Quotes About Philosophy

When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.

Kant does not seem to envisage that we are torn between two courses of action for moral reasons. He makes no provisions for genuine moral dilemmas, where no option is unambiguously right or all options are equally problematic.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant makes it quite clear that sympathetic feelings are often welcome, amiable, desirable, beautiful. They can under certain conditions be good objectively, all things considered. But they are not morally good (V 82.18–25). A happy, well-rounded character is an ideal that lies beyond the sphere of Kant's conception of morality.

In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone he goes so far as to claim that conscientious moral judgement cannot err. The voice of conscience, which is our internal moral judge, can serve as a 'guiding thread' (Leitfaden) in matters of doubt.

The Shallow Faith of the Founding Fathers The founding fathers were politicians and philosophers, churchmen and doubters. They were well acquainted with history, theology,

Conduciveness to happiness being then the test of virtue, and all happiness being composed of our own happiness and that of others, the production of our own happiness is prudence, the production of the happiness of others is effective benevolence. The tree of virtue is thus divided into to great stems, out of which grow all the other branches of virtue.

It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

Colin Chapman summed up his philosophy thus: 'Simplify and add lightness.' Mind you, he also said, 'You would never catch me driving a race car that I have built.' Which probably explains why Lotus came to be known as an acronym for Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious.

There are few things reason can discover with so much certainty and ease as its own insufficiency.

Life itself: Its origin and nature.

Choosing to narrow reality into a single belief system, based solely on human experience, seems insane to me. And

Phillip K. Dick, one of the few classic science fiction writers I've read, explained reality as, 'that which, if you stop believing in it, does not go away.

The words of Plato in the third book of the Republic are as follows: " Truth, said Socrates, is to be specially cultivated.

Contrary to common sense there is no unique "real world" that pre-exists and is independent of human mental activity and human symbolic language; that which we call the world is a product of some mind whose symbolic procedures construct the world.

The sun will rise tomorrow morning; I know that perfectly well. But figuring out how I could know it is, as Hume pointed out, a bit of a puzzle.

Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it's clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn't really philosophical to begin with.

It does bear emphasis that slippery-slope arguments are notoriously invalid.

Ontological priority is normatively neutral, Plato to the contrary notwithstanding.

My point... is of course not that solipsism is true; it's just that truth, reference, and the rest of the semantic notions aren't psychological categories. What they are is: they're modes of Dasein. I don't know what Dasein is, but I'm sure that there's lots of it around, and I'm sure that you and I and Cincinnati have all got it. What more do you want?

God is either good and not all powerful, or He is powerful and not all good. You can't have it both ways.

Randomness, luck, chance, fate. This is modern man's answer to the age-old question, "Why?

If the Mentalese story about the content of thought is true, then there couldn't be a private language argument. Good. That explains why there isn't one. (In Critical Condition, p. 68)