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1 " …ours is a world about which we pretend to have more and more information but which seems to us increasingly devoid of meaning. "
― Jean-Pierre Dupuy , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
2 " how are we to explain that science became such a 'risky' activity that, according to some top scientists, it poses today the principal threat to the survival of humanity? Some philosophers reply to this question by saying that Descartes's dream - 'to become master and possessor of nature' - has turned wrong, and that we should urgently return to the 'mastery of mastery'. They have understood nothing. They don't see that the technology profiling itself at our horizon through 'convergence' of all disciplines aims precisely at nonmastery. The engineer of tomorrow will not be a sorcerer's apprentice because of his negligence or ignorance, but by choice. He will 'give' himself complex structures or organizations and he will try to learn what they are capable of by way of exploring their functional properties - an ascending, bottom-up approach. He will be an explorer and experimenter at least as much as an executor. The measure of his success will be more the extent to which his own creation will surprise him than the conformity of his realization to the list of preestablished tasks. "
― Jean-Pierre Dupuy
3 " On a personal level, all of us have to come to terms with the fact that, sooner or later, we will die. And yet today no aspect of human existence, not even the ending of it, is immune to the hegemonic pretensions of neoclassical economic thought. Not only the intellectual poverty, but also the emotional poverty, of what it has to say about death give us little reason to believe that it will be able to face up to the fact of its own mortality. 4. "
― Jean-Pierre Dupuy , Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith
4 " Noah had grown tired of being a prophet of doom, forever announcing a catastrophe that never came and that no one took seriously. One day, he clothed himself in sackcloth and covered his head with ashes. Only a man who was mourning [the death of] a beloved child or his wife was allowed to do this. Clothed in the garb of truth, bearer of sorrow, he went back to the city, resolved to turn the curiosity, spitefulness, and superstition of its inhabitants to his advantage. Soon a small crowd of curious people had gathered around him. They asked him questions. They asked if someone had died, and who the dead person was. Noah replied to them that many had died, and then, to the great amusement of his listeners, said that they themselves were the dead of whom he spoke. When he was asked when this catastrophe had taken place, he replied to them: “Tomorrow.” Profiting from their attention and confusion, Noah drew himself up to his full height and said these words: “The day after tomorrow, the flood will be something that will have been. And when the flood will have been, everything that is will never have existed. When the flood will have carried off everything that is, everything that will have been, it will be too late to remember, for there will no longer be anyone alive. And so there will no longer be any difference between the dead and those who mourn them. If I have come before you, it is in order to reverse time, to mourn tomorrow’s dead today. The day after tomorrow it will be too late.” With this he went back whence he had come, took off the sackcloth [that he wore], cleaned his face of the ashes that covered it, and went to his workshop. That evening a carpenter knocked on his door and said to him: “Let me help you build the ark, so that it may become false.” Later a roofer joined them, saying: “It is raining over the mountains, let me help you, so that it may become false.”14 "
― Jean-Pierre Dupuy , The Mark of the Sacred
5 " the author of the chapter in question, entitled “Of the Nature of Self-Deceit” in the original English, is known today not only as an economist, but as the founding father of modern economics. He is none other than Adam Smith, about whom the most arrant nonsense has been written for more than three hundred years. And yet at the time he composed The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in 1759, he was not yet the economist he was to become over the course of the next two decades while composing An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Smith started out as a moral philosopher, teaching at Glasgow, and became a foremost representative of the Scottish Enlightenment. His Theory—the womb from which, as Smith himself insisted, the Inquiry sprang—remains the most complete statement of his thinking about man and society. Wealth, he holds, attracts the envious notice of others, because they wish to be wealthy themselves; and if they desire wealth, it is so that they themselves may be noticed in their turn. The poor man suffers less from being poor than from the fact that no one pays attention to him. If, "
6 " In this world economics dooms itself to extinction at the same moment that it condemns politics to the same fate. 3. "
7 " 4. I come back in the fourth part to the metaphysical problem of coordinating individual behaviors by means of the future. This leads me to consider two paradoxes that have yet to be satisfactorily resolved: one a paradox of historical and religious anthropology associated with Max Weber, having to do with the curious affinity between the emergence of the capitalist spirit and the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, at least in the interpretation given to it by the Puritan settlers of New England; the other, a logical and metaphysical paradox due, it is said, to the physicist William Newcomb. "
8 " On this view, God is the cause of physical evil. The question arose, then, whether He is also the cause of sin and of moral evil; and, if so, how He could have invented the very thing that corrupts His creation. The attempt to vindicate God's will was called theodicy in Greek, and it is this term that is traditionally used to refer to all human attempts to justify the existence of evil in a world that has been perfectly made. Theodicies "
