Here are
various quotes by philosophers (mainly) that I don't
necessarily endorse, but which struck me as notable,
entertaining, or otherwise worth recording. There is no
pretense of order here, so apologies for the hodgepodge of
topics and sources.
"The worth of a
metaphysical system can be measured by the number of nonsense
principles and ghostly entities it condones"
-Mario Bunge "Philosophy of Science and Technology" Contemporary
Philosophy 8: Philosophy of Latin America, ed. Floistad, p. 266.
"If you are able to rise to this challenge, if you are able to honestly examine the moral arguments in favor of slavery and genocide (along with the much stronger arguments against them), then you are likely to be either a psychopath or a philosopher. Philosophers are one of the only groups that have been found spontaneously to look for reasons on both sides of a question; they excel at examining ideas 'dispassionately'."
- Haidt and Bjorklund "Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions About Moral Psychology" in Sinnott-Armstrong, ed. Moral Psychology Volume 2, p. 196
"No
thinker has the right to take his own life of reason by
shirking the responsibility of trying to explain whatever
mysteries permeate the world in which he lives and dies. To
say, for example, that the structural ascent from a lower to a
higher manifestation of energy is
a "mysterious" saltus in Nature is to block the road to inquiry. After
all, as Charles Peirce observed, it is precisely the
"mysterious" itself which calls for an explanatory theory. To
declare that the facts themselves, the "leaps" of energy in
this case, are "mysterious" is to make them inexplicable by
definition, thus defeating the very purpose of whatever
hypothesis is proposed. It is, in fact, to miss the whole
point of the function of hypothesis in the field of inquiry,
which is to make as intelligible as possible what otherwise
would remain a great mystery."
-Patrick Romanell, Making
of the Mexican Mind, p. 116.
"Philosophy, when
it is really philosophy and not sophistry or ideology, does
not ponder philosophy. It does not ponder philosophical texts,
excepts as a pedgogical propaedeutic to provide itself with
interpretive categories. Philosophy ponders the
nonphilosophical; the reality."
Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation,
¤
1.1.3.1
"I hate
you all. You leave me writhing to give a decent account of
what you have done for me, and no matter what I say, I am
still going to feel like an ungrateful little weasel."
Sarah Ruden, in the acknowledgements to her
translation of AristophanesÕ Lysistrata, p. ix.
"In
reality, the subject of all our researches is one; we divide
it only so that we may, by separating the difficulties,
resolve them more easily. And so it not infrequently happens
that these established divisions are a hiderance, and that
questions arise which need to be treated by combining the
points of view of several sciences"
- Comte, in Introduction
of Positive Philosophy p. 25-6.
In
Mexico, we are called upon to protect 'national identity' as
an element that is always on the verge of wandering away or
getting lost.
- Carlos Monsiv‡is, "Cultural Relations between
the United States and Mexico" in Common Border, Uncommon
Paths, 115.
Conjectures
on
the cultural consequences of Mexico's economic integration
with the United States-fears of loss of identity and
destruction of individuality, for example-are somewhat belated
and alarmist. The process will take a while and even when it
intensifies, its essential features can already be clearly
seen: The continent, and Mexico, will continue to be
Americanized and, depending on how close or how far a Latin
American country is from high-level technology, the way it
view the world will be modified (who can, in all seriousness,
define what being a Mexican or a Peruvian means?), without
having its fundamental values affected. These values include
the Spanish language, whose vitality and powers of
assimilation do not need government supports that are alien to
the educative process itself.
- Carlos Monsivais, "Cultural
Relations between the United States and Mexico" in Common
Border, Uncommon Paths, 119.
"Who
knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do?
How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a
question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth,
electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether
something is really what you want to do or just some kind of
nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes
place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain
hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't
want to go to Montana. how do I know I really want to go and
it isn't just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it's
just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I
am in Montana and I find out I really didn't want to go there
in the first place. I can't control what happens in my brain,
so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now,
much less Montana next summer? It's all this activity in the
brain and you don't know what's you as a person and what's
some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to
misfire? Isn't that why Tommy Roy killed those people?"
- Heinrich in Don Dellilo's White Noise, pp.45-6.
