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TST: New Content – Quotes, Read-Aloud

Latest 5

The 5 latest stories.

One-minute tidbits.

1.

A Philosophy Quote.

From History:
Subject: Philosophy of History.

“The historian without his facts is rootless…the facts without their historian are…meaningless.”.

  • E. H. Carr.
  • 1961.

Edward Hallett Carr was born in 1892. The British historian, diplomat, and theorist of international relations was best known for What Is History? and his fourteen-volume history of Soviet Russia. Carr challenged the older idea that history is simply a neutral record of facts. His full quote from 1961 captures his view on history well:

“The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless”

Carr’s quote supports Empirical Narrative Realism because it holds together both sides of the historical process. The “facts” are the surviving traces. The historian supplies the story using them. The past happened in the material world, and the practice of history is reconstruction.

The Idea of Ideas sharpens that interaction into categories: the past event was empirical, the surviving traces are empirical, and the historical story is rational. It also adds the language of confidence. Some historical stories are strongly aligned with reality, some are weak, and some collapse when reality pushes back.

Carr’s quote also reflects his wider worldview. He embraced reality and rejected naïve objectivism. The idea that historians can simply gather facts, arrange them in order, and let “history” speak for itself. Historians do more than collect objective facts like stones on a path. History is an active dialogue between the present and the past, a phrase Carr himself used to define history. History is a story that must keep answering to evidence.

At his home in England in 1982, Carr passed into history at the age of 90.

 


That Philosophy Quote, 

was first published on TST 3 weeks ago.
2.

A Philosophy Quote.

From History:
Subject: Situational Ethics.

“In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary.”.

  • Thomas Aquinas.
  • circa 1265.

Saint Augustine, born in 354, is widely cited as the author of Christian Just War Theory. This area of thought takes a look at situational ethics and tries to add temperance. Augustine looked at a violent world and refused the fantasy that moral people could always stay clean. He did not hand us a checklist. He handed us the wound. He made the tradition wrestle with a brutal question: if peace is the goal, what do we do when violence is already at the door? That is Augustine’s role in this story. He gave Just War thinking its grief, its caution, and its sense that even a necessary war is still a tragedy, not a triumph.

Many centuries later, around 1265, Thomas Aquinas clarifed his message: 

“In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary.”

Aquinas, born about 1225, gave us moral clarity to war based on situational ethics. His famous three necessary conditions are proper authority, just cause, and right intent. In plain English, war cannot just be somebody’s anger with weapons. It cannot be private revenge. It cannot be conquest dressed up as virtue. It must be in defense and answer a real wrong. It must be declared by the proper authority, and aim at restoring justice or peace rather than feeding corruption, greed, or bloodlust.

I picture Aquinas in stone halls and candlelight, huge in mind, methodical, patient, almost architectural in the way he thought. A Dominican friar in the 13th century, he was not trying to be flashy. He was trying to build a structure strong enough to hold truth without collapsing into chaos. He gathered scripture, reason, Aristotle, law, and theology, then laid them out like a builder laying blocks. Augustine gave the tradition its moral storm. Aquinas gave it columns, beams, and load-bearing walls.

From there, Just War thinking spread far beyond medieval Christianity. Its descendants helped shape the broader moral grammar of war across the world, especially through international humanitarian law. The basic idea is simple but powerful: even war has limits. You do not target civilians. You do not torture prisoners. You do not take hostages. You do not humiliate detainees. You do not use force without restraint. Those rules exist to prevent the worst kinds of war crimes: attacks on civilians, cruel treatment, torture, degrading treatment, unlawful execution, intimidation, and abuse of prisoners. So even when modern nations no longer speak in Augustine’s or Aquinas’s language, they still live in the shadow of the same ancient effort to put a moral leash on organized violence.

 


That Philosophy Quote, 

was first published on TST 1 month ago.
3.

A History Quote.

From History:
Subject: Belief.

“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”.

  • David Hume.
  • 1739.

In 1739, when Hume wrote:

“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

Hume was not saying smart people believe nothing. He is not telling us to become frozen skeptics, afraid to trust anything. He is saying belief should be earned. Let confidence rise, but make it rise for a reason.

