Quotes About Philosophy

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."26

The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it. —MARCUS AURELIUS1

You can learn more about cultivating the intellectual virtues and about how to incorporate them in schools at intellectualvirtues.org and in the writings of Jason Baehr, a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and one of the founders of the Intellectual Virtues Academy.32

rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.

Muller began by distinguishing conservatism from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the view that there exists a "transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.

Western philosophy has been worshipping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years.4 There's a direct line running from Plato through Immanuel Kant to Lawrence Kohlberg. I'll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion.

people to break their emotional attachments to people and events, which are always unpredictable and uncontrollable, and to cultivate instead an attitude of acceptance. This ancient idea deserves respect, and it is certainly true that changing your mind is usually a more effective response to frustration than is changing the world.

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.

The developmental psychologist Paul Bloom has shown that our minds were designed for dualism—we think that minds and bodies are different but equally real sorts of things—and so we readily believe that we have immortal souls housed in our temporary bodies.

There's The Utilitarian Grill, serving only sweeteners (welfare), and The Deontological Diner, serving only salts (rights). Those are your options.

moral monism—the attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle—leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles

The two leading ethical theories in Western philosophy were founded by men who were as high as could be on systemizing, and were rather low on empathizing.

Kant, like Plato, wanted to discover the timeless, changeless form of the Good. He believed that morality had to be the same for all rational creatures, regardless of their cultural or individual proclivities.

Kant provided an abstract rule from which (he claimed) all other valid moral rules could be derived. He called it the categorical (or unconditional) imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."22

The second truth in this part of the story is that we are all, by nature, hypocrites, and this is why it is so hard for us to follow the Golden Rule faithfully.

Morality is like taste in many ways—an analogy made long ago by Hume and Mencius.

first principle of moral psychology: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Hume diagnosed the problem long ago:

Truth is found at the bottom of a bottomless pit." Jerome Facher - A Civil Action.

But in the words of a great philosopher, you can't always get what you want.

Know what Oscar Wilde said about cynics?" "They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

That's my core philosophy," he said. "The glass is either half-empty or broken.

I saw this cartoon in the paper, once. That Viking, Hagar the Horrible? He's standing on the mountaintop, holding his hands to the heavens, shouting "Why me?" And down from the heavens comes the answer: "Why not?" Maybe that's the ultimate truth; what right to do I have to expect a smooth ride?

Two errors, wrote Pascal, a thinker Andrew once admired. One: to take everything literally. Two: to take everything spiritually.