Quotes About Metaphysics

There are realms of life where the concepts of sense and nonsense do not apply.

the Sage of Koenigsburg, Immanuel Kant, ended traditional metaphysics and made modern psychology necessary by discerning that we never know reality directly;

Attaching epistemic significance to metaphysical intuitions is anti-naturalist for two reasons. First, it requires ignoring the fact that science, especially physics, has shown us that the universe is very strange to our inherited conception of what it is like. Second, it requires ignoring central implications of evolutionary theory, and of the cognitive and behavioural sciences, concerning the nature of our minds.

proficiency in inferring the large-scale and small-scale structure of our immediate environment, or any features of parts of the universe distant from our ancestral stomping grounds, was of no relevance to our ancestors' reproductive fitness. Hence, there is no reason to imagine that our habitual intuitions and inferential responses are well designed for science or for metaphysics.

Given that the `common sense' of many contemporary philosophers is shaped and supplemented by ideas from classical physics, the locus of most metaphysical discussions is an image of the world that sits unhappily between the manifest image and an out of date scientific image.11

Given that the `common sense' of many contemporary philosophers is shaped and supplemented by ideas from classical physics, the locus of most metaphysical discussions is an image of the world that sits unhappily between

Many cultures have independently developed a belief system in reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another physical lifetime on Earth.

I believe in metaphysics. I don't believe in God because I think that is a human simplification of the things we can't explain. But I believe in a greater universe.

The meaning of the universe lies outside the universe.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

There's a whole stereotype of the jazz musician that's into poetry and reading and metaphysics and all that stuff. Really, it's a sign of someone who's searching, whose mind is open, looking for answers. Whatever ideas you may come up with, the beautiful thing is the search.

I realize that psychology has charted some awfully weird areas in its maps of the mind, but you've gone so far into the ultra-mentational hinterlands of metaphysics that I fear you will not return (at least not with your reputation intact).

I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My interest is in the territory between them.

These essays are about life: about its end, its meaning, its value, and about the metaphysics of consciousness. Some of the topics have not received much attention from analytic philosophers, because it is hard to be clear and precise about them, and hard to separate from a mixture of facts and feelings those questions abstract enough for philosophical treatment.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

What a silly thing love is!' said the student as he walked away. 'It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to philosophy and study metaphysics.' So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read.

You can get from the noumenal to the phenomenal without stirring from your chair. In other words, nothing can be excerpted from the absolute without being rendered perceptual.

He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman.

it has never been in my power to study anything,—mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semiotic.

For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.

Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.

The natural striving for knowledge, as Aristotle formulates it at the beginning of the Metaphysics moves in a sphere of universal theoretical brightness and visibility and theoria represents the comprehension (via imaginative reenact- ment) of an absolutely divine act.

this speciously deep thought was to haunt Christian metaphysics: that love without pain and guilt remains simply a joke, a game.

Metaphysical speculation is independent of the physical validity of the Big Bang itself and is irrelevant to our understanding of it.