Above all, rational knowledge does not pretend to disengagement: to be from everywhere and so nowhere, to be free from interpretation, from being represented, to be fully self-contained or fully formalizable. (1/2) — Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges, p. 262

Since all argument must proceed from assumptions, it is plainly impossible to demand that all assumptions should be based on argument. (1/3) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 585

...there is no such thing as an unprejudiced observation. (1/6) — Karl Popper, Unended Quest, p. 60

We must be able to get used to the real. The symptom is not yet truly the real. It is the way the real manifests itself at our level as living beings.As living beings, we are eaten away at, bitten [mordus] by the symptom. (1/2) — Jacques Lacan, The Triumph of Religion, p. 77

We have to agree to remain open to the dizzying otherness of existents, the list of which is not closed, and to the multiple ways they have of existing or of relating among themselves, without regrouping them too quickly in some set, whatever it... (1/5) — Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia, p. 45

Methodological essentialism, i.e. the theory that it is the aim of science to reveal essences and to describe them by means of definitions, can be better understood when contrasted with its opposite, methodological nominalism. (1/10) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 70

Freud shows clearly that […] there can be no such thing as a miracle. It must, he says, have a realtion with causality […] we are progressing in the way of his certainty. (1/4) — Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 46

1. There are no ultimate sources of knowledge. Every source, every suggestion, is welcome; and every source, every suggestion, is open to critical examination. (1/9) — Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p. 48

EVER SINCE THE ENLIGHTENMENT, WESTERN PHILOSOphers have shown us a Nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. (1/7) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 80

To offer a proof of a mathematical result, for Lakatos, is rather like offering a theoretical explanation for an empirical result in the natural sciences. (1/3) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 153

Stirling unwittingly gives away the 'secret of Hegel' when he proceeds to the following poetic as well as prophetic revelations, alluding to the lightning attack made by Prussia on Austria in 1866, the year before he wrote: 'Is... (1/5) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 348

This, of course, is not the only argument against the idea of a rule of love. Loving a person means wishing to make him happy. (This, by the way, was Thomas Aquinas' definition of love.) (1/19) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 593

Plato's treatment of happiness is exactly analogous to his treatment of justice; and especially, that it is based upon the same belief that society is 'by nature' divided into classes or castes. (1/2) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 236

“There would still be hero-worship in such a [post-Philosophy] culture, but it would not be worship of heroes as children of the gods, as marked off from the rest of mankind by closeness to the immortal. (1/3) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xxxvii-c

Ontically, then, the unconscious is the elusive—but we are beginning to circumscribe it in a structure, a temporal structure, which, it can be said, has never yet been articulated as such. — Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 32

In acting on behalf of future generations, we must be careful not to foster ‘the supreme value of species survival as a discursive technology of compulsory heterosexuality’. (1/2) — Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, p. 44

Over the past few decades, many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias; it is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress through modernization. (1/4) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 2258

Davidson's holism and coherentism shows how language looks once we get rid of the central presupposition of Philosophy: that true sentences divide into an upper and a lower division -the sentences which correspond to something and... (1/12) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xix

Hegel's intention is to operate freely with all contradictions. 'All things are contradictory in themselves', he insists, in order to defend a position which means the end not only of all science, but of all rational argument. (1/5) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 357

On these subjects, as on that of "organic" products or "100% natural" yogurt, we are all fairly likely to be constructivists – not to say relativists. (1/6) — Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia, p. 30

… The methodological style of Romantic thought can be contrasted point by point with that of Enlightenment thinking. First, it is not atomistic or individualistic. (1/4) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 63

The nineteenth-century conflict between science and religion appears to me to be superseded. (1/23) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 605

[. . .] The real is transcendent [. . . ]. Our gadgets do, in fact, devour us. Yes. But, personally speaking, I am not very pessimistic. There will be a tapering off of gadgets. (1/4) — Jacques Lacan, The Triumph of Religion, p. 78

What moralists tend to ignore is something engineers know: on the side of the subject, there is no mastery; on the side of the object, no possible deanimation. — Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia, p. 63

… 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,... (1/7) — Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia, p. 71

