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Hegel on Bastille Day

Hegel gathered friends and colleagues and ordered top-shelf champagne — Champagne Sillery, the most distinguished of its day. He passed bottles around the table, but “when it became clear that nobody at the table knew exactly why they should be drinking to that particular day, Hegel turned in mock astonishment and with raised voice declared, ‘This glass is for the 14th of July, 1789 — to the storming of the Bastille.’” Needless to say, this toast astonished the students there, among them Eduard Gans, who would later become Marx’s law professor. How could Hegel be so reckless to express such dangerous sympathies at the height of Restoration Europe? Hegel once told his friend Immanuel Niethammer that to be a philosopher was to be an “expositus,” an exposed person. Once the French Revolution rediscovered that Nous, reason, governs the world, Hegel, the philosopher of reason, would inevitably find himself — whether he liked it or not as a Prussian state philosophy professor — allied to those progressive and potentially rebellious forces. The philosophy of absolute reason thus had real political consequences.

Harvard Professor Harry Lewis on Early Calculating and Computing Devices - YouTube

Harvard Professor Harry Lewis on Early Calculating and Computing Devices

my '84 thesis

We cannot ever rule out the potential relevance of any one field of inquiry to another. At the level of inspiration this seems actually uncontroversial; to give a couple of examples of transfer of ideas between the natural and social sciences, economists have found use in adapting ideas from physics about exchanges of energy that occur during particle collision, and Darwin was apparently inspired by classical economists. In these cases social theory and physical theories have related just by, to speak, happenstance - it turned out to be useful for scientists to be reading and reflecting on ideas and models of the world dreamt up for quite other circumstances. Indeed, if you believe the theory of scientific creativity here, then we should think that very generally scientific creativity tends to be spurred by these sort of unusual interdisciplinary inspirations. I think this is relevant to my point, but I don't think people deny this possibility of fruitful inspiration from afar, and in addition I mean something a bit stronger. I think that we cannot rule out the potential evidential relevance of any one field to results gained from another.

What Separates the Ideas that Endure from Those That Fade? | Yale Insights

The results, published in Strategy Science, reveal that popular concepts tend to be affiliated with and similar to other popular concepts; that is, popular ideas often ride the coattails of other popular ideas. They also tend to be composed of like elements. “If a concept is new or unknown or both, then we find it benefits by appearing together with other famous concepts, and by covering similar ground,” Kovács says. “Specifically, ideas that do this appear more frequently in our data year over year.” “If you are an unpopular person or product or firm, then it pays to affiliate yourself with something similar and famous. But when you reach a certain level of popularity this affiliation can detract from your success. You should go your own way.” An important twist emerged in the results, though. As a concept gains in popularity, it starts to compete with other popular concepts: where once an idea benefited from this association, it eventually starts to suffer. This negative effect only occurs with concepts that are extremely popular, but the overall picture clarifies an intuitive notion. If it helps to attach yourself to well-known ideas when starting out, you must be sure to separate yourself at a certain point, as mentors and models eventually become competitors.