2024-11-18T18:11:21.191395 | 🔗
“Philosophy had mired itself in its own florid eloquence. They sought “not the Artifice of Words, but a bare knowledge of things.” Now it was time for plain speaking, the most naked expression, and when possible this meant the language of mathematics.19Words were truant things, elusive of authorities, malleable and relative. Philosophers had much work to do merely defining their terms, and words like think and exist and word posed greater challenges than tree and moon. Thomas Hobbes warned:The light of humane minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; reason is the pace.… And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities.20” Excerpt From Isaac Newton James Gleick https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0 This material may be protected by copyright.