"But it
is the reverse in philosophy: since it is believed that there
is no issue that cannot be defended from either side, few look
for the truth and many more prowl about for a reputation for
profundity by arrogantly challenging whichever arguments are
the best."
Descartes Meditation on First Philosophy
"Moreover,
it may be part of mature commitments, even of the most
intimate sort, that a measure of perspective beyond the
personal be maintained."
Peter Railton, "Alienation, Consequentialism, Morality"
". . .
for while it is desireable to secure what is good in the case
of an individual, to do so in the case of a people or a state
is something finer and more sublime."
Aristotle, Ethics, Book 1, 1094b
"It is a
mark of the trained mind never to expect more precision in the
treatment of any subject than the nature of that subject
permits."
Aristotle, Ethics, Book 1, 1094b
"Conscious
of their own ignorance, most people are impressed by anyone
who pontificates and says something that is over their heads."
Aristotle, Ethics, Book1, 1095a
"Possibility
is
the destruction of contentment."
G.E.M. Anscombe, "You Can have Sex without Children"
"Philosophy
being
nothing else but the study of wisdom and truth, it may with
reason be expected that those who have spent most time and
pains in it should enjoy a greater clam and serenity of mind,
a greater clearness and evidence of knowledge, and be less
disturbed with doubts and difficulties than other men."
George Berkeley, Introduction to "Principles of Human
Knowledge"
"For
moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is
good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind.
Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and
aversions . . ."
Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan"
"To this
war of every man, against every man, this also is consequent:
that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong,
justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no
common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice."
Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan"
"and the
life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan"
"So that
in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of
quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly,
glory."
Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan"
"For
such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknoweldge
many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more
learned yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as
themselves; for they see their own wit at hand, and other
men's at a distance."
Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan"
"So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination
of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after
power, that ceaseth only in death."
Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan"
"The passions that most of all cause the difference of wit,
are principally, the more or less desire of power, of riches,
of knowledge, and of honour. All of which may be reduced to
the first, that is, desire of power."
Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan"
"He must surely be either very weak, or very little acquainted
with the sciences, who shall reject a truth that is capable of
demonstration, for no other reason but because it is newly
known and contrary to the prejudices of mankind."
George Berkeley, Principle of Human Knowledge
"It is
impossible to refute a system which has never yet been
explained. In such a manner of fighting in the dark, a man
loses his blows in the air and often places them where the
enemy is not present."
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature
"If from
our own concepts we are unable to assert and determine
anything certain, we must not throw the blame upon the object
as concealing itself from us."
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A482/B510
"To
profess to solve all problems and to answer all questions
would be impudent boasting, and would argue such extravagant
self-conceit as at once to forfeit all confidence."
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A476/B504
"Human
reason is by nature architectonic. That is to say, it regards
all our knowledge as belonging to a possible system."
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B502
"The
point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as
not to seem worth stating, and end with something so
paradoxical that no one will believe it."
Betrand Russell, The Monist (1918)
"Possible
worlds
are what they are, and not some other thing."
David Lewis, "Possible Worlds."
"What
matters in survival is survival."
David Lewis, "Survival and Identity"
"Religious
faith
is best understood as trust in the ultimate meaningfulness of
life-that is, the ultimate meaningfulness of the world an of
one's own life, one's own being, as part of and related to, as
embedded in, the world. Religious beliefs, by contrast, are
best understood as religious faith mediated by- understood and
expressed in the medium of-words, whether concretely, in
stories, or abstractly, in concepts and ideas."
Michael Perry, Love and Power
"We
"moderns" (or "postmoderns") would never embrace an outdated,
superseded conception of "science" (of scientific inquiry, of
the methodology of science, and so on), but we often embrace
an outdated and outlandish conception of "religion" (and of
"theology").
Michael Perry, Love and Power
For that
matter I don't know anything that gives me greater pleasure,
or profit either, than talking or listening to philosophy. But
when it comes to ordinary conversation, such as the stuff you
talk about financiers and the money market, well, I find it
pretty tiresome personally, and I feel sorry that my friends
should think they're being very busy when they're really doing
absolutely nothing. Of course, I know your idea of me; you
think I'm just a poor unfortunate, and I shouldn't wonder if
you're right. But then, I don't think that you're unfortunate-
I know you are.
