Quote of the Week 1
“What Shelley meant was that poets—including, of course, imaginative prose writers—are prophets, not in the sense of foretelling things, but of generating forceful visions.
They express, not just feelings, but crucial ideas in a direct, concentrated form that precedes and makes possible their later articulation by the intellect and their influence on our actions.”
–Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry
From Wikipedia: Mary Beatrice Midgley (13 September 1919 – 10 October 2018) was a British philosopher. She was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University and was known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights.
…Midgley argued that philosophy is like plumbing, something that nobody notices until it goes wrong. “Then suddenly we become aware of some bad smells, and we have to take up the floorboards and look at the concepts of even the most ordinary piece of thinking. The great philosophers noticed how badly things were going wrong, and made suggestions about how they could be dealt with.”
Date: January 28, 2019