This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
In summary, the existence of an unperceived material thing can only be its capability of being perceived. This capability is not an empty possibility in the sense that everything that is not contradictory is possible; rather, it is a possibility which belongs to the very essence of consciousness.
Existence | Means | Nature | Objectivity | Will |
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
All enjoyment is also sensation - that is, knowledge and light. It is not just the disappearance of the self, but self-forgetfulness, as a first abnegation.
Consciousness | Existence | Experience | Phenomena |
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed.
Beginning | Existence | Experience | Freedom | Knowledge | Light | Object | Pain | Phenomena | Reason | Sense | Solitude | Sorrow | Space | Suppression | Truth | Work |
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
In the background of conscious life there is a multitude of cogitations. This background is not a vagueness beyond the reaches of analysis, a sort of fog within consciousness; it is a field already differentiated. One can distinguish in it various types of acts: acts of belief (the dawning of a genuine belief, a belief that precedes knowledge etc.) of pleasure or displeasure, of desire, etc.
Capability | Existence | Sense |
This Indwelling Power, the Inner Light, or Spiritual Idea, is spoken of in the Bible as a child, and throughout the Scriptures the child symbolically always stands for this. Bible symbolism has its own beautiful logic, and just as the soul is always spoken of as a woman, so this, the Spiritual Idea that is born to the soul, is described as a child.
Existence | Need | People | Power | Right | Work | World | Privilege |
Decentralization affected every aspect of life. Medical services were dispersed; the claim is that instead of massive hospitals in the city centers, besieged by huge lines of waiting patients, there were small hospitals and clinics everywhere, and a neighborhood-oriented system of medical aides. Schools were broken up and organized on a novel teacher-controlled basis. Agricultural, fishery, and forestry enterprised were also reorganized and decentralized. Large factory-farms were broken up through a strict enforcement of irrigation acreage regulations which had been ignored before Independence, and commune and extended-family farms were encouraged.
Existence | Government | Right | Government |
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions.
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
The science of comparative anatomy. Its task is, by comparing the fully-developed bodily forms in the various groups of animals, to learn the general laws of organisation according to which the body is constructed; at the same time, it has to determine the affinities of the various groups by critical appreciation of the degrees of difference between them.
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
We see that man entirely resembles the higher mammals, and most of all the apes, in embryonic development as well as in anatomic structure. And if we seek to understand this ontogenetic agreement in the light of the biogenetic law, we find that it proves clearly and necessarily the descent of man from a series of other mammals, and proximately from the primates.
Church | Education | Existence | Important | Influence | Need | Order | Public |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
On the basis of experience and conscious thought small ideas may easily be dislodged, but when it comes to bigger, more universal or more subtle ideas it may not be so easy to change them. Indeed, it is often difficult to become aware of them, as they are the instruments and not the results of our thinking—just as you can see what is outside you, but cannot easily see that with which you see, the eye itself.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The truth is that a large part of the costs of private enterprise has been borne by the public authorities—because they pay for the infrastructure—and that the profits of private enterprise therefore greatly overstate its achievement.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
An expansion of man's ability to bring forth secondary products is useless unless preceded by an expansion of his ability to win primary products from the earth; for man is not a producer but only a converter, and for every job of conversion he needs primary products.
Effort | Existence | Experience | Simplicity | Technology |
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
In many of these languages there are numerals only for one, two, and three: no Australian language counts beyond four. Very many wild tribes can count no further than ten or twenty, whereas some very clever dogs have been made to count up to forty and even beyond sixty.
Existence | Faith | Force | History | Knowledge | Necessity | Nothing | Position | Science | Work |
The experts in our society who offer to help us have a kind of general staff mentality from which massive, top-down solutions are issued to solve our problems. Then when solutions donÂ’t work, we get mired in the nothing-can-be-done swamp. We are first incited into being grandiose and then intimidated into being infantile. But there is another way, the plain way of quiet Christian humility. We need pruning. Cut back to our roots, we learn this psalm and discover the quietness of the weaned child, the tranquility of maturing trust. It is such a minute psalm that many have overlooked it, but for all its brevity and lack of pretense, it is essential. For every Christian encounters problems of growth and difficulties of development.
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
The true reason why this universe appears to some scientists as mysterious is that, mistaking existential, that is, metaphysical, questions for scientific ones, they ask science to answer them. Naturally, they get no answers. Then they are puzzled, and they say that the universe is mysterious.
Absolute | Existence | God | Knowledge | Need | Scripture | Truth | God | Understand |
Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out! he exclaimed. The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.
Aptitude | Awareness | Cult | Danger | Ego | Existence | Life | Life | Present | Reason | Right | Spirit | Success | Time | Witness | Worth | Talent | Danger | Awareness | Teacher |
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
We do not need to project out own ideas into the economy of nature; they belong there in their own right. Our own ideas are in the economy of nature because we ourselves are in it. Any and every one of the things which a man does intelligently is done with a purpose and to a certain end which is the final cause why he does itÂ… Through man, who is part and parcel of nature, purposiveness most certainly is part and parcel of nature. In what sense is it arbitrary, knowing from within that where there is organization there always is a purpose, to conclude that there is a purpose wherever there is organization?
Absolute | Ego | Existence | People | Question | Revelation |
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
We can recognize the absolute transcendence of revelation by the curious fact of the philosophical and theological multiple meanings of the texts of scripture. When St. Thomas was looking for a sed contra for his question on the existence of God, he does not seem to have found a text in which Yahweh says in so many words, “I exist.” So he had recourse to the statement of Exodus: Ego sum qui sum. But that statement is a reply to the question Moses put to God: When the people ask me who has sent me to them, what shall I answer?
Existence | God | Philosophy | Reason | Sacred | Simplicity | Work | God |