Quotes About Metaphysics

our dominant technology shapes our symbolism and thereby our metaphysics, our view about what is real.

If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness, a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.

As to the role of emotions in art and the subconscious mechanism that serves as the integrating factor both in artistic creation and in man's response to art, they involve a psychological phenomenon which we call a sense of life. A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.

Dios es aquello que la mente humana no puede concebir, afirman, y luego os piden que consideréis tal cosa como conocimiento; Dios no es hombre, el cielo no es tierra, el alma no es el cuerpo, la virtud no es provecho, A no es A, la percepción no es sensorial, el conocimiento no es rázon. Sus definiciones no constituyen el acto de definir, sino el de borrar.

A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It sets the nature of a man's emotional responses and the essence of his character… a sense of life always retains a profoundly personal quality; it reflects a man's deepest values; it is experience by him as a sense of his own identity.

God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit. A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

Plato, too, had emphasized a kind of dualism of shadow and reality, matter and spirit.

Moreover, as the mind is to the body, so the Logos is to the world.

La idea del principio en Leibniz ? la evolución de la teoría deductiva.

A great physicist is always a metaphysicist as well; he has a higher concept of his knowledge and his task.

We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators.

Plato was the first to envisage the idea of timeless existence and to emphasize it—against reason—as a reality, more [real] than our actual experience…

This is what is meant by the phenomenology of the science-making process: Self-observation always leads us to an existential point about the metaphysics of experience, and it is almost always a transforming moment. (p. 286)

What Kant refers to as depression is simply this stark realization: that thought is only incidentally human. It would take a later generation of philosophers to derive the conclusion of this: that thought thinks us, not the reverse. Legend

For every un-universe, then, an un-philosophy that must also negate itself.

But if metaphysics is to proceed by intuition, if intuition has the mobility of duration as its object, and if duration is of a psychical nature, shall we not be confining the philosopher to the exclusive contemplation of himself?

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

The question between the materialists and me is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of this or that person, but whether they have an absolute existence, distinct from being perceived by God, and exterior to all minds.

Um metafísico é alguém que, quando você lhe diz que dois vezes dois são quatro, ele quer saber o que você entende por vezes, o que significa dois, e o que quer dizer são e por que isto dá quatro. Por fazerem tais perguntas, os metafísicos desfrutam um luxo oriental nas universidades e são respeitados como homens educados e inteligentes.

I don't believe that there is any fourth dimension, and I emphatically do not believe in Tao.

Nothing we see or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given to the senses. Hegel was right when he pointed out that "the This of sense . . . cannot be reached by language"8 Was it not precisely the discovery of a discrepancy between words, the medium in which we think, and the world of appearances, the medium in which we live, that led to philosophy and metaphysics in the first place?

'Do not touch ontologically' doesn't mean 'are separated by empirically measurable hard edges.'

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.

Any necessary truth, whether a priori or a posteriori, could not have turned out otherwise