Quotes About Philosophy

human material existence is limited by ideas, not by stuff.

When asked what consciousness is, we have no better answer than Louis Armstrong's when a reporter asked him what jazz is: "Lady, if you have to ask, you'll never know.

The philosophers Liam Clegg and Daniel Dennett have argued that human behavior is inherently unpredictable not just because of random neural noise in the brain but as an adaptation that makes it harder for our rivals to outguess us.

Echoing a famous argument by the philosopher Karl Popper, most scientists today insist that the dividing line between science and pseudoscience is whether advocates of a hypothesis deliberately search for evidence that could falsify it and accept the hypothesis only if it survives.

Attempts to explain behavior in mechanistic terms are commonly denounced as "reductionist" or "determinist." The denouncers rarely know exactly what they mean by those words, but everyone knows they refer to something bad.

The final problem is called overdetermination (or, sometimes, multiple sufficient causes). Consider a firing squad that dispatches the condemned man with perfectly synchronized shots. If the first shooter had not fired, the prisoner would still be dead, so under the counterfactual theory his shot didn't cause the death. But the same is true of the second shooter, the third, and so on, with the result that none of them can be said to have caused the prisoner's death. But that is just crazy.

Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary contains the following entry: Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. The embarrassments for Hume's two theories of causation (conjunction and counterfactuals) can be diagrammed as a family of networks in which the lines fan in or out or loop around, as in the diagram on the following page.

Rousseau, who replaced the Christian notion of original sin with the romantic notion of original innocence. In his 1762 treatise Émile, or On Education, Rousseau wrote, "Everything is good as it leaves the hand of the Author of things, and everything degenerates in the hands of man.

Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.

A medida que los países se vuelven más inteligentes, se alejan de Dios.

In his book The Expanding Circle, the philosopher Peter Singer has argued that over the course of history, people have enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value as they value their own.

concocting a statement that you have trouble believing in the first place (such as "A herring is a mammal"), and then negating it, requires two bouts of cognitive heavy lifting rather than one.

Humanism may seem bland and unexceptionable—who could be against human flourishing? But in fact it is a distinctive moral commitment, one that does not come naturally to the human mind.

economist Friedrich Hayek observed, "If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations

Voltaire's Candide who asserts that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

reason, by itself, is just a means of getting from one true proposition to the next and does not care about the value of those propositions.

Now, if concepts are undefinable, that means they aren't built out of more elementary concepts, which means they must themselves be elementary concepts, which means they must be innate.

Como escribió Montesquieu: «Si los triángulos tuvieran un dios, le darían tres lados».)

If p or q is true, and p is false, then q is true." They just wouldn't be part of the word's meaning.

In the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth, self-contained communes based on a philosophy of communal sharing sprang up throughout the United States. All of them collapsed from internal tensions, the ones guided by socialist ideology after a median of two years, the ones guided by religious ideology after a median of twenty years.

Si uno ensalza la razón, entonces lo que importa es la integridad de los pensamientos, no las personalidades de los pensadores.

What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

That is why when the stars are out they are visible but when the lights are out they are invisible and why it is that when I wind up my watch it starts, but when I wind up this poem it ends.