Quotes About Philosophy

As to his religious notions—why, as Voltaire said, incantations will destroy a flock of sheep if administered with a certain quantity of arsenic.

But it is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.

The sense of blessedness in his own lot had yet an aching anxiety at his heart: this may be held paradoxical, for the beloved lover is always called happy, and happiness is considered as a well-fleshed indifference to sorrow outside it. But human experience is usually paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the phrases of current, talk or even current philosophy.

just as when a youthful nobleman steals jewellery we call the act kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy who had stolen turnips. In

Naming the emptiness where thought is not

No conceptually regimented and normatively informed theory of mental disorder can be devised without taking philosophy of mind seriously and knowing something about this subject area of philosophy and of such topics as consciousness, Intentionality, personal identity, the mind/body problem and rationality.

A]ny being with the supposed capacity to create the logically impossible must himself be logically impossible.

To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life.

The Christian theologian will never find a contradiction between the propositions of faith and reason, because it is his job to interpret them out of existence.

the Fallacy of the Stolen Concept. This fallacy, writes Nathaniel Branden, "consists of the act of using a concept while ignoring, contradicting or denying the validity of the concepts on which it logically and genetically depends.

When chemistry has told me that nitric acid thrown in a person's face will cause great agony; when physics has told me that throwing a person out of a window will tend to cause broken bones or death; when economics has told me that promising to keep a person in old age will make him idle and improvident, then, and not till then, can ethics step in and forbid me to commit those actions.

George Harrison

In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious.

A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think. ... Unless we know our cognitive unconscious fully and intimately, we can neither know ourselves nor truly understand the basis of our moral judgments, our conscious deliberations, and our philosophy.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

Pragmatic conservatism is less idealistic than central conservatism. The goal is to get ahead, to serve your self-interest. The idealistic parts of conservatism are seen as effective means to achieve that goal.

Epictetus, for example, asks us to think of the deity as the playwright who assigns us roles. Our business in life is to play admirably the role assigned to us.

The embodiment of mind leads us to a philosophy of embodied realism. Our concepts cannot be a direct reflection of external, objective, mind-independent reality because our sensorimotor system plays a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it is the involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world.

T]he whole undertaking of philosophical inquiry requires a prior understanding of the conceptual system in which the undertaking is set. That is an empirical job for cognitive science and cognitive semantics. ... Unless this job is done, we will not know whether the answers philosophers give to their questions are a function of the conceptualization built into the questions themselves.

P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.

The fundamental frames through which you understand the world are physical.

When people ask me about what I learned from martial arts, I don't talk about favorite punches or kicks, or about fights won or lost. I talk about learning self-discipline, about ethics and manners and benevolence and fairness.

You can't win unless you have good people with great attitude. They are the ones who won the games. I didn't win any games. You never saw a coach make a tackle anywhere. My philosophy was to get the best players and then try to do something new with them.

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.