Quotes About Philosophy

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Focus on is for a moment. The nature of is still "is" even if nothing exists. If everything is destroyed, is remains. How can is go anywhere? There is nowhere to go. The nature of is is Nothing. The nature of is is absolute. If you identify with is then nothing can come or go. There is nothing that needs to be or not be.

In contrast to the modern view that religious doubt is something to reject, fear or merely tolerate, doubt not only can be seen as an inevitable aspect of our humanity but also can be celebrated as a vital part of faith. Doubt has often been disparaged, or merely tolerated, because it is seen as leading to an inert state of undecidability in which nothing can be believed or acted upon. Yet in reality it is only in the midst of undecidability that real decisions can be made.

the a/ theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing in God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes about God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain).

Leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual, and all things in the world of being and non-being, that thou mayest arise by unknowing towards the union, as far as it is attainable, with him who transcends all being and all knowledge.

Therefore, Lord, you are not merely that than which a greater cannot be thought; you are something greater than can be thought. For since it is possible to think that such a being exists, then if you are not that being, it is possible to think something greater than you. But that is impossible.

For Anselm there are three levels of existence. The first, and lowest, level is that which exists only in the mind (for instance, a unicorn). The second refers to those things that exist both in the mind and in reality (such as a horse). The third level is that which exists in reality but which cannot be contained in the mind (i.e. God). It is this third level of existence that has often been overlooked by the Church, and yet it is here that we find God.

When the truth affirmed by Christianity is thought of as constituting a series of factual claims open to being assessed by intellectual experts, Christianity opens itself up to a corrosive form of doubt that threatens to destroy it. Later I shall be exploring the deep importance of doubt in the life of faith. However, this importance can only be understood if we think of the truth affirmed by Christianity in a way that is freed from the realm of objectivity.

There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed.

That's a central part of philosophy, of ethics. What do I owe to strangers? What do I owe to my family? What is it to live a good life? Those are questions which we face as individuals.

If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?

The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.

Alors que ce mauvais siècle approche de sa fin, le pressentiment se répand que l'idée de faire histoire n'était qu'un prétexte. Le sujet décisif de la modernité, c'est de faire nature.

Of a techno-human culture that wants to be more than a successful barbarism, two things above all are required: psychological cultural formation and the cultural capacity for translation. Mathematicians must become poets, cyberneticists must become philosophers of religion, doctors must become composers, computer scientists must become shamans. Was humanity ever something other than the art of managing transitions?

A philosopher is one who, as an athlete of totality, is laden with the weight of the world. The essence of philosophy as a form of living is philponia — friendship with the entirety of weighty and worth things. The love of wisdom and the love of the weight of the one whole are unified.

portrait of the theoretician as a young man. His first distinguishing feature is the serenity of indirect defeatism. Although he belongs to a collective of losers

The human being does not hop out of the magician's hat in the way that the ape climbs down from the tree; he also does not emerge from the hand of a creator who surveys everything in advance with his foreknowledge. He is the product of a production that is not itself a human being. The human being was not yet what he would become before he became it.

Ecstasy, as philosophy understands it, is not a phenomenon of light-headedness that interests psychologists or chemists, but the way in which the being represents itself as tenseness in an Elsewhere

P]eople keep believing everywhere else, but in our society we have glorified disillusionment. Indeed, why should Europeans be the only ones on a metaphysical diet when the rest of the world continues to dine unperturbed at the richly decked tables of illusion?

Talvez, por menos oportuno que possa parecer, se devesse dizer mais uma vez: no mundo que sucedeu à graça, a arte foi o asilo das exceções que restaram.

In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.

In fact, by founding the Academy in the year 387 BC, Plato was envisaging a practical pattern of life in retreat that he had encountered shortly before on his first Sicilian journey. Near the city of Kroton (now called Crotone) in southern Italy, he had come upon a commune of hermits doing theory who were followers of the savant Pythagoras, a man of whom it was not known whether he was still a shaman or had already become a mathematician or was both at once.

Not until Plato's Republic was a type of politician created who would no longer serve as a loudspeaker, but rather as a receiver of quiet ideas – with little success, as we know, as the introduction of the quiet politician is yet to come. It would be a contradiction in terms, for politics, as the art of what is possible in noise, remains assigned to the loud side of the phonotope