“It’s polite, literate, plodding, sententious narrative of considerable competence but not a trace of talent or individuality;… Real dull stuff for us Americans. The values in it are so bloody sanctimonious English that I found it hard to take.”
[Rejection of The New Men]
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, philosophy/religion
“Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion
“To argue is to produce considerations designed to support a conclusion. An argument is either the process of doing this (in which sense an argument may be heated or protracted) or the product, i.e., the set of propositions adduced (the premises), the pattern of inference, and the conclusion reached. An argument may be deductively valid, in which case the conclusion follows from the premises, or it may be persuasive in other ways. Logic is the study of valid and invalid forms of argument.”
Excerpted from: Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
“A prose satire by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), written in 1697 and published in 1704. The complete title, A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought Last Friday, between the Ancient and Modern Books in St. James’s Library, more or less explains the gist of the piece. Swift was disinterestedly mocking the contemporary debate as to the relative merits of the ancient and modern authors. In Swift’s fantasy, Plato, Homer, Euclid, and Virgil are ranged against moderns such as Dryden, Hobbes, Milton, and Descartes. The work ends while the outcome is still uncertain.
‘Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders
do generally discover everybody’s face but their own’”
Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, preface
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.”
Commencement address at York University, Toronto, Canada, 6 November 1982
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“The theory of universals that sees them as shadows of our grasp of concepts. Conceptualism lies midway between out-and-out nominalism, holding that nothing is common to objects except our applying the same words to them, and any realism which sees universals as existing independently of us and our abilities.”
Excerpted from: Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
“People in the past, in religious civilizations, had a real profound terror of apocalyptic catastrophe. What frightens us in our secular age is the computer breakdown that’ll occur if computers interpret the 00 of the year 2000 and a return to 1900.”
Conversations About the End of Time introduction, ed. Catherine David et al (1999)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, science literacy
“The general system of concepts which shape or organize our thoughts and perceptions. The outstanding elements of our everyday conceptual scheme include spatial and temporal relations between events and enduring objects, causal relations, other persons, meaning-bearing utterances of others, and so on. To see the world as containing such things is to share this much of our conceptual scheme. A controversial argument of Davidson’s urges that we would be unable to interpret speech from a different conceptual scheme as even meaningful; we can therefore be certain a priori that there is no difference of conceptual scheme between any thinker and ourselves. Davidson daringly goes on to argue that since translation proceeds according to a principle of charity, and since it must be possible for an omniscient translator to make sense of us, we can be assured that most of the beliefs formed with the commonsense conceptual framework are true.”
Excerpted from: Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Here is a learning support on the primary Roman deities. If you teach anything related to classical mythology, you might find this useful.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“A liberal education is at the heart of civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.”
“The American Teacher” in Harper’s (1980)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
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