Thought about concrete particulars is ultimately grounded in acquaintance, albeit acquaintance with sense data, while being descriptive.
For Russell, while there are thoughts about particulars that are wholly qualitative and wholly general, the paradigm form our thought about external reality takes is ultimately grounded in acquaintance, albeit acquaintance with sense data as opposed to extra-mental reality itself.
At its best, a liberal education is cultivated curiosity, tolerance for alternative points of view, humility in response to deeply challenging questions, ingenuity in making connections across disparate disciplines, and independence of thought anchored in an acquaintance with the enduring mysteries of the human condition.
Even if there is no object between a chair and a table, the space between them is composed of other spaces, and in virtue of this we can compare different spaces or distances quantitatively; in contrast, acquaintance with something is not composed of further relations, and so different relations of acquaintance cannot be compared quantitatively in a parallel way.
Early in his acquaintance with Johnson he was advised by the Doctor "to keep a journal of my [Boswell's] life, full and unreserved".
He waited for a moment — genuinely apprehensive, I thought, for the first time in my acquaintance with him — and then a huge smile, almost a big-lug smile, broke across his face.
Houellebecq, after studying at the National Institute of Agronomy, spent eleven years debugging computers for the French government; he differs from most contemporary romancers in his acquaintance with office work, its applied technology and edgy relationships.
The party took place early in my acquaintance with Salle, and this fragment of conversation was a sort of overture to talks I later had with him about his sense of himself as a bad boy of art and about his inability to stop picking at the sore of his own bad reviews.
Gaffes aside, Biden's real-world credibility has been acutely grounded in his acquaintance with loss, and his willingness to talk about it so openly and in a way that is less "Look at what happened to me" and more "I know your pain".
