Quotes About Philosophy

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

For the intellectual, material comforts are relatively unimportant.

But no one who has not wrestled with Communism as a philosophy, and Communists as political opponents, can really understand the values of Western democracy. The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one.

Keynes was patrician in outlook. He suspected that liberty was incompatible with equality, and had a sharp preference for liberty over the chimera of equality.

wir [müssen] begreifen, dass es in unserem Leben letztlich auf das Sein ankommt und nicht darauf zu erhoffen, dass das Werden ein besseres Sein ist, als die Gegenwart.

Gott als persönlicher Urheber und Lenker des Menschen war tot. Und die Naturwissenschaften feierten ihren Siegeszug mit einem neuen sehr nüchternen Bild des Menschen: Das Interesse an Affen wurde größ­er als das an Gott.

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Come insegna Seneca ammaestrando i suoi discepoli, l'ozio senza le lettere è la morte e la tomba dell'uomo mentre ancora vive; così, per la ragione opposta, ne deduciamo che la frequentazione delle lettere e dei libri è per l'uomo la vita.

Aristotle got tired of hearing lousy arguments in the marketplace and the assembly. So he decided to develop reasoning templates to apply to arguments in order to analyze them for validity.

Augustine of Hippo, the future saint, would later become a Manichean and remain one for most of his young manhood.

Almost all arguments for skepticism make reference to seemingly ridiculous possibilities—we are being deceived by an evil demon, life is just a dream, we are brains in vats. You might propose psychoanalysis, rather than philosophical reflection, for anyone who worries about these possibilities.

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not.

Billions of people don't practice a religion at all.

Os gregos substituíram o Yang e o Yin por humores. O sangue, o muco, a bile amarela e a negra, a saúde dependia da harmonia disso tudo num dado momento. O médico mais importante era Galeno (c. 132-200 d.C.). Ele era um homem autoritário, com resposta pra tudo e, desse modo, estabeleceu o padrão e personalidade para nossa profissão.

Greene felt that a disaster had set in for the English novel after the death of Henry James; whereas traditional novelists had always conceived of their characters as being somehow under the eye of God, where their actions had an eternal consequence, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster had produced characters who seemed nothing more than the sum of their drifting perceptions. This is a problem philosophers have worried about since the days of John Locke,

So, Spinoza went off, not as a victim or a pariah but as an independent Portuguese person living in Amsterdam. In so doing, he became one of the first people to live outside of any religious affiliation.

Spinoza was introduced to the Quaker leader in the Netherlands, William Ames, and was described by Peter Serrarius as a "Jew who by the Jews hath been cast out.

The distinguished economist and philosopher Amartya Sen famously called people who always give nothing in this game rational fools for blindly following only material self-interest: "The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron. Economic theory has been much preoccupied with this rational fool.

Choice architecture in domains from human resource departments to social security to health care must use some combination of curation and navigation tools. If they don't, people will flounder. As we have mentioned, some people have a simple philosophy: Just Maximize Choices. That's not always a bad idea, but it can be problematic without sophisticated choice architecture tools. Instead, a well-curated small selection and/or a good default can produce quite satisfactory outcomes.

Very few of us in our saner moments believe that the particular postulates that some logicians have dreamed up create the numbers - no, most of us believe that the real numbers are simply there and that it has been an interesting, amusing, and important game to try to find a nice set of postulates to account for them.