Quotes About Philosophy

But it there's anything I've learned in the past few months, it's that the only thing that's certain in life is that nothing in life is certain.

Mathematics, even in its present and most abstract state, is not detached from life. It is just the ideal handling of the problems of life.

I have to say that some philosophers such as the late Bernard Williams, and I would include myself in this group, would say that tranquillity is overrated as the goal of life.

The (atomic) soul is mortal, and the best life is the one with the least pain and the most pleasure.

The life-world of human and animal experience, with colours, tastes, solid objects, is a perceptual effect of massed atoms.

I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves?

And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.

I hate Bernard Shaw because he says that life is compromise.

If you've led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it's precisely the cancer that you'd expect to get. That's a bit of a yawn.

Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger's life to be a total head-scratcher.

It is a paradox. Life is that way. God designed it that way. I believe I met him once. He was full of mischief.

If we have been brought up with the idea that life is for suffering and sacrifice, then of course we would seek death to escape this 'vale of tears'.

I trained myself. Long ago, 'Boy' [Arthur] Capel introduced me to 'Bludgeon the Poor!' (Assommons les pauvres!) which, rejecting resignation, informed my moral outlook for life.

at the end of the day, human beings are products of nature, and if humans have purposes, then at some level purposefulness must arise from nature and therefore be inherent in nature … Might purpose be a genuine property of nature right down to the cellular or even the subcellular level? (p. 121–2)

Wanda: But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?  Otto:     Apes don't read philosophy.  Wanda: Yes, they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. A Fish Called Wanda (1988) One cannot help but think of A Fish Called Wanda when one reads Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion; or at least I can't.

uncaused cause, or to use Aristotle's famous expression, an Unmoved

science," for the Aristotelian, is an organized body of demonstrated truths concerning the things falling within some domain and their causes. Hence, not only physics, chemistry, biology, and the like, but also metaphysics, ethics, natural theology, and indeed the philosophy of nature itself (since, for the Aristotelian-Thomistic thinker, these fields of inquiry rest on rational arguments and analysis no less than physics, chemistry, etc. do) count as sciences.

Better in most contexts (such as the present one) once again to acquiesce to standard contemporary usage and classify fields like metaphysics, ethics, natural theology, philosophy of nature, etc. as branches of philosophy rather than of "science.

Other potentially misleading terms include "cosmology" and "psychology." In

As with the terms "physics" and "science," so too with terms like "cosmology" and "psychology," the wisest policy is, in my view, not to quibble about contemporary usage but rather to use the best modern labels, qualify them as one sees fit, and then to get on with matters of substance.

I have indicated, the most fundamental concepts of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of nature (the theory of actuality and potentiality, hylemorphism, and so forth) overlap with those of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics.

What is the epistemology of the philosophy of nature itself? Is it an a priori discipline the way that mathematics and metaphysics are often claimed to be? Or are its claims subject to empirical falsification the way that those of natural science typically are? These

The emphasis in philosophy of nature is always on metaphysical questions, whereas the accent in the philosophy of science (at least where it isn't essentially just philosophy of nature under another name) is on epistemological and methodological issues.

1.2.2 Hylemorphism In change, there is, again, both the potential that is to be actualized and the actualization of that potential.