Quotes from Simon Blackburn

Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.

Freedom is a dangerous word, just because it is an inspirational one.

To process thoughts well is a matter of being able to avoid confusion, detect ambiguities, keep things in mind one at a time, make reliable arguments, become aware of alternatives, and so on.

Reflection opens the avenue to criticism, and the folkways may not like criticism. In this way, ideologies become closed circles, primed to feel outraged by the questioning mind.

We can check on what people say by seeing what they do.

Science similarly contains within itself the devices for correcting the illusions of science. That is its crowning glory. When we come upon intellectual endeavours that contain no such devices—one might cite psychoanalysis, grand political theories, 'new age' science, creationist science—we need not be interested.

the unexamined life is not worth living. It has insisted on the power of rational reflection to winnow out bad elements in our practices, and to replace them with better ones.

So the middle-ground answer reminds us that reflection is continuous with practice, and our practice can go worse or better according to the value of our reflections.

I cannot climb out onto the nature of your mind. So how then do I know anything about your mental life? How do I know, for instance, that you see the colour blue the way that I do? Might it be that some of us feel pain more, but make less fuss about it, or that others feel pain less, but make more fuss?

Reflection matters because it is continuous with practice. How you think about what you are doing affects how you do it, or whether you do it at all.

The time we take out, whether it is to do mathematics or music, or to read Plato or Jane Austen, is time to be cherished.

A system of thought is something we live in, just as much as a house, and if our intellectual house is cramped and confined, we need to know what better structures are possible. The

Those who can make you believe absurdities,' said Voltaire, 'can make you commit atrocities.' By contrast, my caution cannot do any such thing.

There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.

Broadminded though we take ourselves to be, lust gets a bad press. It is the fly in the ointment, the black sheep of the family, the ill- bred, trashy cousin of upstanding members like love and friendship.

So the middle-ground answer reminds us that reflection is continuous with practice, and our practice can go worse or better according to the value of our reflections. A system of thought is something we live in, just as much as a house, and if our intellectual house is cramped and confined, we need to know what better structures are possible

We are no more than taking a philosophical stroll in the park, here and there stopping to point out an interesting view. The park is not a paradise. Weeds grow, serpents lie in wait, and people have built slums over parts of it. But we do not have to inhabit them, if we are careful.

Our concepts or ideas form the mental housing in which we live. We may end up proud of the structures we have built. Or we may believe that they need dismantling and starting afresh. But first, we have to know what they are.

Human beings can grow to make killing fields, and they can grow to make gardens.

The absolutist takes himself to speak to the ages, with the tongue of angels, but the relativist hears only one version among others, the subjectivity of the here and now.

In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual.

Induction is the process of taking things within our experience to be representative of the world outside our experience. It is a process of projection or extrapolation.