I have a firm belief in such things as, you know, the water, the Earth, the trees and sky. And I'm wondering, it is increasingly difficult to find those elements in nature, because it's nature I believe in rather than some spiritual thing.
Bill BlassTags: reductionism spiritual atheism water atheist spirituality earth materialism elements
The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of weakness and confusion. Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.
- Albert Einstein, letter of February 5, 1921
Tags: reductionism mind self skeptic weakness meaning mysticism clarity confusion theosophy dualism
At first sight nothing seems more obvious than that everything has a beginning and an end, and that everything can be subdivided into smaller parts. Nevertheless, for entirely speculative reasons the philosophers of Antiquity, especially the Stoics, concluded this concept to be quite unnecessary. The prodigious development of physics has now reached the same conclusion as those philosophers, Empedocles and Democritus in particular, who lived around 500 B.C.E. and for whom even ancient man had a lively admiration.
Svante ArrheniusTags: science reductionism obvious philosophy universe admiration physics end beginning atoms antiquity democritus stoics empedocles
It seemed a ruse that fear of death should be the sole motivation for living and, yet, to quell this fear made the prospect of living itself seem all the more absurd; to extend this further, the notion of living one’s life for the purposes of pondering the absurdity of living was an even greater absurdity in and of itself, which thus, by reductio ad absurdum, rendered the fear of death a necessary function of life and any lack thereof, a trifling matter rooted in self-inflicted incoherence.
Ashim ShankerTags: paradox reductionism absurdity fear-of-unknown absurdism fear-of-death circular-reasoning incoherence reason-for-living
The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.
Leon M. LedermanTags: science reductionism nature physics atoms nobel-laureate cern particle-physics atomic-theory natural-laws atomism
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