Quotes from Anthony Pagden

Philosophy itself should not be merely "the pursuit of the knowledge of the truth" but should offer a practical guide for ordinary people in their everyday lives.

human nature" had, of course, been going on for some time. The earliest examples of "natural men" had been the American Indians. It had been they who had provided Montaigne with much of the material he had used to cast doubt on the civility and humanity of his Christian contemporaries, both Catholic and Protestant, and to suggest that, after all, "barbarian" might be nothing more than a word we use to describe what is unfamiliar to us.

Christianity—which for so long had kept their cringing adherents trapped in a state of "slavery without hope and a perpetual infancy," would finally be revealed for the lies, tricks, and deceits that they were.

It was, after all, Voltaire who was reputed to be the source of the famous quip that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him, if only because, so long as his wife, his tailor, his lawyer, and his servants could be persuaded to believe in the threat of punishment in an afterlife, "I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often."49

Chinese were not simply great craftsmen and ingenious designers, they were also a deeply moral people. Ethics was their true strength, and theirs was an ethics that crucially eschewed metaphysical or theological speculation and adhered to education and conversation.

Whatever else we may also be discussing, "enlightenment" was a concern with the understanding of the historical evolution of the human mind.

One can define this virtue," he wrote, "as love of the laws and of the homeland [patrie].

The trouble with this, in MacIntyre's opinion, was that all the insistence on the primacy of reason and of "rational debate" had ever achieved was to have erased from men's minds what, since Aristotle, had been the main support for their entire moral, intellectual, and political lives: the concept of virtue. And it had given them nothing in return. Their intellectual "light" was, in fact, nothing other than moral darkness.