“Philosophy has been called the search for the Permanent amid the changing.”
The Usurpation Of Language (1910)
Context: Philosophy has been called the search for the Permanent amid the changing. With this account of philosophy there is no need to quarrel. But having accepted it, a distinction remains to be observed, a distinction of capital importance, which we are in constant danger of forgetting. It is one thing to find the Permanent; it is another thing to find a form of words in which the Permanent shall stand permanently expressed. It is one thing to experience something fixed and changeless; it is another thing to fix this something by a changeless definition. The first may be possible, while the second remains impossible for ever.
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L. P. Jacks26
British educator, philosopher, and Unitarian minister 1860–1955Related quotes
“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher
Source: Dialogues II
“A philosophy has a practical power: it contributes to the changing of the world.”
Umberto Eco book Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
[O] : Introduction, 0.7
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Context: A philosophy has a practical power: it contributes to the changing of the world. This practical power has nothing to do with the engineering power that in the discussion above I attributed to sciences, including specific semiotics. A science can study either an animal species or the logic of road signals, without necessarily determining their transformation. There is a certain 'distance' between the descriptive stage and the decision, let us say, to improve a species through genetic engineering or to improve a signaling system by reducing or increasing the number of its pertinent elements.
On the contrary, it was the philosophical position of the modern notion of thinking subject that led Western culture to think and to behave in terms of subjectivity. It was the position of notions such as class struggle and revolution that led people to behave in terms of class, and not only to make revolutions but also to decide, on the grounds of this philosophical concept, which social turmoils or riots of the past were or were not a revolution. Since a philosophy has this practical power, it cannot have a predictive power. It cannot predict what would happen if the world were as it described it. Its power is not the direct result of an act of engineering performed on the basis of a more or less neutral description of independent data.
Hannes Alfvén (1908–1995) Swedish electrical engineer and plasma physicist
Source: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents (1988), p. 192.
“Nothing is permanent but change.”
Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul
Harold W. Percival book Thinking and Destiny
Source: Thinking and Destiny (1946), Ch. 5, Physical Destiny, p. 143
