Words&Dirt

“Simply put, the philosophical fallacy is committed whenever the outcome of a process is presumed to be antecedent to that process––whenever some ostensive ‘principle’ is identified, isolated, and abstracted from the flow of experience and is then used anachronistically and reduplicatively to rationalize an always-emergent history.  Dewey from early on saw as ‘the most pervasive fallacy of philosophical thinking’ the error of ignoring the historical, developmental, and contextualizing aspects of experience.  The methodological problem as he saw it is ‘the abstracting of some one element from the organism which gives it meaning, and setting it up as absolute’ and then proceeding to revere this one element ‘as the cause and ground of all reality and knowledge.'”

––Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, by Roger T. Ames, pg. 16

“‘Look in yourselves at this moment,’ said Andrew.  ‘You will find that underneath your hatred of Ender the Xenocide and your grief for the death of the buggers, you also feel something much uglier: You’re afraid of the stranger, whether he’s utlanning or framling.  When you think of him killing a man that you know of and value, then it doesn’t matter what his shape is.  He’s varelse then, or worse––djur, the dire beast, that comes in the night with slavering jaws.  If you had the only gun in your village, and the beasts that had torn apart one of your people were coming again, would you stop to ask if they also had a right to live, or would you act to save your village, the people that you knew, the people who depended on you?'”

––Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card, pg. 36