id,dictionary,theme,reviewed_on,metaphor,created_at,provenance,comments,work_id,text,context,updated_at
18684,Writing,"",,"""The great laws of morality are indeed written in our hearts, and may be discovered by reason: but our reason is of slow growth, very unequally dispensed to different persons, liable to error, and confined within very narrow limits in all.""",2011-06-16 16:41:03 UTC,Reading,p. 11 in PGDP edition,6939,"The great laws of morality are indeed written in our hearts, and may be discovered by reason: but our reason is of slow growth, very unequally dispensed to different persons, liable to error, and confined within very narrow limits in all. If, therefore, God vouchsafed to grant a particular revelation of his will--if he has been so unspeakably gracious, as to send his Son into the world to reclaim mankind from error and wickedness--to die for our sins--and to teach us the way to eternal life--surely it becomes us to receive his precepts with the deepest reverence; to love and prize them above all things; and to study them constantly, with an earnest desire to conform our thoughts, our words, and actions to them.
(I, p. 21-3)","Volume I, Letter 1",2011-06-16 16:41:03 UTC
19117,"","",,"""He [Derek Parfit] pictures his thinking self as a government minister sitting behind a large desk, who writes a question on a piece of paper and puts it in his out-tray. The minister then sits idly at the desk, twiddling his thumbs, while in some back room civil servants labor furiously, come up with the answer, and place it in his in-tray.""",2011-09-02 16:08:47 UTC,Reading,"",7079,"There is something not-there about him, an unphysical, slightly androgynous quality. He lacks the normal anti-social emotions--envy, malice, dominance, desire for revenge. He doesn't believe that his conscious mind is responsible for the important parts of his work. He pictures his thinking self as a government minister sitting behind a large desk, who writes a question on a piece of paper and puts it in his out-tray. The minister then sits idly at the desk, twiddling his thumbs, while in some back room civil servants labor furiously, come up with the answer, and place it in his in-tray. Parfit is less aware than most of the boundaries of the self--less conscious of them and less protective. He is helplessly, sometimes unwillingly, empathetic: he will find himself overcome by the mood of the person he is with, especially if that person is unhappy.
(pp. 44-5)","",2011-09-02 16:09:17 UTC