1) Cicero was already using the phrase “cultura animi” [culturing of the mind] to

describe the cultivation of the soul as the development of a philosophical soul in

accordance with Plato’s conception of the highest ideal of man. - Cicero, Marcus T, J
E. King, Marcus T. Cicero, and Marcus T. Cicero. Tusculan Disputations. Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1960. Print. P.273.

2) Hobbes on natural state of man without a political community that pursues a greater
good: “In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is
uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor the use of
commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of
moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of
the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all,
continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short.” - Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Baltimore :Penguin Books, 1968. P.
89.

3) "Hence although men had become less forbearing, and although natural pity had
already undergone some alteration, this period of the development of human faculties,
maintaining a middle position between the indolence of our primitive state and the
petulant activity of our egocentrism, must have been the happiest and most durable
epoch. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least
subject to upheavals and the best for man, and that he must have left it only by virtue
of some fatal chance happening that, for the common good, ought never to have
happened. The example of savages, almost all of whom have been found in this state,
seems to confirm that the human race had been made to remain in it always; that this
state is the veritable youth of the world; and that all the subsequent progress has been
in appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, and in fact toward
the decay of the species." Cranston, Maurice. The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, 1754-1762. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Print. p. 65.
(„Rousseau's "noble savage" stands in direct opposition to the man of culture” – don’t
put this on the hand-out!)
4) Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. - Kant,
Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals: And What Is Enlightenment?
New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959. Print. P.12.

5) „Wir sind im hohen Grade durch Kunst und Wissenschaft cultivirt. Wir sind civilisirt
bis zum Überlästigen, zu allerlei gesellschaftlicher Artigkeit und Anständigkeit. Aber
uns für schon moralisirt zu halten, daran fehlt noch sehr viel. Denn die Idee der
Moralität gehört noch zur Cultur; der Gebrauch dieser Idee aber, welcher nur auf das
Sittenähnliche in der Ehrliebe und der äußeren Anständigkeit hinausläuft, macht blos
die Civilisirung aus“ – KrV

6) „Kultur, der deutsche Inbegriff für geistige Tätigkeit und ihren Ertrag im weltlichen
Felde, ist ein schwer zu übersetzendes Wort. Es deckt sich nicht mit Zivilisation, mit
Kultiviertheit und Bildung oder gar Arbeit. Alle diese Begriffe sind zu nüchtern oder
zu flach, zu formal, bzw. ›westlich‹ oder an eine andere Sphäre gebunden. Ihnen fehlt
das Schwere, die trächtige Fülle, das seelenhafte Pathos, das sich im deutschen
Bewußtsein des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts mit diesem Wort verbindet und seine oft
empathische Verwendung verständlich macht.“ Pleßner

7) “And it is the more absurd to represent savages as continually cutting one another's
throats to indulge their brutality, because this opinion is directly contrary to
experience; the Caribbeans, who have as yet least of all deviated from the state of
nature, being in fact the most peaceable of people in their amours, and the least subject
to jealousy, though they live in a hot climate which seems always to inflame the
passions.” Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778. The Essential Rousseau: The Social
Contract, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,
The Creed of a Savoyard Priest. New York :New American Library, 1974. P.74.

8) Religion is the opium of the people. - Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970. Print. P. 72.
 9) The domestication (the culture) of man does not go deep--where it does go deep it at
once becomes degeneration (type: the Christian). The 'savage' (or, in moral terms, the
evil man) is a return to nature--and in a certain sense his recovery, his cure from
'culture'. - Nietzsche, Friedrich W, Walter Kaufmann, and R J. Hollingdale. The Will
to Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Print. P.495.

10) I believe only in French culture and consider everything in Europe that calls itself
'culture' a misunderstanding, not to speak of German culture. - Nietzsche, Friedrich W,
and Duncan Large. Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007. Print. P.205.

Quine’s thought experiment: A radical interpreter, say a linguist, attempts to learn a foreign
language from scratch. The native speaker points to a rabbit and says “gavagai”. The radical
interpreter might guess that ‘gavagai’ references the demonstrated rabbit, however ‘gavagai’
could reference an innumerable list of other things:

- rabbit on a Monday

- rabbit with a white patch above its left eye

- the presence of a rabbit and the presence of a foreign linguistic combined

- a rabbit with a tree in the background

All the linguist can do is to make a common sense guess that the rabbit is being referenced by
‘gavagai’ and test his hypothesis with further observations of the speech-patterns of the
natives. This means that the linguist won’t ever arrive at a translation of ‘gavagai’ but at a
common-sense interpretation. This problem becomes radicalized when one considers the
possibility of ‘gavagai’ referencing a very common necessary condition of rabbits, e.g.
undetached parts of a rabbit’s body.
 The important conclusion Quine draws from this is that everyone has been that radical
interpreter during the early phases of our language acquisition meaning everyone operates
with indeterminate meaning and interprets rather than translates linguistic signs.

- Quine, Willard Van Orman. Word and Object. Martino Fine Books, 2013. P.26-68.