One of their most surprising findings was that many organisms develop only through interactions with other species. […] Consider the parasitic wasp Asobara tabida. (1/14) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 2169

… What Serres explores in The Natural Contract is this congenital weakness of natural law, which consists in saying simultaneously that there is indeed law in nature – the prescriptive dimension that we recognized earlier – and that, nevertheless,... (1/4) — Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia, p. 71

The reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact (or biological, economic...) necessity (and that we tend to... (1/2) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, p. 22

The modern revolt against what Foucault calls "the sovereignty of the signifier" helps us think of the creation of new descriptions, new vocabularies, new genres as the essentially human activity-it suggests the poet, rather than the... (1/3) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 136

we can say that the engineer or the technologist approaches institutions rationally as means that serve certain ends, and that as a technologist he judges them wholly according to their appropriateness, efficiency, simplicity,... (1/6) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 59

Pragmatism – considered as a set of philosophical views about truth, knowledge, objectivity, and language – is neutral between feminism and masculinism. (1/5) — Richard Rorty, Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View, p. 345

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. — Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, p. 200

...‘constitution of objects by discourse’ goes all the way down, and that ‘respect for reality’ (social and historical, astrophysical, or any other kind of reality) is just respect for past language,... (1/3) — Richard Rorty, Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View, p. 343

It must be admitted that the structure of our social environment is man-made in a certain sense; that its institutions and traditions are neither the work of God nor of nature, but the results of human actions and decisions, and... (1/3) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 422

This is a test quote. — Test Author, Test Title, p. 42

I do not believe that heterosexuality is a sexual practice or a sexual identity but, like Monique Wittig, a political regime that reduces the sum total of the living human body and its psychic energy to its reproductive potential, a... (1/2) — Paul B. Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?, p. 35

-c essentialism not only encouraged verbalism, but it also led to the disillusionment with argument, that is, with reason. (1/8) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 333

There has recently been a reaction against the idea that students of man and society will be "scientific" only if they remain faithful to the Galilean model-if they find "value-neutral," purely descriptive terms in which to state... (1/7) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 196

All over the world, indeed, matsutake are associated with the most disturbed kinds of forests: places where glaciers, volcanoes, sand dunes—or human actions—have done away with other trees and even organic soil. (1/2) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 865

It does not matter how the central principles of rationality are chosen, or how they might change. The central point is that, once chosen, the rational aspects of science are held to be self-moving and self-explanatory. — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 10

Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. (1/2) — Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, p. 234

Even insecure bureaucrats and compulsive novelists are less obsessed by inscriptions than scientists. Between scientists and chaos, there is nothing but a wall of archives, labels, protocol books, figures, and papers. (1/3) — Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life, p. 285

Since the time of Kant, it has become more and more apparent to nonphilosophers that a really professional philosopher can supply a philosophical foundation for just about anything. (1/3) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 169

"[One must respect] the laws of nature [which] impose themselves on everyone [whatever one may do and whatever one may think]." (1/8) — Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia, p. 32

Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. (1/2) — Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, p. 241

Explanation is always incomplete:203 we can always raise another why-question. (1/5) — Karl Popper, Unended Quest, p. 156

It is now possible to see why the relation of correspondence between a theory and reality is vague. At no stage is this correspondence ever perceived, known or, consequently, put to any use. (1/5) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 40

Instead of defining it as true belief … knowledge for the sociologist is whatever people take to be knowledge. It consists of those beliefs which people confidently hold to and live by. (1/3) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 5

Typically, attempts to overthrow the traditional problems of modern philosophy have come in the form of proposals about how we ought to think s.o as to avoid those problems. (1/8) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 35

Both Marxist/socialist-feminisms and radical feminisms have simultaneously naturalized and denatured the category 'woman' and consciousness of the social lives of 'women'. Perhaps a schematic caricature can highlight both kinds of moves. (1/10) — Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, p. 211

Latent commons are not exclusive human enclaves. Opening the commons to other beings shifts everything. Once we include pests and diseases, we can’t hope for harmony; the lion will not lie down with the lamb. (1/5) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 3750

“Attempts to get back behind language to something which "grounds" it, or which it "expresses," or to which it might hope to be "adequate," have not worked. (1/8) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xx

For excellent reasons, most Marxisms see domination best and have trouble understanding what can only look like false consciousness and people's complicity in their own domination in late capitalism. (1/4) — Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, p. 231

Who can be against “helping suffering patients” or “treating treatable diseases”? Who can be for “ignoring sick people” or, worse, “refusing to give patients life-saving treatment”? (1/3) — Thomas Szasz, The myth of mental illness, p. 6

I do not overlook the fact that there are irrationalists who love mankind, and that not all forms of irrationalism engender criminality. (1/14) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 592