Apollodorus in Plato's Symposium (173c-d)
"It is comfortable
to
be
a
philosopher,
for no one makes demands of philosophers . . . . Today's
philosophers manifest all the vices of the age, above all its
haste, and they rush into writing. They are not ashamed to
teach, even when they are very young."
- Nietzsche, "Philosophy in Hard Times," #53 (1873).
"No
genuinely radical living for the truth is possible in a
university."
Nietzsche . . . letter to Overbeck (date ?)
"Twentieth-century
moral
philosophers
have
sometimes appealed to their and our intuitions; but one of the
things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral
philosophy is that the introduction of the word 'intuition' by
a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone
badly wrong with an argument."
- MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 69
"Philosophy
leaps
ahead on tiny toeholds; hope and intuition lend wings to its
feet. Calculating reason lumbers heavily behind, looking for
better footholds. For reason too wants to reach that alluring
goal which its diving comrade has long since reached."
- Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the
Greek, ¤ 3
"Perhaps
. . . the inwardness of human life is an ontological
absurdity- something which takes itself enormously seriously
but actually has no important role to play."
H. Frankfurt, "Identification and Wholeheartedness"
"For
what purpose,
then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous?"
F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ¤ 354
"In the
end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the
constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything
large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less
important than one might suppose, if only it was a single
taste!"
F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ¤ 290
"We were
friends and have become estranged. but this was right, and we
do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we
had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has
its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate
a feast together, as we did-and then the good ships rested so
quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked
as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal.
But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again
into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall
never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but
fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas
and suns has changed us. That we have to become estranged is
the law above us; by the same token we should also become more
venerable for each other-and the memory of our former
friendship more sacred. There is probably a tremendous but
invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and
goals may be included as small parts of this path; let us rise up to
this thought. but our life is too short and our power of
vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense
of this sublime possibility. -Let us then believe in our star friendship even if
we should be compelled to be earth enemies."
F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ¤ 279.
"the
maxim 'know theself!' addressed to human beings by a god, is
almost malicious.'
F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ¤ 335
"The
general drift of Vitoria's argument is that the quality of the
thing being eaten reflects the quality of the eater. Thus it
is 'better' to eat a cow than cabbage for precisely the same
reason that, as we have seen, it is better to command a woman
than a donkey."
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, p. 88.
"Men do
not consider what we say but what we do- we may philosophize
interminably, but if when the occasion arises we do not
demonstrate with our actions the truth of what we have been
saying, our words will have done more harm than good."
St. John Chrysostom
Other
apart sat on a hill retired
In
thought more elevate, and reason'd high
Of
providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
Fix'd
fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute;
And
found no end, in wand'ring mazes lost.
Milton Paradise Lost, Book I
Demetrius:
'No
one seems to me more miserable than the man who has not been
touched by adversity'
Seneca's
gloss: 'indeed he has not been allowed to test himself; if
everything has gone as he could wish or even better than he
wished, the gods have had a low opinion of him; he has not
been thought to deserve an occasional victory over ill-fortune
. . . God hardens, examines and trains those he loves . . .
Why does God visit bad health and loss of those dear to them
and other troubles on the best of mankind? Because in the army
the most dangerous tasks are assigned to the bravest soldiers
. . . No one who goes out on a dangerous mission says 'the
commander has treated me badly' but 'he has judged me well'.
In the same way those who are ordered to suffer what would
cause the fearful and cowardly to weep should say 'God has
found us worthy men on whom to try what human nature can
bear'" (On Providence IV).
"The
story goes that Zeno was flogging a slave for stealing. 'I was
fated to steal', said the slave. 'And to be flogged', was
Zeno's reply.
Diogenes Laertius 7.23
"For the
Cynic life is a short road to virtue, as Apollodorus says in
his Ethics.
And the wise man will even taste human flesh in special
circumstances. He alone is free, and the base men are slaves;
for freedom is the authority to act on one's own, while
slavery is the privation of [the ability] to act on one's
own."
Diogenes Laertius, 7.121
"For as
long as a purely naturalistic understanding of human life
remains controversial . . . no conception of agency and
responsibility can claim to be neutral among conceptions of
the good. This may seem to imply that, in order to preserve
its neutrality, liberalism should refrain from endorsing any
conception of individual agency or responsibility. However,
even if such abstinence were a conceptual possibility, as it
almost certainly is not, it would have the peculiar effect of
reducing liberalism to silence on the very subject that was
supposed to be its specialty, namely, the nature and moral
importance of the individual human agent."