Neo-Kantian philosophers like Putnam, Strawson, and Rawls have arguments and theses which are connected to Kant's by a fairly straightforward series of "purifying" transformations, transformations which are thought to give clearer and... (1/2) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 93

Just as people haggle over questions of duty and legality so they haggle over questions of logical compulsion. Just as our roles and obligations may conflict so may the deliverances of our logical intuitions. — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 131

I think this is a question in which we can maintain that some progress has already been made, in a direction that can only be one of work, of conquest, with a view to resolving the question as to whether... (1/4) — Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 11

Even in industrial farms, farmers depend on life processes outside their control, such as photosynthesis and animal digestion. (1/5) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 968

Organisms don’t have to show their human equivalence (as conscious agents, intentional communicators, or ethical subjects) to count. (1/2) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 2321

...refusal of the phallic term brings with it an attempt to reconstitute a form of subjectivity free of division, and hence a refusal of the notion of symbolisation itself. (1/2) — Juliet Mitchell & Jacqueline Rose, Feminine Sexuality, p. 56

The simple precision of DNA sequencing has taken the scientific world by storm: there are no alternatives. It seems so powerful that scientists keep making up questions based on the availability of this answer. (1/3) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 3387

L: Are you following me? Has a little light bulb gone on in your head? Doesn't my position seem quite measured? I'm listening. L: Yes, you are listening. But are you catching hold of a little something that resembles the real? (1/2) — Jacques Lacan, The Triumph of Religion, p. 67

the critique of bad science that glides into a radical doctrine that all scientific statements are historical fictions made facts through the exercise of power produces trouble when feminists want to talk about producing feminist... (1/3) — Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 103

Logically, hysteria brings into focus the need to distinguish bodily illness from the imitations of such illness. (1/3) — Thomas Szasz, The myth of mental illness, p. 36

Who charges Popper's theory with relativism? Indeed, when this charge is pressed against the sociology of knowledge doesn't it frequently come from those who are impressed by that philosophy? (1/3) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 159

For Westerners, it is a central consequence of concepts of gender difference that a person may be turned by another person into an object and robbed of her or his status as subject. (1/4) — Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 180

It is strange that this teaching of antiquity could be almost ignored by modern empiricists, including phenomenalists and positivists; yet it is ignored in most of the problems posed by positivists and phenomenalists, and in the... (1/7) — Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p. 34

Negotiations create meanings. The conclusion that the square root of 2 is an irrational number is not to be discovered within any of the concepts to be involved in the negotiation. (1/3) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 146

Positioning the body as a potential site for feminist technopolitical intervention is one possible tool in a refusal to inevitabilize suffering. (1/4) — Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, p. 16

The refusal to become or to remain a 'gendered' man or a woman, then, is an eminently political insistence on emerging from the nightmare of the all-too-real, imaginary narrative of sex and race. (1/4) — Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 198

Science did not demonstrate that religion was false, nor philosophy that science was merely phenomenal, nor can modernist literature or textualist criticism demonstrate that the "metaphysics of presence" is an outdated genre. (1/2) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 156

just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be [. . .] (1/2) — Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, p. 20

“Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word "true" or "good," supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. (1/10) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xiv

when i talk aboutr the regime of sex, gender and sexual difference as an epistemology, i am referring to a historical system […] that make it possible for a society to decide what is true and to distinguish it from what is false, and,... (1/2) — Paul B. Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?, p. 29

The ecofeminists Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva have argued that ‘science’s whole paradigm is characteristically patriarchal, anti-nature and colonial and aims to dispossess women of their generative capacity as it does the productive capacities of... (1/5) — Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, p. 15

Psychoanalysis should aim to show us that we do not know those things we think we do; it therefore cannot assault our popular conceptions by using the very idiom it is intended to confront; a challenge to ideology cannot... (1/4) — Juliet Mitchell & Jacqueline Rose, Feminine Sexuality, p. 4

The 'eyes' made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and... (1/2) — Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges, p. 254

“On James's view, "true" resembles "good" or "rational" in being a normative notion, a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so. (1/5) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xxv

The result of the construction of a fact is that it appears unconstructed by anyone; the result of rhetorical persuasion in the agnostic field is that participants are convinced that they have not been convinced; the result of... (1/3) — Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life, p. 278