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10/15/2024

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10/15/2024

François-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume M. de Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher, satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit and his criticism of Christianity (especially of the Roman Catholic Church) and of slavery, Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.

Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, histories, and even scientific expositions. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. Voltaire was one of the first authors to become renowned and commercially successful internationally. He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties and was at constant risk from the strict censorship laws of the Catholic French monarchy. His polemics witheringly satirized intolerance and religious dogma, as well as the French institutions of his day. His best-known work and magnum opus, Candide, is a novella that comments on, criticizes, and ridicules many events, thinkers and philosophies of his time, most notably Gottfried Leibniz and his belief that our world is of necessity the "best of all possible worlds".

Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the Church as a static and oppressive force useful only on occasion as a counterbalance to the rapacity of kings, although all too often, even more rapacious itself. Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses.

He is remembered and honored in France as a courageous polemicist who indefatigably fought for civil rights (such as the right to a fair trial and freedom of religion) and who denounced the hypocrisies and injustices of the Ancien Régime. The Ancien Régime involved an unfair balance of power and taxes between the three Estates: clergy and nobles on one side, the commoners and middle class, who were burdened with most of the taxes, on the other. He particularly had admiration for the ethics and government as exemplified by the Chinese philosopher Confucius.[269]

Voltaire is also known for many memorable aphorisms, such as "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him"), contained in a verse epistle from 1768, addressed to the anonymous author of a controversial work on The Three Impostors. But far from being the cynical remark it is often taken for, it was meant as a retort to atheistic opponents such as d'Holbach, Grimm, and others.

10/15/2024

/ Michel de Montaigne /
"All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of goodness."
"Michel de Montaigne, (born Feb. 28, 1533, Château de Montaigne, near Bordeaux, France—died Sept. 23, 1592, Château de Montaigne), French courtier and author. Born into the minor nobility, Montaigne received an excellent Classical education (speaking only Latin up to age 6) before studying law and serving as counselor at the Bordeaux Parliament. There he met the lawyer Étienne de La Boétie, with whom he formed an extraordinary friendship; the void left by La Boétie’s death in 1563 likely led Montaigne to begin his writing career. He retired to his château in 1571 to work on his Essais (1580, 1588), a series of short prose reflections on many subjects that form one of the most captivating and intimate self-portraits ever written. At once deeply critical of his time and deeply involved in its struggles, he sought understanding through self-examination, which he developed into a description of the human condition and an ethic of authenticity, self-acceptance, and tolerance. Though most of his later years were devoted to writing, he occasionally served as mediator in episodes of religious conflict in his region and beyond, and served as mayor of Bordeaux during the troubled period 1581–85. " (Britannica)
'The Essays'

10/15/2024

Credit:Terry Pratchett Books

10/15/2024

/ Stephen Hawking /
"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it."
"Stephen Hawking (born January 8, 1942, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England—died March 14, 2018, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire) was an English theoretical physicist whose theory of exploding black holes drew upon both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. He also worked with space-time singularities.
Hawking studied physics at University College, Oxford (B.A., 1962), and Trinity Hall, Cambridge (Ph.D., 1966). He was elected a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge. In the early 1960s Hawking contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, an incurable degenerative neuromuscular disease. He continued to work despite the disease’s progressively disabling effects..." (Britannica)
BBC, Dec. 2014.