Quotes from Massimo Pigliucci

Of all existing things some are in our power, and others are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everything which is our own doing. Things not in our power include the body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, everything which is not our own doing." Epictetus, Enchiridion, 1

Of all existing things some are in our power, and others are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everything which is our own doing. Things not in our power include the body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, everything which is not our own doing." Epictetus, Enchiridion,

The basic idea of the new philosophy was that in order to figure out how to live a life worth living, a eudaimonic life, as both modern philosophers and psychologists still refer to it, we have to master two things: we need to develop a decent understanding of how the world works, so not to engage in wishful thinking and waste a lot of time and resources; and we need to reason as well as we can about things, or we risk arriving at the wrong conclusions as to what to do and how.

Between the poles of individualism and community, freedom and constraint, pragmatism emerged as a genuinely American philosophical outlook—and as a way of life.

There are two crucial ideas underlying Stoicism, and they each correspond to one major promise the philosophy holds for its practitioners. The first crucial idea is that life is fundamentally about being a morally good person, which is achieved through the continuous practice of four cardinal virtues. The second idea is the so-called dichotomy of control, the notion that some things are "up to us," as the Stoics say, and other things are not.

Epictetus claims that all three of these things (thoughts, impulses, and the will to avoid and to get) are ultimately under our control.

To a Stoic, it ultimately does not matter if we think the Logos is God or Nature, as long as we recognize that a decent human life is about the cultivation of one's character and concern for other people (and even for Nature itself) and is best enjoyed by way of a proper—but not fanatical—detachment from mere worldly goods.

These and similar examples are easy enough to uncover, and they make two crucial points: first, good science does not require experiments, it can be done with an intelligent use of observational evidence; second, there is more than one way to do science, depending on the nature of the questions and the methods typical of the field.

Stoics shifted the emphasis very much toward the social, essentially arguing that the point of life for human beings is to use reason to build the best society that it is humanly possible to build.

One of the first lessons from Stoicism, then, is to focus our attention and efforts where we have the most power and then let the universe run as it will. This will save us both a lot of energy and a lot of worry.

Such Christian frameworks of meaning encourage a positive expectation on the part of believers that something may be learned and gained through illness and suffering.

Para decidir cuál es la mejor forma de vivir (ética), hay que entender cómo funciona el mundo (física) y razonar adecuadamente sobre ello (lógica).

Through inhabiting the Christian narrative, we come to see ourselves, as the medieval writer Julian of Norwich famously put it, as being enfolded in the love of Christ, which brings us a new security, identity, and value. Our self-worth is grounded in being loved by God.

In contrast, Confucians hold that we should show compassion to all human beings, but we have special obligations to certain individuals because of the specific relationships we have with them, relationships that make us who we are—family, community, and friendship. So part of the justification for differentiated care is the special debts we acquire through the relationships that help define us.

What these cases of success in the hard sciences have in common is that they really do lend themselves to a straightforward logical analysis: there is a limited number of options, and they are mutually exclusive. Just like logical trees work very well in classic Aristotelian logic (where the only values that can be attached to a proposition are true or false), so strong inference works well with a certain type of scientific question.

So is there a better way of framing our identity? Part of the Christian answer to this question focuses on a relationship with God that affirms, whatever else we are, we are loved by God and individually known to God by name. We find identity, meaning, and value within the context of this relationship.

No sé si realizaré progresos; pero prefiero la falta de éxito a la falta de fe».[14]

Shaping your character is ultimately the only thing under your control.

It is instructive to note that different cultures "discovered" completely different constellations in the sky, a fact that is more consistent with the idea that constellations are a whimsical projection of the human mind than a reflection of astronomic reality.

Popper rightly believed that the public-not just scientists or philosophers-needs to understand and appreciate that distinction, because science is too powerful and important, and pseudoscience too common and damaging, for an open society to afford ignorance on the matter.

for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

That framework is the idea that in order to live a good (in the sense of eudaimonic) life, one has to understand two things: the nature of the world (and by extension, one's place in it) and the nature of human reasoning (including when it fails, as it so often does).

The eudaimonic life, for Aristotle, is one in which we have lived to the fullness of our potential; developed our distinctive capacities to their finest points; and accomplished in the world what we have set out to do.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.-Adam Smith