“Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became.”
The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)
Context: Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us.
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Václav Havel126
playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of … 1936–2011Related quotes
Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books
De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: There are books that have devastated continents, destroyed thousands. What war hasn’t been a war of fiction? All the religious wars certainly, or the fiction of communism versus the fiction of capitalism – ideas, fictions, shit that people make. They have made a vast impression on the real world. It is the real world. Are thoughts not real? I believe it was Wittgenstein who said a thought is a real event in space and time. I don’t quite agree about the space and time bit, Ludwig, but certainly a real event. It’s only science that cannot consider thought as a real event, and science is not reality. It’s a map of reality, and not a very good one. It’s good, it’s useful, but it has its limits. We have to realise that the map has its edges. One thing that is past the edge is any personal experience. That is why magic is a broader map to me, it includes science. It’s the kind of map we need if we are to survive psychologically in the age that is to come, whatever that is. We need a bigger map because the old one is based on an old universe where not many of us live anymore. We have to understand what we are dealing with here because it is dangerous. It kills people. Art kills.
Otto Dix (1891–1969) German painter and printmaker
Otto Dix quoted by Eva Karcher, in Otto Dix, New York: Crown Publishers, 1987, p. 41; as cited by Roy Forward, in 'Education resource material: beauty, truth and goodness in Dix's War' https://nga.gov.au/dix/edu.pdf, p. 9
Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) American philosopher and logician
Theories and Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981
1980s and later
Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) French historian and philosopher
Methodical Realism
“but, in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science.”
William Stanley Jevons The Theory of Political Economy
Source: The Theory of Political Economy (1871), Chapter I, Introduction, p. 40.
Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author
Source: Black Holes and Baby Universes