Quotes About Formalism

The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much sympathy with his tyranny, - is a familiar fact explained to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forma, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth.

The model of semantic interpretation we construct should reflect the particular properties and difficulties of natural language, and not simply be an application of a ready-to-wear logical formalism to a new body of data

There is a famous Russian cartoon in which a hippopotamus, in the bush, points out a zebra to another hippopotamus: 'You see,' he says, 'now that's formalism.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

All these schools of though gradually transformed into legal institutions, the diversity of ideas and freedom of opinion that characterized their early development gave way to rigid formalism, strict adherence to precedent, and an almost complete stultification of independent though

How on earth did it come about that all the things denounced in the Gospels are violently defended by the Christian sects? But we must grow out of religion. It is either bugaboo, formalism, or hysteria. Besides, what proof is there that the churches know more about God than the Cockney sentry on duty outside the camp? We have only their say-so. (Sacrifice Post, Lt. Davison)

Do not speak of God much. After a very little conversation on the highest nature, thought deserts us and we run into formalism.

Formalism was a language made for and by elites, a way through which art history would be recorded. It never aspired to be a way through which the masses might encounter and enjoy art.

There's a perspective that I've gained as an astronaut that I didn't get from my science activities. In my science activities, I learned by the seat of my pants. Spending 17 years as an astronaut, I learned the NASA formalism of systems engineering as if my life depended on it. Literally.

An accident of the formalism is something that is mathematically useful, even necessary perhaps to the elegance of the equations, but has no measurable consequence in the experimental world.

In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism.

It's a big criticism of Greenaway films that they are far too interested in formalism and not enough interested in notions of emotional content. It's a criticism I can fully understand from a public that has been brought up by Hollywood movies that demand intense emotional rapport.

What worries me is the professionalism of everything.

Newton blew away any dusty talk of natures and purposes, revealing what lay underneath: a crisp, rigorous mathematical formalism with which teachers continue to torment students to this very day.

just because of its promise of unlimited possibilities technology is an empty form like the most formalistic logic and is unable to determine the content of life.that is why our time,being the most intensely technical,is also the emptiest in all human history.

Q: Why bother doing proofs about programming languages? They are almost always boring if the definitions are right. A: The definitions are almost always wrong. - Anonymous

Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.

Whereas discipline without discipleship leads to rigid formalism, discipleship without discipline ends in sentimental romanticism.

Ideology is essentially a matter of meaning; but the condition of advanced capitalism, some would suggest, is one of pervasive non-meaning. The sway of utility and technology bleach social life of significance, subordinating use-value to the empty formalism of exchange-value.

If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago. ... This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism.

The exercises of our meeting are to be simple and devoid of all ceremonial and formalism.

Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately it also brought mortis.

Newton had considered the calculus as a scientific description of the generation of magnitudes, and Leibniz had viewed it as a metaphysical explanation of such generation. The formalism of the nineteenth century took from the calculus any such preconceptions, leaving only the bare symbolic relationships between abstract mathematical entities.

Without sense of contradiction, for example, once can today consider a dissolution of the Reichstag 'strictly legal,' even though it is, in fact, a coup d'etat, and, vice versa, a parliamentary dissolution might substantively conform to the spirit of the constitution, and yet not be legal. Such antitheses document the breakdown of a system of legality, which ends in a formalism and functionalism without substance or reference points.