for the animals or birds, and it is often foul for the women and men who process the meat that results - especially in factories for chicken parts. But do not sentimentalize. Do not imagine barnyard life is a bowl of cherries. "

" Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life. "

" If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser. "

" Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion. "

Ian Hacking

Too

Science

" Each of us becomes a new person as we re-describe the past. "

Ian Hacking

New

Each

" The public debate about evolution itself, as opposed to whether to teach it, is something else. It is boring, demeaning, and insufferably dull. "

" The anti-Darwin movement has racked up one astounding achievement. It has made a significant proportion of American parents care about what their children are taught in school. "

" If you are a researcher and want to publish a paper, if you are applying for money either from a private or public foundation, you have to have a DSM code. "

" Secrecy is one of the shadier sides of private and public life. "

" What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power. "

" The word 'revolution' first brings to mind violent upheavals in the state, but ideas of revolution in science, and of political revolution, are almost coeval. The word once meant only a revolving, a circular return to an origin, as when we speak of revolutions per minute or the revolution of the planets about the sun. "

" Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do. "

" I think it's unfortunate when people say that there is just one true story of science. For one thing, there are many different sciences, and historians will tell different stories corresponding to different things. "

" I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences. "

" Great books are rare. "

" Amartya Sen is best known to the general reader for his powerful essays on famine. He is an optimist about some of our gravest economic problems, such as mass starvation in a world that at present can easily produce more food than everyone can eat. Reason and voluntary participation are his watchwords. "

" Despite a certain amount of rhetoric, such as 'the second American Revolution,' there is a fair consensus about which events in the affairs of a people can rightly be called revolutions. It is also clear that such revolutions are proper objects of study for the historian. "

" Many of us will be obsessed with one or another kind of secret or revelation, be it gossip about friends or ourselves, a fantasy about spies, or a worry about the most personal information now stored in data banks. But few of us think about secrets in general, or about the moral rights and wrongs of hiding or exposing them. "

" Risk analysis can cater to any sort of hazard, but their profession owes its existence to a relatively narrow band of possible dangers. "

" One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today. "

" Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be. "