Quotes About Philosophy

But in philosophy, he was closer to his contemporary Siddhartha Gautama Buddha (c. 560 – 480 B.C.). Both believed in reincarnation, possibly as an animal, so even an animal could be inhabited by what was once a human soul. Thus, both placed a high value on all life, opposing the common practice of animal sacrifice and preaching strict vegetarianism.

theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.

One morning during Lent in 415, Hypatia climbed into her chariot, some say outside her residence, some say on a street intending to ride home. Several hundred of Cyril's stooges, Christian monks from a desert monastery, swooped upon her, beat her, and dragged her to a church. Inside the church they stripped her naked and peeled away her flesh with either sharpened tiles or broken bits of pottery.

Cardano worked at a time when mystical incantation was more valued than mathematical calculation.

Egoists hold that a man's primary moral obligation is to achieve his own welfare (egoists do not necessarily agree on the nature of man's welfare).

In a primacy-of-consciousness philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to the ruling consciousness, such as God or society. In Ayn Rand's philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to existence; it consists of a man's recognizing facts and then acting accordingly.

No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy—not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams—which turned the Germans into a nation of killers. The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.

Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.

Philosophy. A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate

Every central doctrine of the Nazi politics, racism included, is an expression or variant of the theory of collectivism. Such doctrines cannot rise to the ascendancy, neither among the intellectuals nor in the mind of the public, except in a culture already saturated with a mystical-collectivist philosophy. In the case of Germany, this means: saturated with the ideas of Hegel.

A necessary complement to induction is deduction, the standard example of which is: "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal." The

The first thing to say about that which is is simply: it is. As Parmenides in ancient Greece formulated the principle: what is, is. Or, in Ayn Rand's words: existence exists.

The Nazis preached a certain philosophy—and they carried it out in action. They preached authority above rights, the group above the individual, sacrifice above happiness, nihilism above morality, feelings above facts, pliability above absolutes, obedience above logic, the Führer above the self—and they applied it.

For those new to philosophy, its two fundamental branches are metaphysics, which studies the nature of existence, and epistemology, which studies man's means of knowledge.

When the country surrendered its educational institutions—in countless forms, direct and indirect, public and private, from nursery school on up—to the legion of Progressive educators spawned by Dewey, it formally delivered its youth into the hands of the philosophy of pragmatism, to be "reconstructed" according to the pragmatist image of man.

A country with a philosophic base, freed of fundamental uncertainty and guilt, would not tolerate leaders who evade every choice, crawl down the middle of every road, and wait for the deluge. It would not tolerate any deluge by the waves of self-righteous, man-hating evil, foreign or domestic. It would not apologize for its greatness to the worshipers of weakness. It would not watch in despair while its youth turned in despair to cults, communes, and cocaine.

Philosophy is the study of the nature of existence, of knowledge, and of values.

The branch of philosophy that studies existence is metaphysics.

The essentialized approach is the opposite of that practiced by today's academic establishment, who reject system-building—that is, broad integration—in favor of the analysis of minutiae. I am as far from today's philosophy departments as an atheist is from the pope or, in more positive terms, as a man who wants to live is from an ascetic writhing in the desert. My explanation of today's philosophers is offered below, in my discussion of the D2 mentality.

The branch of philosophy that studies knowledge is epistemology.

The branch of philosophy that studies values is ethics (or morality), which rests on both the above branches—on a view of the world in which man acts, and of man's nature, including his means of knowledge.

The branch of philosophy that applies ethics to social questions is politics, which studies the nature of social systems and the proper functions of government.

I call the Platonic mode "misintegration"—M. I call the Aristotelian mode simply "integration"—I. I call the Kantian mode "disintegration"—D.

Aristotle is the champion of this world, the champion of nature, as against the supematuralism of Plato.