Diderot’s definition of facts, as presented in the original Encyclopédie:
Facts: You can divide facts into three types: divine, natural and man made. The first belong to theology, the second to philosophy and the others to actual history. All three are open to question.
…from An Unconscious Civilization1
It’s the last line that I find most significant; its [...]
Recently, when reading Fuyuki Kurasawa’s “The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices”, I was struck by a similarity in his “three paradigms of social justice” to Tom Gleason’s notion of the fourth autonomy.
Gleason’s three autonomies relate to the role of design in a post enlightenment era. He speaks of the three autonomies of [...]
An Interpretation of Umwelt through diagram of synonyms.
Kant writes, “Space is merely the form of all appearances of the outward senses, i.e., the subjective conditioning of sensibility, by which alone intuition of the outside world is possible for us.” (Uexküll qtd in Sebeok 194)
Kant’s view of space and time is that an organism cannot, through [...]
This describes an interesting idea on the rhetorical use of necessity as a notion or term.
“institutions of government must correlate with the structure of the economy and the information system”…
“Must correlate”? Did you notice? They insisted that we must correlate with economics and technology.
“Necessity.” William Pitt said two centuries ago, “is the plea for every [...]
Below is taken from John Raulston Saul’s Unconscious Civilization and refers to how our language has been separated into two parts.
There is Public language—enormous, rich, varied and more or less powerless. Then there is Corporatist language, attached to power and action. Corporatist language itself breaks down into three types. Rhetoric, Propaganda, and Dialect. […] [...]
An excellent and concise explanation of the difference between modernism and postmodernism, courtesy of the Open Learning University.
The modernist tradition rejected the mythical and religious views of the world and gave rise to science, democracy, liberation movements and a belief in the supremacy of rationality. Within this tradition there was an implicit belief that there [...]