Quotes About Philosophy

Normative Economics is like religion without the aesthetics.

There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell them. As the great philosopher of uncertainty Yogi berra once said, Don't waste your time trying to fight forecasters, stock analysts, economists and social scientists, except to play pranks on them.

Seneca's version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside.

you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

Ex cura theoria nascitur.

The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy. …

Mathematicians think in symbols, physicists in objects, philosophers in concepts, geometers in images, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators, writers in impressions, and idiots in words.

you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant

Wittgenstein is occasionally mentioned (you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant).

Atheism or materialism means treating the dead as if they were unborn, I won't.

Huet presents arguments against causality that are quite potent—he states, for instance, that any event can have an infinity of possible causes.

an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the

once asked Einstein if he carried a notebook to write down ideas. "I never have ideas" was the reply

La persona a quien se atribuye la difusión de esta idea del semiescepticismo tendencioso es sir Doktor Professor Karl Raimund Popper, posiblemente el único filósofo de la ciencia a quien leen y de quien hablan los actores del mundo real (aunque es posible que los filósofos profesionales no lo hagan con tanto entusiasmo).

I count myself one of those).

Friedrich Nietzsche got the point: Sympathy for all would be tyranny for thee, my good neighbor.

He would be forced to act as a satisficer instead of a maximizer

is neither meaningful nor relevant.

For those readers who wonder about the difference between Buddhism and Stoicism, I have a simple answer. A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says "f*** you" to fate.

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances.

focusing on the rationality of a belief rather than its consequences

Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Lucian, or the poets: Juvenal, Horace, or the later French so-called "moralists" (La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, La Bruyère, Chamfort). Bossuet is a class on his own. One can use Montaigne and Erasmus as a portal to the ancients: Montaigne was the popularizer of his day; Erasmus was the thorough compiler.

Judging people by their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as the "rationality" of a belief, there is rationality of action. The rationality of an action can be judged only in terms of evolutionary considerations.

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do.