Quotes About Philosophy

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

I have remained someone who believes that the only things indispensable to human life are air, food, drink and excretion, and the search for truth. The rest is optional.

A necessidade, já os gregos o sabiam, é uma deusa não só cega mas também cruel.

It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

On David Hume] Although he never admitted to being an atheist as such, he was clearly and unquestionably the most vividly elegant skeptic of them all.

John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison, the big three of modern liberalism

Tomorrow morning," said Socrates, "let us meet here again." The conversation he and his young protégé began 2,500 years ago continues, now spanning the world instead of just Athens, despite countless efforts to squelch it.

This is, more or less, what the great twentieth-century philosopher of science Karl R. Popper and his followers have called the principle of falsifiability. Science is distinctive, not because it proves true statements, but because it seeks systematically to disprove (falsify) false ones.

There is nothing like absolute certainty in the whole field of our knowledge," writes Popper.

Historians, as Robert Darnton observed in 1980, 'want to penetrate the mental world of ordinary persons as well as philosophers, but they keep running into the vast silence that has swallowed up most of mankind's thinking.

What Genesis is, in fact, is philosophy written in a deliberately non-philosophical way. It deals with all the central questions of philosophy: what exists (ontology), what can we know (epistemology), are we free (philosophical psychology), and how we should behave (ethics). But it does so in a way quite unlike the philosophical classics from Plato to Wittgenstein. To put it at its simplest: philosophy is truth as system. Genesis is truth as story.

The trouble was that they also argued that the worst thing you can have is certainty. Conviction, they said, leads to tyranny. On this they were wrong, indeed self-contradictory. Hayek was certain that freedom was preferable to slavery

What the secularists forgot is that Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal. If there is one thing the great institutions of the modern world do not do, it is to provide meaning.

This paradox suggests that Judaism has a different understanding of language than the one that prevails in the West and had its origins in ancient Greece. The philosophers, heirs to the Greeks, tended to think of language as conveying information. What matters is whether it is true or false.

A fellow scientist visited Bohr at his home and saw to his amazement that Bohr had fixed a horseshoe over the door for luck. 'Surely, Niels, you don't believe in that?' 'Of course not,' Bohr replied. 'But you see – the thing is that it works whether you believe in it or not.

Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? These are questions to which the answer is prescriptive not descriptive, substantive not procedural. The result is that the twenty-first century has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning.

Science does not yield meanings, nor does it prove the absence of meanings. The meaning of a system lies outside the system. Therefore the meaning of the universe lies outside the universe.

Wisdom tells us how the world is. Torah tells us how the world ought to be. Wisdom is about nature. Torah is about will.

the truth that there is not one single system that can do justice to the moral life. What we need is a combination of several. Attempt to reduce them to "one very simple principle," in John Stuart Mill's phrase, and you will fail to do justice to morality itself.

our views of the natural are shaped by our ideas of the supernatural.

God is beyond time, but human beings live within time. We cannot take ourselves out of, say, the twenty-first century and project ourselves a thousand years from now. Inescapably, we live in the now, not eternity.

Kant had disproved the ontological argument. Hume had shown that for any supposed miracle, the evidence that it had not happened was always greater than the evidence that it had. Darwin had shown the error in the 'argument from design'.

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.