Quotes About Philosophy

Does awareness play some kind of role as a 'bridge' to a world of Platonic absolutes.

I am not an advocate of Enlightenment. On the contrary, I see it as a form of light pollution, which prevents us from seeing the stars.

The consolation of an imaginary thing is still a real consolation.

Realism...is a kind of disappointed tribute to the ideal.

There's a real question as to what beauty is and why it's important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they're not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that's in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

The identification of any object in the first-person case is ruled out by the enterprise of scientific explanation. So science cannot tell me who I am, let alone where, when, or how.

Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. He chose a single word from that language for his device: caute – 'be cautious' – inscribed beneath a rose, the symbol of secrecy. For, having chosen to write in a language that was so widely intelligible, he was compelled to hide what he had written.

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative', is asking you not to believe him. So don't.

I believed that 'freedom' is not a clear or sufficient answer to the question of what conservatives believe in. Like Matthew Arnold, I held that 'freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere'.

Some of the greatest achievements of modern philosophy result from the attempt to reconcile the belief in human freedom with the eternal laws of God's nature, and among these achievements Spinoza's is not only the most imaginative and profound, but perhaps the only one that is truly plausible.

There are many American conservatives, including those influenced by the Roman Catholic tradition of natural law philosophy, who believe that, in the end, the conservative position rests on theological foundations.

Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean.

The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas.

Lo que resulta inaceptable en la filosofía política que hoy se oferta es su incapacidad por reconocer que la mayor parte de lo que somos y debemos nos ha sido dado sin nuestro consentimiento

The God of the philosophers disappeared behind the world, because he was described in the third person, and not addressed in the second.

Kant enjoyed the company of women (provided that they did not pretend to understand the Critique of Pure Reason) and

Paul Benacerraf, 'What Numbers Could Not Be,' Philosophical Review (1965).

The picture of a universe of infinitely many wholly unrelated substances is at least as hard to understand as the monism of Spinoza, and far less easy to reconcile with appearances.

Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind.

We must not think of this merely as a theological or metaphysical question. For

If we cannot justify the very concept of the aesthetic, except as ideology, then aesthetic judgement is without philosophical foundation. An 'ideology' is adopted for its social or political utility, rather than its truth. And

the mind, to borrow Hume's metaphor, 'spreads itself upon objects'.

Hegel, that the intellectual life is ultimately a spiritual endeavour to synthesize art, music, religion, politics and philosophy