Excerpt (p 4-5) on philosophy and philosophizing from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (a seminar-lecture course from 1929/30) by Martin Heidegger:

The negative result is this: philosophy does not permit itself to be grasped or determined by way of detours or as something other than itself [i.e., as science, worldview, art, religion, or history]. It demands that we do not look away from it, but apprehend it from out of itself. Philosophy itself---what do we know of it, what and how is it? It itself is only whenever we are philosophizing. Philosophy is philosophizing. That does not seem very informative. Yet however much we seem merely to be repeating the same thing, this says something essential. It points the direction in which we have to search, indeed the direction in which metaphysics withdraws from us. Metaphysics as philosophizing, as our own human activity---how and to where can metaphysics as philosophizing, as our own human activity, withdraw from us, if we ourselves are, after all, human beings? Yet do we in fact know what we ourselves are? What is man? The crown of creation or some wayward path, some great misunderstanding and an abyss? If we know so little about man, how can our essence not be alien to us? How can philosophizing as a human activity fail to conceal itself from us in the obscurity of this essence? Philosophy---as we are presumably superficially aware---is not some arbitrary enterprise with which we pass our time as the fancy takes us, not some mere gathering of knowledge that we can easily obtain for ourselves at any time from books, but (we know this only obscurely) something to do with the whole, something extreme, where an ultimate pronouncement and interlocution occurs on the part of human beings. For why else would we have come along here? Or have we arrived here only because others also come along, or because we happen to have a free period just between five and six when it is not worth going home? Why are we here? Do we know what we are letting ourselves in for?

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Dutch Book From 1692 Documents Every Color Under the Sun: A Pre-Pantone Guide to Colors

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Van Morrison - It's All In The Game/You Know What They're Writing About ...

Van Morrison - It's All In The Game/You Know What They're Writing About

van morrison - madame george (with text)

Van Morrison - Madame George

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We find the various stages of the logical Idea in the history of philosophy in the shape of a succession of emerging philosophical systems, each of which has a particular definition of the Absolute as its foundation. [...] But the relationship of the earlier to the later philosophical systems is in general the same as the relationship of the earlier to the later stages of the logical Idea; that is to say, the earlier systems are contained sublated within the later ones. This is the true significance of the fact (which is so often misunderstood) that in the history of philosophy one philosophical system refutes another, or, more precisely, that an earlier philosophy is refuted by a later one.

When people talk about a philosophy's being refuted, they usually take this first in a merely abstract, negative sense---in other words, as meaning that the refuted philosophy is simply no longer valid at all, that it is set aside and done with. If this were the case, then the study of the history of philosophy would have to be considered an utterly mournful affair indeed, since it only shows how all the philosophical systems that have emerged in the course of time have met their refutations. But, although it must certainly be conceded that all philosophies have been refuted, it must also equally be affirmed that no philosophy has ever been refuted, nor can it be. This is the case in two ways. First, every philosophy worthy of the name always has the Idea as its content, and second, every philosophical system should be regarded as the presentation of a particular moment, or a particular stage, in the process of development of the Idea. So, the "refuting" of a philosophy means only that its restricting boundary has been overstepped and its determinate principle has been reduced to an ideal moment.

-- Hegel, from The Encyclopaedia Logic, sect. 86, add. 2, p 138

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In both cases [i.e., "the minimal form [...] closure takes for life at the single-cell level, and [...] the minimal form it takes for the nervous system"] we see the co-emergence of inside and outside, of selfhood and a correlative world or environment of otherness, through the generic mechanism of network closure (autonomy) and its physical embodiment [...].

[...] The animate form of our living body is thus the place of intersection for numerous emergent patterns of selfhood and coupling. Whether cellular, somatic, sensorimotor, or neurocognitive, these patterns derive not from any homuncular self or agent inside the system organizing it or directing it, but from distributed networks with operational closure. In Varela's image, our organism is a meshwork of "selfless selves," and we are and live this meshwork [...].

-- Evan Thompson, from Mind in Life, p. 49, emphasis mine

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Andy Goldworthy - bones

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6.4321 The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution.

6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni [from the viewpoint of eternity] is to view it as a whole---a limited whole.
Feeling the world as a limited whole---it is this that is mystical.

6.5 When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.
The riddle does not exist.
If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.

6.51 Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked.
For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.

6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.

-- Wittgenstein, from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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