Quotes About Philosophy

One of the things about a degree in philosophy and theology is that it makes you almost completely unemployable.

Our brains are not capable of comprehending the infinite so, instead, we ignore it and eat cheese on toast.

Ockham's razor is only a methodological principle, not a necessary truth

I don't know the true meaning of happiness.

Why should not He had made all things, still having something immediately to do with the things that He has made? Where lies the great difficulty, if we own the being of a God, that He created all things out of nothing, I'll be allowing something immediate influence of God on creation still?

Because if the Will be already inclined, before it exerts its own sovereign power on itself, then its inclination is not wholly owing to itself:

His aim, in all his investigations, was the discovery and the defence of truth.

This is the most excellent and divine wisdom that any creature is capable of. 'Tis more excellent than any human learning; 'tis far more excellent than all the knowledge of the greatest philosophers or statesmen. Yea, the least glimpse of the glory of God in the face of Christ doth more exalt and ennoble the soul than all the knowledge of those that have the greatest speculative understanding in divinity without grace.

at New Haven with the valedictory. In his Sophomore year he made the acquaintance of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding—a work which left a permanent impress on his thinking. He read it, he says, with a far higher pleasure "than the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some newly-discovered treasure.

Arminian notion of Liberty of the Will, consisting in the will's Self-determination, is repugnant to itself, and shuts itself wholly out of the world.

Of all kinds of knowledge that we can ever obtain, the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of ourselves, are the most important.

Scottish philosopher William Drummond, read: "He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot reason is a fool; he who dares not reason is a slave.

if philosophy develops in the right ways, it might help ease the conflicts between rival dogmatic certainties. But, even if this hope is right, philosophy will never be a quick fix. Its influence is slow, the result of patient questioning and discussion.

In recent philosophy there has been a growing awareness of the gap between the abstract principles proposed by philosophers and the ways in which people actually think. The kind of rationality admired in the theory of knowledge is idealization. In the real world people have to act on beliefs often based on fragmentary and unreliable evidence.

Putting this all together, it makes sense that WEIRD philosophers since Kant and Mill have mostly generated moral systems that are individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That's the morality you need to govern a society of autonomous individuals.

Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.49 In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification).

Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.49 In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse

There is a principle in philosophy and rhetoric called the principle of charity, which says that one should interpret other people's statements in their best, most reasonable form, not in the worst or most offensive way possible.

Good and evil do not exist outside of our beliefs about them.

If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you're bound to misunderstand it.

These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions. It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

WEIRD philosophers since Kant and Mill have mostly generated moral systems that are individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That's the morality you need to govern a society of autonomous individuals.

I believe the Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than was Plato when he said, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

we are all, by nature, hypocrites, and this is why it is so hard for us to follow the Golden Rule faithfully.