Quotes About Philosophy

It is not thinking that determines being, but being that determines thinking.

To prove that something exists means to prove that it is not something that exists only in thought." This is perfectly true, but it means that the unity of thinking and being does not and cannot in any way mean their identity. This is one of the most important features distinguishing materialism from idealism.

The Hegelian dialectic could be "turned right side up" only by one who was convinced of the soundness of the basic principle of Feuerbach's philosophy, viz., that it is not thinking that determines being, but being that determines thinking.

Trotsky once asked, "How many Aristotles are herding swine, and how many swineherds are sitting on thrones?

Edwards's piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-centered worldview or his profoundly theological philosophy. The disappearance of Edwards's perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy. Mark Noll

Edwards believed his Biblical theology was, in fact, a true rendering of reality, and therefore could stand confidently in the marketplace of philosophical ideas and give an account of itself--which in his hands it would do.

It seemed to me that much philosophical talk about meaning was just plain hypocritical.

Bottom up thinkers try to start from experience and move from experience to understanding. They don't start with certain general principles they think beforehand are likely to be true they just hope to find out what reality is like.

Epistemology models ontology.

In youth his mind had been closed, for every prejudice of upbringing was a disinfectant against pagan ideas. He now had an even more satisfying answer to the puzzles of human strivings and destiny. Paganism at its philosophical best would appear a gluttering candle to a man who had followed the Light of the World, and more usually it was idolatry, mixed with license.

To America's founders, China was a source of inspiration. They saw it as a harmonious society with officials chosen on merit, where the arts and philosophy flourished, and the peasantry labored happily on the land.

Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.

A wiser and more useful philosophy, however, directs us to consider man according to the nature in which he was formed; subject to infirmities, which no wisdom can remedy; to weaknesses, which no institution can strengthen; to vices, which no legislation can correct. Hence,

The home gardener is part scientist, part artist, part philosopher, part ploughman.

Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death.

In the West, of course, God has been dead for some time. What remains is religion as social belief, which is at best a moral code and at worst social etiquette.

Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.

It may be expedient but it is not just that some should have less in order that others may prosper.

closed system

A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue

moral order arises in some way from human nature itself and from the requirements of our living together in society.

Finally, moral philosophy was always the exercise of free, disciplined reason alone. It was not based on religion, much less on revelation, since civic religion did not offer a rival to it. In seeking moral ideals more suited than those of the Homeric age to the society and culture of fifth-century Athens, Greek moral philosophy from the beginning stood more or less by itself.

El resultado es que con frecuencia parecemos obligados a escoger entre el utilitarismo y el intuicionismo.

If everybody contemplates the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera.