Word: priori
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...pragmatic utopian. "The problem with utopias is that they are based on some theory of human nature," he says, as he is joined on his couch by a topless woman, a punk called Chicken John and a transvestite glam rock star named Adrian Roberts. "Static utopias based on a priori notions are doomed to failure." Surprisingly, utopias where you have to bring your own toilet paper work just fine...
...camp by asking a simple but all-important question--is it possible for a work of art to be just plain weird? Can art cultivate its own apolitical pathology of weirdness, like a wax museum, or is weirdness always a subversive comment on a world that is itself, a priori, weird? The Wilson twins, Jane and Louise, balk neither at the weirdness of the world nor the weirdness of the work of art. They give us something fearless and fresh, something that dumbfounds, something that makes me say in a moment without footnote, "I think I really like this...
...overly complex. After all, I had not even heard of Kant, much less been able to name-drop The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals in section. Yet despite all the references to Herder, Plato, Machiavelli and Voltaire, I detected some resonance in this history of ideas. What "a priori" meant I did not know, but the basic themes I understood. Berlin was saying that theories were wonderful stuff, great to think about and even more fascinating to create; that there is no limit to where theory can lead in the real world (I knew at least of Marx...
...should a minority citizen of middle-or upper-middle class background, of a similar education and acculturation as any caucasian, be given a priori an advantage? To make up for the centuries of discrimination preceding 1863? Or, for that matter, 1963? We no longer live in that world, thank God. Should we pretend we still...
...want engineering. Such laws can easily (and there are innumerable precedents in history) degenerate into a tyranny of the majority by those who believe everyone's morality fell out of the sky and landed on Mount Sinai, and those who don't. Unlike what Lat said, we should a priori be skeptical and hesitant toward laws which restrict the freedom of a group which wants to be left alone. --Joshua E. Seims...