"Data: what is given. It is difficult to find a more pervading word in today's scientific practice.
In every field there is a surge of data collection, remarkable not only for its size, unthinkable until recently, but especially for its modus
operandi: streams of values of variables are collected from a given phenomenon, without the pretension of understanding how they can contribute
to the explanation, or simply to a suitable general description of the phenomenon itself. This modus operandi is implicitly based on the
following, almost paradoxical belief: if we have collected enough and sufficiently diverse data, we will be able to answer any relevant
question concerning the phenomenon itself." -- Foundations of Science, 2011. "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?'" – Submitted by Kelli Fuery, University Honors Program. "A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in
glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is
throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No
wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off
and dimmer seems the Lord himself."
- Submitted by Barney McGrane, Department of Sociology. "Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."
– Submitted by Kelli Fuery, University Honors Program. "A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it." -- - Submitted by Barney McGrane, Department of Sociology. "… our notions of what a human being is problematically depend on there being two coherent genders. And if someone doesn’t comply with either the masculine norm or the feminine norm, their very humanness is called into question."
– Submitted by Kelli Fuery, University Honors Program. "The ... assumptions of this ideal [that reality divides into subject and object and that the object through its
own activity cannot make itself known] give rise to a form of knowing which begins with, and is sustained by, the activity of cognitive
subjects. The success of this activity, however, requires the prior self-objectification of the cognitive subject. And this is achieved
by the subject purifying its consciousness of all pre-understandings or prejudices so that its consciousness becomes 'maximally transparent
to itself, one without any alien forces influencing it unawares toward a given conclusion or directing it outside its control'. The
presumption, of course, is that it is 'the immediate entanglements of history and the prejudices that come with entanglement' which
predispose human consciousness to misunderstanding. Therefore only by extricating itself from its historical situatedness (that is, from
its participation in history) can consciousness re-construct itself as a purely disinterested or objective openness to natural and human
phenomena as objects. This self-objectified or worldless inner self, 'with no essential bonds to anything else in the cosmos,' becomes the
sine qua non for objective (that is, true) knowing of the external and internal world." -- A Gadamerian (New York: Catholic Scholars Press, 2000), 14. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers.
I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however,
the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."
-Submitted by Barney McGrane, Department of Sociology. "The ghost of Platonic idealism is its reliance on one truth found by either/or argument, its contention that this
truth is "not of this world," universal and absolute. In the context of teaching composition, then, the Platonic ghost lives on in
every pro and con assignment, every comparison and contrast essay, every mock debate, every writing task that asks students to see "both
sides" of something in order to find a winner, as though every worthwhile intellectual endeavor can be reduced to one of two clear and
distinct choices." --The WPA Outcomes Statement— A Eds. Nicholas Behn, Gregory Glau, Deborah Holdstein, and Duane Roen (West Lafayette, "I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality … I expect it to provide all further enlightenment." -Submitted by Kelli Fuery, University Honors Program. "Specialization and exchange are at the core of economics, yet over 230 years after Adam Smith first presented his
fundamental theorem, economists know remarkably little about how exchange evolves from personal social interactions...to impersonal market
transactions." -- American Economic Review, 98:3, 2008 , 1009. "Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a
great fear."
–Submitted by Barney McGrane, Department of Sociology. "The thing itself – technology, images, narrative, mode of delivery, and so on – may not be new, but this will not matter once ‘newness’ is evoked." -- University Honors Program.