Haverstock Hill

“Paul Zeal told me of how, one day, he and Laing had spotted me careering down Haverstock Hill on my bike: bobble-hat on the hawk-head, a Dr Who oversized overcoat flapping in the breeze, with my “Unfit to Plead” badge attached to the lapel, no doubt heading for another night at the Vortex, or the consoling disillusions of the White Heart Lane terraces. This sight(ing) had provoked Laing to casually share with Paul, “What a strange bunch we are!” And the strangeness, the incipient unreality, of the psychotic world is what Laing had a considerable capacity to acknowledge, whilst neither rejecting, nor reinforcing it.”

Chris Oakley (2012), Where did it all go wrong? In R.D. Laing 50 Years since The Divided Self, edited by Theodor Itten and Courtenay Young.

“We rarely recognize how…

“We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake — like putting a fork in one’s eye or using a window instead of a door.”

—Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1988)

“We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake — like putting a fork in one’s eye or using a window instead of a door.”

—Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1988)

A good way to think about truth

“My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity. By this I mean that, for me, it was not a question of analyzing the internal or external criteria that would enable the Greeks and Romans, or anyone else, to recognize whether a statement or proposition is true or not. At issue for me was rather the attempt to consider truth-telling as a specific activity, or as a role.”

Discourse & Truth, Concluding remarks by Foucault. (Spotted here.)