Passions and Tempers

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First annotation on Sep 19th, 2025.

Today we understand the natural world and the human body in much greater detail than in the past; but there remains much that we do not know. This book concerns itself primarily with our capacity to make mistakes even when our questions are right: its premise is that all theories about how the world works are revealing, in the way that children's questions about the world are revealing. In a sense, we are all children in our relation to scientific information. Whether today, in fifteenth-century Florence, or in fifth-century-BC Greece, we need commonsense explanations, regardless of whether or not they are provable, or true.