A Rich Mandala

-"Sabbo pajjalito loko, sabbo loko pakampito;"- 'The entire universe is nothing but combustion and vibration.'

[30000fps]

[victoriousvocabulary]

EIDOLON

[noun]

1. an ideal.

2. a wistful daydream.

3. a phantom; apparition.

Etymology: from Ancient Greek eídōlon, “figure, representation”, from eîdos, “sight”, from eídō, “I see”.

[Seb McKinnon - Eidolon of Blossoms, Magic the Gathering]

[thetwomeatmeal]

The power of fate is a wonder, dark, terrible wonder– neither wealth nor armies towered walls nor ships black hulls lavished by the salt can save us from that force.

Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Robert Fagles (via thetwomeatmeal)

[pluviobrew]

Autumn - Day 17

[richmandala-blog]

"Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness— for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children."

[pouletbacon]

[yoursummerdreamz]

[katemess-deactivated20160109]

I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can’t even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk…

Franz Kafka (via poeticsofdeath)

[linxspiration]

That map wall. https://www.instagram.com/p/BJQ8EsKhNcH/

[lickrock]

“I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.” –H.D. Thoreau

[awesomehotguys2-deactivated2016]

[wired]

Xavi Bou spends most weekends photographing birds. Although he appreciates their plumage and mating habits and everything else nature photographers love about the animals, he isn’t especially interested such things. He’s far more interested in the hypnotic patterns birds create while flying.

READ MORE: Mesmerizing photos capture the flight patterns of birds.

[studentsofphilosophy]

The kind of philosophy one chooses thus depends upon the kind of person one is. For a philosophical system is not a lifeless household item one can put aside or pick up as one wishes; instead, it is animated by the very soul of the person who adopts it.

JG Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings (via studentsofphilosophy)

[tauchner-deactivated20260222]

Marion Costentin - 3 Crows

[quotebook-in]

Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.

Naguib Mahfouz (via thesebooksareolderthanyou)

[victoriousvocabulary]

[aqua-regia009]

Annie Stegg - Scylla

[word-association]

Frege's insight about quantified sentences

In Chapter 2 of his book on Frege’s philosophy of language (Dummett (1973)), Dummett writes about Frege’s basic insight about how quantified sentences work.

What’s the insight? Well take a sentence expressing generality, for instance:

Everybody envies somebody.

which we would express, in logical notation, as

(∀x)(∃y)xEy,

where E is a predicate letter standing for the two-place predicate ’_ envies _’.

Now, Dummett writes (pp. 10 - 11):

Frege’s insight consisted in considering the sentence as being constructed in stages, corresponding to the different signs of generality occurring in it. A sentence may be formed by combining a sign of generality with a one-place predicate. The one-place predicate is itself to be thought of as having been formed from a sentence by removing one or more occurrences of some one singular term (proper name).

etc etc etc

Once we know the constructional history of a sentence involving multiple generality, we can from these simple rules determine the truth-conditions of that sentence…

The main problem with what Dummett says is that it has this extraordinary capacity of putting you to sleep. Luckily, though, we can visualize the stages and bypass Dummett’s soporific prose.

Keep reading