That is the science-first spirit. You do not commit first and defend later. You let evidence, logic, testing, and good authority do their work. Some ideas deserve strong belief. Some deserve light belief. Some deserve no belief yet.

That is believing well: proportion your confidence to the support.

 


That History Quote, 

was first published on TST 1 month ago.
4.

A Philosophy Quote.

From History:
Subject: Worldviews.

“Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually, but only as a corporate body.”.

  • W. V. Quine.
  • 1951.

People do not revise beliefs one at a time in a vacuum. They protect central beliefs, sacrifice peripheral ones, and reinterpret new evidence through a larger web.

Quine’s point here is that beliefs are not usually tested one at a time. They hang together. A single claim about reality rarely walks into experience alone. It arrives with background assumptions, supporting ideas, habits of thought, and a larger structure already in place. That is why this quote connects so naturally to worldview. From Quine’s point of view, what we believe forms more like a web than a stack of separate bricks. Experience presses on the whole structure, and then we adjust different parts of it as needed.

That fits my work because I also reject the idea that people hold beliefs as isolated units. In my writing, worldview is the deeper interpretive structure through which beliefs are sorted, integrated, defended, or revised. Where Quine gives us a web of belief, I push further into the lived human side of that structure by framing worldview around personal language, philosophy, and religion. We do not merely test claims. We test them from within a larger framework that helps decide what even feels believable in the first place.

Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician born in Akron, Ohio, in 1908. He spent his career at Harvard and became one of the major figures in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. He is especially known for his 1951 essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” where this quote appears and where he challenged the sharp divide between truths supposedly true by meaning alone and truths grounded in experience. He died in 2000.

In the broader academic world, Quine matters because he helped reshape how philosophers think about meaning, evidence, and theory. His critique of reductionism and his more holistic picture of belief became part of the backbone of later debates in epistemology, philosophy of science, and analytic philosophy more broadly. Even scholars who reject parts of his view still have to reckon with him, and that is one mark of a major thinker.

 


That Philosophy Quote, 

was first published on TST 2 months ago.
5.

A Philosophy Quote.

From History:
Subject: Belief.

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”.

  • William Kingdon Clifford.
  • 1877.

Clifford said this because he thought belief is not morally innocent. In The Ethics of Belief, he used the famous example of a shipowner who convinces himself his unsafe ship is fine without doing the hard work of checking it. Even if the ship had arrived safely, Clifford argued, the man would still have been wrong to believe as he did, because he had not earned that belief through honest investigation. That is why the quote lands so hard. Clifford was not merely telling us to prefer evidence. He was saying that careless belief is already a failure of character and judgment.

William Kingdon Clifford was a British mathematician and philosopher who lived from 1845 to 1879. He died young, at just 33, but left a lasting mark in both mathematics and philosophy. He worked on geometry and the nature of space, and Britannica notes that some of his ideas about matter and spatial curvature foreshadowed later themes in Einstein’s general relativity. So Clifford was not a minor scold wagging his finger at belief. He was a serious mind, cut short early, whose thinking reached across science, mathematics, and philosophy.

Clifford’s severity helped divide later discussion about belief, especially when William James answered him in 1896 with The Will to Believe. James thought Clifford’s rule was too strict. Clifford leaned toward avoiding error through disciplined restraint, while James argued that in some live, forced, and momentous choices, waiting for sufficient evidence can itself block access to truth. In that way, Clifford and James became one of philosophy’s enduring forks in the road, a bit like how Plato and Aristotle helped shape two broad tendencies in Western philosophy, or how Laozi and Confucius came to represent two powerful styles of thought in the East. The comparison is not exact, but the pattern is familiar: one side stresses discipline and restraint, the other leaves more room for practical life, commitment, and lived judgment.

TST agrees with the heart of Clifford’s warning, but not with all of its severity. Belief should never be careless. Evidence matters. Reason matters. Confidence should be ranked. But TST also leaves room for rational structure, degrees of confidence, and pragmatic humility toward stories of the unknown and unknowable. So Clifford fits TST as a stern ancestor, not a final authority. He reminds us that belief has consequences. TST adds that not all beliefs are held in the same way, and not all deserve the same confidence.

 


That Philosophy Quote, 

was first published on TST 2 months ago.

The end.

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