Homer nods

Bertrand Russell in The Impact of Science on Society, page 17

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.

There are only human beings

From The Scientist in the Crib by Alison Gopnik, Andrew M. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl. Page 13

There is still supposed to be a deep split between scientific, cultivated, rational ways of knowing the world and intuitive, natural, emotional ways of knowing. And children (and "primitive" people and women) are still assumed to be the exemplars of intuition rather than science, and passion rather than reason. The debate is still about which side you think you ought to root for.

The new developmental research shows that this historical consensus about children was just plain wrong. Children are not blank tablets or unbridled appetites or even intuitive seers. Babies and young children think, observe, and reason. They consider evidence, draw conclusions, do experiments, solve problems, and search for the truth. Of course, they don't do this in the self-conscious way that scientists do. And the problems they try to solve are everyday problems about what people and objects and words are like, rather than arcane problems about stars and atoms. But even the youngest babies know a great deal about the world and actively work to find out more.

That undermines the entire picture of the great chain of knowing. Women and people from other cultures have, after all, at least escaped the negative implications of being "childlike." (Nowadays it's okay to think women and people from other cultures are intuitive and natural only if you take the positive, Romantic view). But if even children themselves aren't "childlike," the whole picture collapses. There are no savages, noble or otherwise, and there are no "children of nature," not even among children. There are only human beings, children and grown-ups, women and men, hunter-gatherers and scientists, trying to figure out what's going on.

Getting to know the world

Bertrand Russell in The Impact of Science on Society, page 91

Science used to be valued as a means of getting to know the world; now, owing to the triumph of technique, it is conceived as showing how to change the world.

And then I call to mind eternity

The Infinite
by Giacomo Leopardi

Dear to me always was this lonely hill
And this hedge that excludes so large a part
Of the ultimate horizon from my view,
But as I sit and gaze, my thought conceives
Interminable vastnesses of space
Beyond it, and unearthly silences,
And profoundest calm; whereat my heart almost
Becomes dismayed. And as I hear the wind
Blustering through these branches, I find myself
Comparing with this sound that infinite silence;
And then I call to mind eternity,
And the ages that are dead, and this that now
Is living, and the noise of it. And so
In this immensity my thought sinks drowned:
And sweet it seems to shipwreck in this sea.

Evidence

Christopher Hitchens:

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Responsibility must be both definite and limited

Via Saving Hayek from the People Who Think They're Saving Hayek by Jason Kuznicki

A free society will not function or maintain itself unless its members regard it as right that each individual occupy the position that results from his action and accept it as due to his own action. Though it can offer to the individual only chances and though the outcome of his efforts will depend on innumerable accidents, it forcefully directs his attention to those circumstances that he can control as if they were the only ones that mattered (The Constitution of Liberty, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 78).

The sense of responsibility has been weakened in modern times as much by overextending the range of an individual's responsibilities as by exculpating him from the actual consequences of his actions . . . To be effective, responsibility must be both definite and limited, adapted both emotionally and intellectually to human capacities. It is quite as destructive of any sense of responsibility to be taught that one is responsible for everything as to be taught that one cannot be held responsible for anything . . .

Responsibility, to be effective, must be individual responsibility. In a free society there cannot be any collective responsibility of the members of a group as such, unless they have, by concerted action, all made themselves individually and severally responsible . . . If the same concerns are made the responsibility of many without at the same time imposing a duty of joint and agreed action, the result is usually that nobody really accepts responsibility. As everybody's property in effect is nobody's property, so everybody's responsibility is nobody's responsibility (ibid., p 83).

Sic transit Gloria mundi

From Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. A very intriguing and rigorous discussion of what constitutes accomplishment, how do we measure it, and how do we explain it.

At the end of 1899, the editor of London's Daily Telegraph, with the assistance of learned consultants, selected the "100 Best Novels in the World" from all the novels in any language. In all, 61 authors were represented in the list of 100 best novels. Only 27 of them - fewer than half - qualified as significant figures in Human Accomplishment's inventory of Western literature. Seventeen of the 61 - 28 percent -were not mentioned even once by any of the 20 sources used to compile that inventory; not even by the most encyclopedic ones. And yet each of those 17 who are now ignored had written one of the supposedly 100 best novels of all times as judged in 1899. Sic transit Gloria mundi.

It is this sort of contemporaneous over-confidence that always makes me leery of the hoopla over the most recently discovered author or new gem of a book. Time tests them all and finds most wanting regardless of what experts and critics might opine.