Quotes About Philosophy

We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.

Sophisticated Hindus do not think of God as a special and separate superperson who rules the world from above, like a monarch. Their God is "underneath" rather than "above" everything, and he (or it) plays the world from inside.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.

But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.

There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.

Despite Schelling's aspirations and claims, he was instrumental not in the completion of metaphysics, but rather in its abandonment.

In claiming to have exhausted the dialectically structured categorial realm, Hegel claims to have completed philosophy. In fact, however, he has completed at best only first philosophy; his system represents at most the highest theoretical knowledge, that which grounds further inquiry. Grounding such inquiry is however quite different from completing it. In complete metaphysics, Hegel provides philosophical anthropology with the point from which it can begin.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

Lanark said irritably, "You seem to understand my questions, but your answers make no sense to me." "That's typical of life, isn't it?

Modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.

From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.

We know that there are no self-evident truths.

The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man

It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.

To say that a belief is rational is to talk about how it stands in relation to other beliefs

At least some of the items in a Homeric list of the aretai would clearly not be counted by most of us nowadays as virtues at all, physical strength being the most obvious example.

Augustine's final verdict on the philosophers of Greece and Rome was that, although they had made various mistakes, "nature itself has not permitted them to wander too far from the path of truth" in their judgments about the supreme good (De Civitate Dei 19.1).

would certainly not have admired Jesus Christ and he would have been horrified by St Paul—does

The book review pages of those journals are the graveyards of constructive academic philosophy, and any doubts as to whether rational consensus might not after all be achievable on modern academic moral philosophy can be put to rest by reading them through regularly.