Quotes About Philosophy

The Aristotelian and Thomist mind works: it doesn't just wait around to recover something hidden or something lost. This includes the laws governing nature as understood by science and the laws that govern our own behavior in terms of morality and ethics.

Diogenes's quick wit and, dare we say it, cynical outlook disguised a first-class intellect focused on proving a single principle: that we have to own nothing, absolutely nothing, to be truly free.

But how do we do that? Especially since, as we have seen, the Forms do not exist in time and space, and none of us ever really knows them until we are dead.

It was Aristotle who first made private property the basis of the good life and the independent householder the basis of the free polis.18 The world of the Enlightenment took him firmly at his word.

Why use two (or more) when one (or fewer) will do, is the principle that William of Ockham introduced into the medieval thought process. It grew out of his refinement of Aristotle's logic and set off a revolution not only in philosophy, but in politics and religion. Before he died, Ockham's razor would undercut the foundations of the medieval Church.

The job of ethics, Aristotle asserts, "is not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may become virtuous," especially in our daily dealings with others.

Mailer's Negro lived in a realm of Nietzschean nihilism, of Being-for-Itself.

Aristotle's Politics, like his Metaphysics, turns Plato's system upside down.

For Plato, we find our true freedom only when we find our proper place within the political community. Aristotle, by contrast, concludes that community exists to serve the individuals who make it up, not the other way around.

Aristotle's philosopher is always an observer of reality, not the creator of it. Instead of laying out the perfect blueprint, then turning reluctantly to the real world, Aristotle starts with the real world itself.

We have been trained to think of Machiavelli as the apologist for power politics. In fact, his passion for the ideal of liberty was so strong

Plotinus. He is without doubt the most important and influential thinker to appear between Aristotle and Saint Augustine. Yet we know almost nothing about him. His life is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. He declined to tell his disciples any details about his life. He even refused to have his portrait painted or a bust made of his likeness.

But that community still exists, Aristotle argues, in order to make the householder happy, rather than the other way around.

History teaches us what human beings are like in reality rather than what we would like them to be. And when we deal with the sum total of history's record, high-minded ideals like those of Plato's Philosopher Rulers have to be pushed off over the side. Reality teaches a very different set of lessons about politics—and Machiavelli's ambition was to present them to posterity

two-thousand-year struggle for the soul of Western civilization, which today extends to all civilizations: a struggle born from an act of rebellion. It came around 360 BCE, when the young Aristotle, son of the court doctor of the Macedonian kings, turned against the ideas of his famous teacher, Plato of Athens, and set out to create a school of his own.

while Judaism and the Bible gave Christianity its weight and matter, its flesh and blood, Plato and Neoplatonism became its conceptual spine.

action is best, which produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number

To Clement and his generation, Christianity was not the enemy of philosophy, but its finest and last expression.

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" One of Augustine's fellow Christian Africans, Tertullian, had posed that question in the third century. His meaning was all too clear. What do Plato, Aristotle, and the rest really tell us about wisdom and salvation, compared with the Bible and Christianity? More than a century later, Augustine bleakly answered: Not much.

In some ways, Bacon also looked beyond Aristotle. First, he believed that no natural or physical science could get anywhere without a firm foundation in mathematics. He called it the "gate and key" to all science.

Epicurus even defined pleasure as the absence of pain: not exactly a formula for a life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Still, the underlying principle of his philosophy—that the one thing all nature seeks to avoid is pain, and the one thing it seeks to gain is pleasure, and men should do the same—was only an extreme version of Aristotle's theory of knowledge based on our senses.

Far more than Thomas Aquinas or even Bacon, Ockham is the true forerunner of the modern era.

He ripped aside the veil of respectability with which the ancients had clothed their traditional gods and goddesses and exposed the sordid reality underneath. What Socrates and Plato had started, the overthrow of the pagan pantheon, Origen's Christianity finished.

Beginning with their founder, Zeno, the Stoics taught that the key to the happy life is adhering to a strict sense of virtue and a rigid duty toward others rather than indulging in pleasure, and a renunciation of, or at least an indifference to, all worldly goods.