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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Ian Hacking

Live

Life

Spiritual

" 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. "

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

Ian Hacking

New

Each

" 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. "

" 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

" Great books are rare. "

" One of the things Kuhn said about normal science is that people 'expect' things to be discovered. "

" Dolomite is a whole mess of stuff, a mixture. It gets characterised as 'a stuff' because of the interest of oil geologists. It would have been a nonentity were it not for its applications. "

" One ought to begin an analysis of power from the ground up, at the level of tiny local events where battles are unwittingly enacted by players who don't know what they are doing. "

Ian Hacking

Doing

Power

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" We do not need to have a way to talk clearly about other people's images. "

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

" Antonio Damasio is a distinguished neuroscientist with a flair for writing about science and an enthusiasm for philosophizing. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Brain science will be the most popular science of the early twenty-first century. "

" It is possible to argue that our present conception of revolution was staked out more securely in science than in political action. "

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

" 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. "

" Foucault's genius is to go down to the little dramas, dress them in facts hardly anyone else has noticed, and turn these stage settings into clues to a hitherto un-thought series of confrontations out of which, he contends, the orderly structure of society is composed. "

Ian Hacking

Facts

Society

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

" As a political metaphor, a revolution could, in that sense, mean only a return to better times, or to the true constitution: a ridding of excess or usurpers. "

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

" All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them. "

" 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. "

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