Quotes About Relativism

I suppose Relativism is cynical. It surely isn't idealistic. It's the result of being killed and injured and made poor and working hard for empty words.

So I might say to her: look, the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes—and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.

Richard Bernstein's Beyond Objectivism and Relativism

To avoid confusion, let me make an important distinction: Practically all philosophers these days are fallibilists. That is, they recognize that even our best-supported theories and factual claims are fallible and may turn out to be wrong—as, indeed, they so often have in the past. But fallibilism does not entail relativism

What is sacred among one people may be ridiculous in another and what is despised or rejected by one cultural group, may in a different environment become the cornerstone for a great edifice of strange grandeur and beauty.

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing there's someone who feels much worse.

Nada es verdadero, todo está permitido!

Nothing is true; everything is permitted

My opinion is: Truth must be absolute and that you Mr. Protagoras, are absolutely in error. Since this is indeed my opinion, then you must concede that it is true according to your philosophy.

postmodern man who denies the existence of any Truth and believes that each of us makes his own truth that is as valid as any other.

Contextualism is only the flipside of logocentrism.

A secular person treats as the Highest Standard something that isn't the Highest Standard.

Zeitgeist is a German word that means "spirit of the age."  The zeitgeist of Periclean Athens was self-knowledge (supremely embodied in the thought of Socrates), while that of the Middle Ages and Victorianism was hierarchy (Dante) and progress (Tennyson), respectively.  As for the darker zeitgeist of modernism, marked by relativism and subjectivism, though Lewis did not embody it, he understood it better than many of its most ardent supporters.

No longer do our beliefs point back to a divine law code or an essential, in-built sense of good and evil; they exist only and solely in the eye of the beholder.

Surely, even in a world apparently turned enthusiastically relativistic in nearly all matters of belief and conviction, at least this single principle of physiological, if not moral, certainty still held true. There were men and there were women, and there were straights and there were gays. And that was that.

There is a great deal of nonsense written on the subject of diversity and multiculturalism, but the fact remains that the great challenge facing our world is that of maintaining clear convictions and strong commitments while living in peaceful proximity with people with different convictions and commitments, avoiding brittle bigotry on the one hand and soggy relativism on the other.

discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, "Your ace is just a social construct.

We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.

In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.

The notion that relativity physics supports the avoidance of value judgments in anthropology, for example, or a relativism with respect to morals, is absurd. Actually, relativity introduces a whole series of new "absolutes.

It is the duty and privilege of historians to deploy relativism in a fashion that cannot be expected of contemporary participants.

Anthropologists teach others to try to avoid the pitfalls of ethnocentrism by learning to understand a culture in terms of its own assumptions about reality. Western shamans can do a similar service with regard to cognicentrism. The anthropologists' lesson is called cultural relativism. What Western shamans can try to create, to some degree, is cognitive relativism.

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice...for we have no other criterion of reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.