Quotes from Simon Blackburn

The absolutist takes himself to read nature in her very own language, but the relativist insists that nature does not speak, and we hear only what we have elected to hear.

When the hoary old question of nature versus nurture comes around, sides form quickly.

A god that created the world and then walked off the site leaving it to its own devices is not a fit object of worship, nor a source of moral authority.

Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility.

Respect, of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way to garden.

The scientific world is to be less threatening than was feared. It is to made safe for human beings. And the way to make it safe is to reflect on the foundation of knowledge.

it seems as though Descartes (once more influenced by ideas from previous philosophical traditions) may have slipped into thinking that an idea of X actually shares X. So an idea of infinity, for instance, would be an infinite idea.

We thus combine unreasonable optimism about what people might be like, with unreasonable hatred of them when they are not like that (pp269)

getting clear about the right categories with which to understand human motivation, is an important practical task.

our ideas and concepts can be compared with the lenses through which we see the world. In philosophy the lens is itself the topic of study. Success will be a matter not of how much you know at the end, but of what you can do when the going gets tough: when the seas of argument rise, and confusion breaks out. Success will mean taking seriously the implications of ideas. WHAT IS THE POINT?

Reflection enables us to step back, to see our perspective on a situation as perhaps distorted or blind, at the very least to see if there is argument for preferring our ways, or whether it is just subjective.

We must inspect each part, and we have to do so while relying on other parts. But the result of that inspection may, if we are coherent and imaginative, be perfectly seaworthy.

Goya's full motto for his etching is, 'Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.

It is one thing to be the common-or-garden villain who says, I don't care if I have wronged you by breaking my word or stealing your goods. But it is another to achieve the rather extraordinary pitch of villainy, which says, I don't even recognize that you have a complaint. A society in which people are incapable of recognizing others as having a complaint, whatever they do, would be one without an ethic - but for that very reason, it would be hard to recognize it as a society at all.

literature is but the shadow of good talk

seperate morality from its effects, and you will see that everyone regards ias a nuisance, an annoying brake on their freedom of action.

belief is to knowledge as shadow is to original

What do we mean when we ask what the point is? Reflection bakes no bread, but then neither does architecture, music, art, history, or literature.

Que sais-je?'—what do I know?

what Russell called a 'logical construction out of aggregates of facts. (This does not mean that all statements about the average are sensible or useful: as has been said, the average person has one testicle and one breast.)

Leibniz thought that if we had a sufficiently logical notation, dispute and confusion would cease, and men would sit together and resolve their disputes by calculation.

consider the many ways of failing that await the poet who makes his or her own consciousness of emotions into the subject of a poem, instead of the emotion itself.

For he has found that even his senses deceive him, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once. He puts to himself the objection that only madmen (who say that they are dressed in purple when they are naked, or that their heads are made of earthenware, or that they are pumpkins or made of glass -- madmen were evidently pretty colorful in the seventeenth century) deny the very obvious evidence of their senses.

Why does causation run always from past to future, or does it make sense to think that the future might influence the past?