Quotes from David Edmonds

When you play Bobby, it is not a question of whether you win or lose. It is a question of whether you survive. —BORIS SPASSKY

Bentham maintained that what mattered about an action was how much pleasure it produced and how much pain was avoided. He enjoined us always to act so as to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters."5

I think that success in life is largely a matter of luck. It has little correlation with merit, and in all fields of life there have been many people of great merit who did not succeed – Popper

Deontology states that there are certain things, like torture, that you just shouldn't do.

Most people seem to believe that not only is it permissible to turn the train down the spur, it is actually required—morally obligatory.

Subjectivism maintains that there are no objective moral truths.

What I am concerned about is when tolerance is raised to a political principle and used as a substitute for discourses of justice, equality, or even freedom. What I am suggesting is that when it is raised to the level of a political principle of that sort, it usually cloaks the kinds of powers that are at issue.

threnody through the postmortem

Rousseau's constant influence on later generations is indubitable (though not always positive). He can be seen as father of the Romantic movement (and even a great-grandfather of the Green movement). The Romantics were inspired by his confirmation of the worth of each and every one of us, however ordinary, by his emphasis on equality, on knowledge of the inner self, and on a spiritual connection with nature, as well as by his imagination and the depth of his feelings.

Jews were the standard-bearers of the Austrian idea of unity.' A poignant though probably apocryphal tale is of a group of Austro-Hungarian Army officers casting earth into the grave of a fellow soldier: each does it in the name of his own nationality – Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish. Only the Jewish officer speaks for Austria.

His face was broad and fat, his mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility. His eyes vacant and spiritless, and the corpulence of his whole person was far better fitted to communicate the idea of a turtle-eating alderman than of a refined philosopher. His speech in English was rendered ridiculous by the broadest Scottish accent, and his French was, if possible, still more laughable.

On the whole, their message to their students remained steady: that science was good and metaphysics was bad. As Neurath put it to Feigl in 1938, "what we have in common will remain; as products of their time, the differences will fade.

One has to read Heidegger in the original to see what a swindler he was," said Popper. His philosophy was "empty verbiage put together in statements which are absolutely empty."19 On this even Carnap—not Popper's biggest fan—concurred.

Tolerance isn't just a discourse of power, it is also a discourse of conditionality; that is to say, you will be tolerated unless and until you behave in certain ways, at which point I will no longer tolerate you.

I do not believe in race; I abhor any form of racialism or nationalism; and I never belonged to the Jewish faith. Thus I do not see on what grounds I could possibly consider myself as a Jew. I do sympathize with minorities; but although this has made me stress my Jewish origin, I do not consider myself a Jew.

But racial pride is not only stupid but wrong, even if provoked by racial hatred. All nationalism or racialism is evil, and Jewish nationalism is no exception.

Why do we classify all the mental things together as the mental at all? I think action is mental because it's intentional, in the sense that it's directed on to something other than itself. So when you act, when you go to buy yourself a coffee, you're aiming at something beyond yourself, namely the result of getting a coffee.

Now that sense of intellectual urgency has dissipated. Tolerance, relativism, the postmodern refusal to commit, the cultural triumph of uncertainty – all these rule out a repeat of the pyrotechnics in H3. Perhaps, too, there is currently so much specialization, and so many movements and fissures within higher education, that the important questions have been lost.

the idea is that the infinite doesn't stand opposed to anything else—it is all-inclusive—while on the other hand, precisely what that is, is a way of contrasting the infinite with the finite. By definition, you can't contrast the infinite with the finite, although that's exactly what you want to do.