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

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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. "

" Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas. "

" 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. "

" Foucault is one of many who want a new conception of how power and knowledge interact. But he is not looking for a relation between two givens, 'power' and 'knowledge.' As always, he is trying to rethink the entire subject matter, and his 'knowledge' and 'power' are to be something else. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling it as is it is' insofar as talking about a process of 'tinkering' in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Great books are rare. "

" Among the lesser effects of quantum theory are gaping holes in old ideas about causality. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "