From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Wed 03 Mar 2004 - 05:01:41 GMT
More interesting stuff from trawling. This is recent enough to have been
influenced by Dawkins, but there are no occurrences of meme, memes or
memetics in the book.
"On the one hand, this tradition is woven around charismatic
personalities, brilliant eccentrics. On the other hand, it is in the nature
of Western philosophy that ideas have a life of their own, even if they
also betray some deep concern of the philosopher. By contrast, the stories
told about Confucius and the Buddha are hardly separable from their
philosophy. Confucianism and Buddhism are about Confucius and Buddha in a
way that Greek philosophy is not about Thales and his followers, or even
Socrates, the most exemplary of them all. Philosophy was, from the first,
about the ideas, and so it should be no surprise, in the centuries to
follow, that the ideas should take on a life of their own and become the
center of focus. Biographies of the philosophers, accordingly, are
considered just so much gossip."
Page 31
_A Short History of Philosophy_ by Kathleen M. Higgins, Robert C. Solomon;
Oxford University Press, 1996
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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