Anticipation is another gift for travelers in unfamiliar territory. It quickens the spirit. The contemplation of the unseen world; imagination piqued in consideration of animals.

Terry Tempest Williams, An Unspoken Hunger

While our ancestors charted their own path, they kept coming back for trysts with the apes. Human and ape DNA show signs of a million-year-long hybridization phase, not unlike the continued interbreeding today between grizzlies and polar bears or wolves and coyotes.

Frans de Waal, Different

Classic scholars are those who look upon events in terms of their constituent parts. Step by step they single out important units and elements until they can formulate abstract, general laws. One outcome of this approach is the reduction of living reality with all its richness of detail to abstract schemas. The properties of the living whole are lost, which provoked Goethe to pen, “Gray is all theory; green grows the golden tree of life.”

Romantics in science want neither to split living reality into its elementary components nor to represent the wealth of life’s concrete events in abstract models that lose the properties of the phenomena themselves. It is of the utmost importance to romantics to preserve the wealth of living reality, and they aspire to a science that retains this richness.

AR Luria, Making Of Mind

The general explanation given for why the Greeks, rather than some other people, invented logic, is that a society in which debate plays a prominent role will begin to recognize which arguments are flawed by definition because their structure results in a contradiction. The basic rules of logic were worked out by Aristotle, who is said to have invented logic because he was annoyed at hearing bad arguments in the political assembly and in the agora.

Logic is applied by stripping away the meaning of statements and leaving only their formal structure intact. This makes it easier to see whether an argument is valid or not.

On the other hand, Greek logic may have presented as many obstacles as opportunities. For example, the Greeks never developed the concept of zero, which is required for algebra. Zero was considered by the Greeks, but rejected on the grounds that it represented a contradiction.

Zero equals nonbeing and nonbeing cannot be!

In place of logic, the Chinese developed a type of dialectic. Whereas the ultimate aim of Greek logic is to resolve contradiction, the Chinese dialectic instead uses contradiction to understand relations among objects or events, to transcend or integrate apparent oppositions, or even to embrace clashing but instructive viewpoints.

In the spirit of the Tao or yin-yang principle, A can actually imply that not-A is also the case, or at any rate soon will be the case.

Dialectical thought is in some ways the opposite of logical thought. It seeks not to decontextualize but to see things in their appropriate contexts. Events do not occur in isolation from other events, but are always embedded in a meaningful whole in which the elements are constantly changing and rearranging themselves.

To think about an object or event in isolation and apply abstract rules to it is to invite extreme and mistaken conclusions.

Goal Of Reasoning: Find Middle Way

Richard Nisbett, Geography Of Thought