Date: Summer 2009

"It is in this sense that the first-personal perspective is strictly unavoidable: I am not a passenger on a vessel pulled hither and yon by impulses and desires; I have to steer."

— Pippin, Robert B. (b. 1948)

Date: Februrary 25, 2009

"He thinks that discourses are 'established conventions' and that language is a resource which constrains what can be said – as if words were ill-fitting clothes within which thoughts are confined."

— Wootton, David

Date: March 31, 2009

"Brains have long been compared to the most advanced existing technology--including, at one point, telephone switchboards."

— Aamodt, Sandra; Wang, Sam

Date: March 31, 2009

"Today people talk about brains as if they were a sort of biological computer, with pink mushy 'hardware' and 'software' generated by life experiences."

— Aamodt, Sandra; Wang, Sam

Date: March 31, 2009

"Our colleague David Linden has compared the evolutionary history of the brain to the task of building a modern car by adding parts to a 1925 Model T that never stops running."

— Aamodt, Sandra; Wang, Sam

Date: March 31, 2009

"As smart as we are, in this sense we are all dim bulbs."

— Aamodt, Sandra; Wang, Sam

Date: March 31, 2009

"We use emotions, the brain's steersman, to assign value to our experiences and to future possibilities, often allowing us to evaluate potential outcomes efficiently and rapidly when information is uncertain."

— Aamodt, Sandra; Wang, Sam

Date: April 2, 2009

"Memory is a muscle, not a quart jar."

— Holt, Jim

Date: 2009

"These are some of the things // you don't have to know because the melody / is like a small bird, maybe a yellow canary, / that wings its way into your mind / --no, into your heart-- / where there's a perch already // set up for it, a little trapeze / to swing back and forth on as it sings / and...

— Raab, Lawrence (b. 1946)

Date: 2009

"As far as I can tell, Quine’s philosophical and political thinking were conducted in two different and hermetically sealed off compartments of his mind."

— Feser, Edward (b. 1968)