Quotes from Sebastian Rödl

The literature on Hegel is fond of representing him as someone who had very particular ideas and opinions. That is not only false; Hegel would have found it embarassing.

God is not simply other than our knowledge of Him. It is through God and God alone that we know God. Descartes elaborates this in this way: We know God because he left a mark of Himself in us; this mark is nothing other than our self-consciousness. Knowing God through this mark of His, we know God in every act of reason.

Die Hegelliteratur stellt Hegel gern als jemanden dar, der ganz eigene Ideen und Meinungen hat. Das ist nicht nur falsch; Hegel hätte es peinlich gefunden.

It has been held that, since its essential normativity cannot be accommodated within the natural sciences, we might be forced to throw the concept of action and with it action concepts on the trash heap of outdated theories. With action concepts a logical basis of first person thought disappears. Renouncing action concepts is a form of self-annihilation: logical self-annihilation. It annihilates a source of the power to think and say 'I'.

No Aristotelian ever thought that what strikes me as self-evident cannot fail to be true. If I am enough of an idiot, the most errant nonsense may strike me as self-evident.

We may think the following a prime example of a response to a stimulus: I clap my hands, and the cat shies away, hiding under the sofa. The following is just as good an example: I throw the cat into the fire, and she burns to ashes.' The first is a life-process: it is something that plays a certain role in a cat's life. The second is not: it is a purely physical process which the cat undergoes.

Moral Psychology is a manifestation in the philosophical discipline of ethical nihilism.

Yet, the notion that the self-comprehension that is episteme (Wissenschaft) could result from amalgamating a form of episteme from which the first person is expelled with a form of spiritual activity that is incapable of rigorous conceptual articulation is bizarre.

What is philosophy? Albrecht Wellmer, I say, or John McDowell. This is how I know what philosophy is.

Consciousness of a manifold of subjects lies deeper than any empirical content judged. It is inside the logical concept of judgment, inside the concept of being and truth. As you contradict me, you figure in my consciousness not as an object with determinations. You figure in my consciousness as judgment. Anything I think of you is subordinated to and informed by this conception.