Philisophical Anthropolgy Quotes

Shigehisa Kuriyama

"To know the body is to see how Nature designed each part perfectly for its end, that is to say, its function."

Shigehisa Kuriyama

"Each site in the universe, and by correspondence, each site on the body is engaged in a specific network of responsiveness by virtue of nothing other than its position."

Shigehisa Kuriyama

"The statement 'the human body is a microcosm' defines not a state but a process... correspondence expresses the Chinese approach to the problem of change; one apprehends change by embodying it."

Plato

"So long as we keep to the body and our soul is contaminated with this imperfection, there is no chance of our ever attaining satisfactorily to our object, which we assert to be truth"

Plato

"Because every pleasure or pain has a sort of rivet with which it fastens the soul to the body and pins it down and makes it corporeal, accepting as true whatever the body certifies"

Clara Han

"Despite one's desire to aguantar (endure), signs of hardship still seep out... all signaling to others that despite oneself, one is in need and needs the help of another. For neighbors, how to respond to this seepage or to the gossip about another's "critical moment" involves subtle performances that conceal both the critical moment and the act of giving"

Clara Han

"While humanitarian reason advances the equality of all lives, 'echoing the ideas of Christian brotherly love,' it reconstitutes Christian notions of charity that assert asymmetric relationships between givers and receivers: gifts of aid can not be reciprocated... it not only rests upon structural inequalities but also propagates them by denying that structural, or sociological, difference"

Nancy Scheper-Hughes

"A particularly lethal form of negative feedback results when some Alto mothers reject and withdraw their affections from their passive and less demanding babies whose disvalued "character traits" are primarily the symptoms of chronic hunger"

Nancy Scheper-Hughes

"Nonetheless, selective neglect accompanied by maternal detachment is both widespread among the poorer populations of Ladeiras but "invisible" - generally unrecognized by those outside shantytown culture, even by professionals such as clinic doctors and teachers who come into frequent contact with severely neglected babies and young children"

Aristotle

"For if the eye were an animal, the soul of it would be its sight, since this is the thinghood of an eye as it is disclosed in speech (and the eye is the material of sight); if its sight were left out it would no longer be an eye, except ambiguously, in the same way as a stone eye or a painted one

Aristotle

"...if any one alone of the following is present in something, we say it is alive: intellect, perception, moving and stopping with respect to place, and the motion that results from nourishment, that is, wasting away as well as growing. And for this reason all plants seem to be alive... all of them that are continually nourished and live for the sake of their ends, so long as they are able to get food"

Aristotle

"...all are not final: but the Chief Good is manifestly something final; and so, if there is some one only which is final, this must be the object of our search: but if several, then the most final of them will be it"

Aristotle

"First then this must be noted, that it is the nature of such things to be spoiled by defect and excess; as we see in the case of health and strength (since for the illustration of things which cannot be seen we must use those that can), for excessive training impairs the strength as well as deficient: meat and drink, in like manner, in too great or too small quantities, impair the health: while in due proportion they cause, increase, and preserve it."

Aristotle

"Some acts perhaps there are for which compulsion cannot be pleaded, but a man should rather suffer the worst and die; how absurd, for instance, are the pleas of compulsion with which Alcmaeon in Euripides' play excuses his matricide!"

Aristotle

"Further, we deliberate not about Ends, but Means to Ends. No physician, for instance, deliberates whether he will cure, nor orator whether he will persuade, nor statesman whether he will produce a good constitution, nor in fact any man in any other function about his particular End; but having set before them a certain End they look how and through what means it may be accomplished"