Plato zou vandaag de dag geen filosoof zijn

"Laat vooral niemand geloven dat als Plato nu leefde en platonische opvattingen had, hij een filosoof zou zijn, - hij zou een godsdienstwaanzinnge zijn." (Nietzsche, Herwaardering van alle waarden, p. 546)

Darwin and Deleuze

"Deleuze’s ethology in the final analysis employs a biological rhetoric to evoke an anti-human, anti-ethical, anti-political, anti-philosophical pathos which sentimentally avoids the implications of biological selection. The immanence of the Origin of the Species remains far more rigorous and implacable than that of Difference and Repetition and A Thousand Plateaus. These texts moralize selection, linking it with the active or passive affective relations of an organism to its environment. They provide by default a strong case for maintaining the separation of the biological and the philosophical, especially in respect to their use of the concept of selection. Indeed, there is no place for philosophy with its active and passive capacities and relations within a rigorously defined Darwinian world. Any biophilosophy, consequently, will reduce not only the philosophical to the biological, but also the biological to the philosophical. Certain conceptions of action and classification will be applied to nature, and then refracted back into philosophy. In an earlier version of biophilosophy these conceptions were those of race and fitness, while now they are those of passive and active affections. In both cases, nature and politics are sentimentalized and brutalized. By refusing the full rigour of Darwinian selection, Deleuze is left with a sentimentalized nature and a brutalized ethics and politics." (Howard Caygill, The Topology of Selection)

Through the Language Glass

"Human color vision evolved independently from that of insects, birds, reptiles, and fish. We share our trichromatic vision with the apes and with Old World monkeys, but not with other mammals, and this implies that our color vision goes back about thirty to forty million years. Most mammals have dichromatic vision: they have only two types of cones, one with peak sensitivity in the blue-violet area and one with peak sensitivity in green (the middle-wave cone). It is thought that the primate trichromatic vision emerged from a dichromatic stage through a mutation that replicated a gene and split the original middle-wave (green) receptor into two adjacent ones, the new one being a little farther toward yellow. The position of the two new receptors was optimal for detecting yellowish fruit against a background of green foliage. Man's color vision seems to have been a coevolution with the development of bright fruits. As one scientist put it, "with only a little exaggeration, one could say that our trichromatic color vision is a device invented by certain fruiting trees in order to propagate themselves." In particular, it seems that our trichromatic color vision evolved together with a certain class of tropical trees that bear fruit too large to be taken by birds and that are yellow or orange when ripe. The tree offers a color signal that is visible to the monkey against the masking foliage of the forest, and in return the monkey either spits out the undamaged seed at a distance or defecates it together with fertilizer. In short, monkeys are to colored fruit what bees are to flowers." (Deutscher, Through the Language Glass, p. 247)