“Though a state of affairs that would contravene the laws of physics can be represented by us spatially, one that would contravene the laws of geometry cannot.”
3.0321
Original German: Wohl können wir einen Sachverhalt räumlich darstellen, welcher den Gesetzen der Physik, aber keinen, der den Gesetzen der Geometrie zuwiderliefe.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
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Ludwig Wittgenstein228
Austrian-British philosopher 1889–1951Related quotes
Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party
As quoted in Hitler and I, Otto Strasser, Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin Company (1940) pp. 113-114
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Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist
L.A. Cooper and R.N. Shepard (1984). "Turning something over in the mind." Scientific American 251(6), 106-114; p. 114.
Context: In spite of some unresolved issues, the close match we have found between mental rotation and their counterparts in the physical world leads inevitably to speculations about the functions and origin of human spatial imagination. It may not be premature to propose that spatial imagination has evolved as a reflection of the physics and geometry of the external world. The rules that govern structures and motions in the physical world may, over evolutionary history, have been incorporated into human perceptual machinery, giving rise to demonstrable correspondences between mental imagery and its physical analogues.
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§ 5
From Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius
Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman
Inhumanity of Slavery. Extract from A Lecture on Slavery, at Rochester. December 8, 1850
1850s, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States
Reply to brokers who urged him to lend $44 million from the U.S. Treasury reserve to banks. Harper's Weekly (11 October 1873).
1870s
Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist
Stuart A. Kauffman (2010) Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. p.40
Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer
Alexander Bogdanov, cited in: James Patrick Scanlan, (1965). : Pre-revolutionary philosophy and theology. Philosophers in exile. Marxists and Communists. p. 398
Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher
Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 133-134