believe #pragmatism

For us ironists, nothing can serve as a criticism of a final vocabulary save another such vocabulary; there is no answer to a redescription save a re-re-redescription. CIS p.80 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Criticism

In the same spirit, it has been strongly maintained and is today widely believed that all acts of charity and benevolence, private and public, go seriously to degrade the human race.

would never have existed. /2x

Bernard Mandeville, in his Fable of the Bees, maintains that private vices of all descriptions are public benefits, and proves it, too, quite as cogently as the economist proves his point concerning the miser. He even argues,with no slight force, that but for vice civilization /1

without paying for it, and of so bequeathing to your children something to boast about of their father -- and who by a thousand wiles puts money at the service of intelligent greed, in his own person. /3x

who wrecks feeble enterprises better stopped, and who administers wholesome lessons to unwary scientific men, by passing worthless checks upon them -- as you did, the other day, to me, my millionaire Master in glomery, when you thought you saw your way to using my process /2

So a miser is a beneficent power in a community, is he? With the same reason precisely, only in a much higher degree, you might pronounce the Wall Street sharp to be a good angel, who takes money from heedless persons not likely to guard it properly, /1

In my opinion, a mathematician, in so far as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy - an opinion, moreover, which has been expressed by many philosophers.--Henri Lebesgue

There is...only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law--Immanuel Kant

The twentieth century, in its latter half, shall surely see the deluge-tempest burst upon the social order -- to clear upon a world as deep in ruin as that greed-philosophy has long plunged it into guilt. No post-thermidorian high jinks then!

Soon a flash and quick peal will shake economists quite out of their complacency, too late.

The Reign of Terror was very bad; but now the Gradgrind banner has been this century long flaunting in the face of heaven, with an insolence to provoke the very skies to scowl and rumble.

of all blasphemies the most degrading. Yet the nineteenth century has steadily contemned it, because it brought about the Reign of Terror. That it did so is true. Still, the whole question is one of how much. /2x

But what after all is sentimentalism? It is an ism, a doctrine, namely, the doctrine that great respect should be paid to the natural judgments of the sensible heart. This is what sentimentalism precisely is; and I entreat the reader to consider whether to contemn it is not /1

Doubtless some excuse there was for all those opinions in days gone by; and sentimentalism, when it was the fashionable amusement to spend one's evenings in a flood of tears over a woeful performance on a candle-litten stage, sometimes made itself a little ridiculous.

Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears and never regrets. - Leonardo da Vinci

He wants his mammon flavored with a soupçon of god.

and when, holding the opinions I have repeated, he at the same time acknowledges that society could not exist upon a basis of intelligent greed alone, he simply pigeon-holes himself as one of the eclectics of inharmonious opinions. /2x

Plainly,the author holds the notion that some other motive might be in a higher degree beneficent,even for the man's self, to be a paradox wanting in good sense. He seeks to gloze and modify his doctrine;but he lets the perspicacious reader see what his animating principle is; /1