Quotes About Philosophy

So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.

And then but so what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?

The reality is that dying isn't bad, but it takes forever.

Respecting infinite sets, for example, Intuitionism is rabidly anti-Cantor and Formalism staunchly pro-Cantor, even though both Formalism and Intuitionism are anti-Plato and Cantor is a diehard Platonist. Which, migrainous or not, means we're back to metaphysics: the modern wrangle over math's procedures is ultimately a dispute over the ontological status of math entities.

Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts. Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things?

The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it's also wrong. Better

So while a thing in a finite time cannot come in contact with things quantitatively infinite, it can come in contact with things infinite in respect of divisibility: for in this sense the time itself is also infinite.

For the record, Parmenides' metaphysics-which is even wilder than the D.B.P's, and in retrospect seems more like Eastern religion than Western philosophy-is describable as a kind of static monism, and Zeno's paradoxes (of which there are really more than four) are accordingly directed against the reality of (1) plurality and (2) continuity. For present purposes we are concerned with (2), which for Zeno takes the form, as Russell mentions, of regular physical motion.

David Foster Wallace

I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption.

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

But what G. Cantor posits as the defining formal property of an infinite set is that such a set can be put in a 1-1C with at least one of its proper subsets. Which is to say that an infinite set can have the same cardinal number as its proper subset, as in Galileo's infinite set of all positive integers and that set's proper subset of all perfect squares, which latter is itself an infinite set.

Specifically, Aristotle claims that no spatial extension (e.g. the intercurb interval AB) is 'actually infinite,' but that all such extensions are 'potentially infinite' in the sense of being infinitely divisible.

Like most religious mathematicians from Pythagoras to Godel, Bolzano believes that math is the Language of God and that profound metaphysical truths can be derived and proved mathematically.

But if we can't think ourselves, ... that means we, ourselves, are things that can't think themselves, and so are the proper objects for our thought; we fulfill the game's condition, we are ourselves Other. So if we can think ourselves, we can't; and if we can't; we can. KABLAM, ... There go the old crania.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS NATURE'S NIGHTMARE

David Foster Wallace

What Mark Nechtr fears most: solipsistic solipsism: silence.

This is reality in a universe without God: there is no hope; there is no purpose. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot's haunting lines: This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. What is true of mankind as a whole is true of each of us individually: we are here to no purpose. If there is no God, then our life is not fundamentally different from that of a dog.

God exists necessarily and is the explanation why anything else exists.

If God is dead, then man is dead too.

I am not offering God as a theory to compete with scientific theories about the universe. Rather I am saying that those self-contained, secular theories provide evidence for theologically neutral premises in philosophical arguments leading to a conclusion that has theistic significance.

What sort of God would put us here in this goddamned, stinking slaughterhouse of a world?