Sam Scheffler, "Responsibility, Reactive Attitudes, and
Liberalism in Philosophy and Politics," p. 318.
"The
rest of it seemed very plausible, quite in keeping with the
general tone of the work and (as is natural) a bit boring.
Reading it over again, we discovered beneath its rigorous
prose a fundamental vagueness."
Jorge Luis Borges "Tlšn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
"I
myself believe that the great prophet Darwin has done us as
ill a turn as CortŽs did his crew members. Darwin has burned
our ships for us, and I have a strong urge to strangle him."
Angel Floro Costa, quoted in Zea's The
Latin-American Mind, p. 252.
"Students
were
asked at the beginning of the semester, and also at the end,
whether they would return to its owner an envelope they found
that contained $100. The students also were asked whether they
would inform a store about a billing mistake if they had been
sent ten computers but had been billed only for nine. At the beginning of the semester, the economics
students and the astronomy students said they'd perform the
honest action about equally often. The economics and the
astronomy students differed in how they changed during the semester. The
willingness to act dishonestly increased among students in the
economics classes more than it did among those in the
astronomy class. This is evidence that studying economics
inhibits cooperation. Of course, it is a further question
whether economics has this effect by encouraging people to
believe that psychological egoism is true. We think that this
is a plausible guess, since this motivational theory plays a
more prominent role in economics than in any other
discipline."
Sober and Wilson in Unto Others (1998, p.274), reporting on a
study by Frank, Gilovich, and Regan in (1993).
"As is
frequently the case in discussions that are conducted with a
great show of emotion, the down-to-earth interests of certain
groups, whose excitement is entirely concerned with factual
matters and who therefore try to distort the facts, become
quickly and inextricably involved with the untrammeled
inspirations of intellectuals who, on the contrary, are not in
the least interested in facts but treat them merely as a
springboard for "ideas."
Arendt, in postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem
(285).
"What is evil? You have looked on it often, so whatever happens,
remind yourself that you have seen it all before."
Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations,
7.1
"One thing alone troubles me: the thought that I might do what
my true self does not will or that I might do what it wills in
the wrong way or at the wrong time"
Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations,
7.20
"Do not feel
for misanthropes what they feel for mankind."
Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations,
7.65
"It is no longer possible to live your entire life, not even
your adult life, as a philosopher. How far short of philosophy
you fall is plain to others, as it is to yourself. Your life is
flawed, your reputation tainted, and it is no longer possible to
win the glory of being a philosopher. Even your calling in life
militates against it. Having seen these truths wiht your own
eyes, stop worrying about what others may think and be content
to live the rest of your life, as long or short as it may be,
according to the requirements of your nature. know those
requirements well and let nothing pry you from them."
Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations,
8.1
"No one is possessed of such good fortune that he can lie dying without being circled by people rejoicing at his imminent demise. Was he high-minded and wise? Then you can be sure that omoene will be muttering to himself, "Now we can breathe easy again with that schoolmaster out of the way. Although he was never hrash with any of us, I always felt he was silently judging us." So much for the virtuous man's reward. As for the rest of us, think of all the good reasons we have given our friends to be happy to be rid of us."
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 10.36.
"You can't master the arts of reading and writing until you've studied them. This applies even more to those who would master the art of living."
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.29
"But without a mind, man is
no longer able to be the master of himself, to understand
exactly what is expected of him, to judge the evidence of
his senses, to know when it's time to quit this life,
or in other words, to make any of those calculations that
require an intellect in reasonably good working order. We
must get on with our lives, then, not only because we are
closing on death with each passing day, but because our
mental capacities may desert us before death decides to take
us."
- Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations, 3.1
"Treat
with utmost respect your power of forming opinions, for this
power alone guards you against making assumptions that are
contrary to nature and judgments that overthrow the rule of
reason."
- Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations,
3.9
"Never
act without purpose and resolve, or without the means to
finish the job."
- Marcus
Aurelius, Meditations,
4.2
"Philosophy always buries
its undertakers."
Etienne Gilson (1949)