Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · blog0.697

   It may seem, in such a case, that her claim to deserve the medal would be justified. But since she would not be entitled to it by the rules of the ideal institution, IID implies that it is impossible to justify her claim that she deserves the medal by virtue of her performance here tonight. It appears, then, that difficulties confront the attempt to justify desert claims by appeal to claims about the entitlements created by institutions, actual or ideal. Some philosophers have drawn attention to alleged connections between desert claims and facts about “appraising attitudes” or “responsive att…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/desert.md

2. 02 · gutenberg0.697

   As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the players; but this is the only interest in the story, which otherwise has no moral and little incident. A story of education--seventy years of it--the practical value remains to the end in doubt, like other values about which men have disputed since the birth of Cain and Abel; but the practical value of the universe has never been stated in dollars. Although every one cannot be a Gargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck and walk off with the great bells of Notre Dame, every on…

   gutenberg/PG-2044-the-education-of-henry-adams/PG-2044.txt

3. 03 · blog0.695

   It mistook itself for superhuman, it willed a thing impossible, it failed to eliminate its own internal jealousies, it failed to understand the conditions of victory, it did not train itself to hold the sea, and thus, having violated every principle of MAGICK, it was pulled down and broken into pieces by provincialism and democracy, so that neither individual excellence nor civic virtue has yet availed to raise it again to that majestic unity which made so bold a bid for the mastery of the race of man.*At least it allowed England to discover its intentions, and so to combine the world against …

   blog/www-sacred-texts-com/internet-book-of-shadows-magick-course-outline-amber-k-internet-sacred-text-arch.md

4. 04 · gutenberg0.694

   "There is no single fact to justify a conviction," said Mr. Cock; whereon the Solicitor General replied that he did not rely upon any single fact, but upon a chain of facts, which taken all together left no possible means of escape. _Times_, Leader, Nov. 16, 1894. (The prisoner was convicted).

   gutenberg/PG-49324-the-authoress-of-the-odyssey-where-and-when-she-wrote-who-she-was-the-/PG-49324.txt

5. 05 · gutenberg0.689

   To fit him for this task he possessed great knowledge of men and books, a wide experience of life, a knowledge of languages, and a freedom from bondage to any authority but that of reason and conscience. He was pinned to no Thirty-nine Articles, and was in receipt of no retaining fee which he was not prepared to sacrifice. Another gift, rare among men of his position, was his wonderful sincerity and (due, I think, to that sincerity) an amazing power of looking at the phenomena of our complex and artificial life with the eyes of a little child; going straight to the real, obvious facts of the c…

   gutenberg/PG-64908-what-is-art/PG-64908.txt

6. 06 · gutenberg0.683

   This remarkable man, whose system of thought will long remain one of the landmarks in the history of philosophical speculation, does, in the treatise in question, lay down an universal first principle as the origin and ground of moral obligation; it is this:--'So act, that the rule on which thou actest would admit of being adopted as a law by all rational beings.' But when he begins to deduce from this precept any of the actual duties of morality, he fails, almost grotesquely, to show that there would be any contradiction, any logical (not to say physical) impossibility, in the adoption by all…

   gutenberg/PG-11224-utilitarianism/PG-11224.txt

7. 07 · blog0.680

   As a candidate for E, McKinsey may have had something like the following proposition in mind (from Brueckner 1992a: 112): (E1) Oscar inhabits an environment containing H 2 O and not XYZ. The problem with this candidate for E is that on a holistic theory of CE, as Burge explains, An individual or community might (logically speaking) have been wrong in thinking that there was such a thing as water. It is epistemically possible—it might have turned out—that contrary to an individual’s belief, water did not exist. (Burge 1982: 97) We may read “epistemically possible” here as “epistemically possibl…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/content-externalism-and-skepticism.md

8. 08 · gutenberg0.680

   Respecting the sub-title, to which allusion was made above, I may add that it was appended at the last moment, after reading the final proofs, as being the estimate left in a candid mind of the heroine’s character—an estimate that nobody would be likely to dispute. It was disputed more than anything else in the book. _Melius fuerat non scibere._ But there it stands.

   gutenberg/PG-110-tess-of-the-d-urbervilles-a-pure-woman/PG-110.txt

9. 09 · blog0.679

   Others are “pluralists.” They defend the idea that desert claims fall into different categories, and that each category has its own distinctive sort of justification (see, for example, Feinberg 1970, Sher 1987, and Lamont 1994). We first consider some monist views. Some popular views about the justification of desert claims are based on the idea that such claims can be justified by appeal to considerations about the values of consequences. Sidgwick seems to be thinking of something like this in The Methods of Ethics where he mentions ‘the utilitarian interpretation of Desert.’ He describes thi…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/desert.md

10. 10 · blog0.677

    He was dissatisfied with its morals; which in some respects were not any better than his own. Indeed they were an unflatteringly close imitation of his own. They were a very bad people, and as he knew of no way to reform them, he wisely concluded to abolish them. This is the only really enlightened and superior idea his Bible has credited him with, and it would have made his reputation for all time if he could only have kept to it and carried it out. But he was always unstable -- except in his advertisements -- and his good resolution broke down. He took a pride in man; man was his finest inve…

    blog/www-sacred-texts-com/letters-from-the-earth.md