Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Introduction: A Brighter Past

Introduction: A Brighter Past Page 199 PEACE AND MIND Seriatim Symposium on Dispute, Conflict, and Enmity Part 5: Benefits of the Doubt Jeffrey M. Perl, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Israel J. Yuval, Colin Davis, Dale Kent, Georges Didi-Huberman, Downing Thomas INTRODUCTION: A BRIGHTER PAST A benign, supreme intelligence that transcends yet comprehends the universe in detail and speaks a language that we all understand, and understand in precisely the same way — a being hypersensitive to raised voices — has just informed us all of an absolute truth: we cannot know what has been, can never establish finally what has happened in our past. The disqualifying paradox of skepticism (“there is no truth” cannot be asserted truly—or even skeptically) has been overcome by an assertion of perfect and well-meaning omniscience. Now what? Or—let us say that this supreme, sweet-tempered, transcendent, all-knowing, easily understood, hypersensitive intelligence has just made the apparently opposite revelation to us all: that there are historical facts, that they are absolute, and here is a complete list of them and of their interrelationships, Listen up. The human race would not survive to hear the list to its conclusion, its end (by definition) not being possible until the human race had stopped http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

Introduction: A Brighter Past

Perl, Jeffrey M.
Common Knowledge , Volume 9 (2) – Apr 1, 2003
Download PDF
5 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/introduction-a-brighter-past-TbIwlx9wi7
Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2003 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0961-754X
eISSN
1538-4578
DOI
10.1215/0961754X-9-2-199
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Page 199 PEACE AND MIND Seriatim Symposium on Dispute, Conflict, and Enmity Part 5: Benefits of the Doubt Jeffrey M. Perl, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Israel J. Yuval, Colin Davis, Dale Kent, Georges Didi-Huberman, Downing Thomas INTRODUCTION: A BRIGHTER PAST A benign, supreme intelligence that transcends yet comprehends the universe in detail and speaks a language that we all understand, and understand in precisely the same way — a being hypersensitive to raised voices — has just informed us all of an absolute truth: we cannot know what has been, can never establish finally what has happened in our past. The disqualifying paradox of skepticism (“there is no truth” cannot be asserted truly—or even skeptically) has been overcome by an assertion of perfect and well-meaning omniscience. Now what? Or—let us say that this supreme, sweet-tempered, transcendent, all-knowing, easily understood, hypersensitive intelligence has just made the apparently opposite revelation to us all: that there are historical facts, that they are absolute, and here is a complete list of them and of their interrelationships, Listen up. The human race would not survive to hear the list to its conclusion, its end (by definition) not being possible until the human race had stopped

Journal

Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2003

There are no references for this article.