Monthly Archives: January 2016

Thomas Nagel

Generalization would lead to the recognition of value in possible future experiences, in the means to them, and in the lives of creatures other than ourselves. These values are not extra properties of goodness and badness, but just truths such as the following: If something I do will cause another creature to suffer, that counts against doing it. I can come to see that this is true by generalizing from the evident disvalue of my own suffering[.]

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Oxford, 2012, p. 77

Thomas Nagel

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which things as they are make sense, and that includes the way the physical world is, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind.

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Oxford, 2012, p. 51

Larissa MacFarquhar

It was a dull way of giving—writing checks rather than, say, becoming an aid worker in a distant country. There was a moral glamour in throwing over everything and leaving home and going somewhere dangerous that compensated for all sorts of privations. There was no glamour in staying behind, earning money, and donating it. It certainly wasn’t soul-stirring, to be thinking about money all the time. But so much depended on money, they knew—it took a callous kind of sentimentality to forget that. Money well spent could mean years of life, and money spent badly meant years of life lost.

Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help, New York, 2015. p. 89

Donald Keene

Another pleasure at Harvard that year was the course on the poetry of Du Fu (Tu Fu), given by William Hung. In some ways, Hung’s scholarship was old-fashioned, but he not only was completely familiar with Du Fu’s poems but also had consulted English, German, and Japanese translations to discover what fresh insights had been provided by non-Chinese scholars. My most vivid memory of his teaching is of the time when he recited by heart one of Du Fu’s long poems. He recited the poem in the Fukien dialect, his own, which preserves the final consonants lost today in standard Chinese. As Hung recited, leaning back, tears filled his eyes.

Donald Keene, Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan, New York, 2008, p. 63