Quotes About Rationalism

To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them

it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.

tandis que le rationaliste vulgaire, fût-il l'homme le plus ignorant de toute philosophie, est au contraire le plus empressé à se proclamer tel, en même temps qu'il se pare fièrement du titre plutôt ironique de « libre-penseur », alors qu'il n'est en réalité que l'esclave de tous les préjugés courants de son époque.

The tendencies that found expression among the Greeks had to be pushed to the extreme, the undue importance given to rational thought had to grow even greater, before men could arrive at 'rationalism', a specifically modern attitude that consists in not merely ignoring, but expressly denying, everything of a supra-rational order.

But in the mid-nineteenth century, grasping for the certitude and authority the church was quickly losing in the face of rationalism and scientism, Catholics declared the Pope to be "infallible," and Evangelicals decided the Bible was "inerrant," despite the fact that we had gotten along for most of eighteen hundred years without either belief. In fact, these claims would have seemed idolatrous to most early Christians.

When Thomas Jefferson sat on the steps of the White House and, with a pair of scissors, began to cut out all portions of the Bible that he felt were mythic nonsense, he was expressing a rational point of view.

While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.

Descartes himself, as one will recall, experienced great difficulty in overcoming his celebrated doubts, and was able to do so only by way of a tortuous argument which few today would find convincing. Is it not strange that tough-minded scientists should have so readily, and for so long, espoused a rationalist doctrine which calls in question the very possibility of empirical knowledge?

Deizm, laikli?in bir tür felsefesidir.

Despite what it says, science is actually just a philosophy – the philosophy of materialism and empiricism – but it refuses to commit itself to this. It refuses to state why materialism is right and idealism is wrong. It refuses to state why empiricism is right and rationalism is wrong. And if it ever actually got into any of this, if it dared, it would be intellectually destroyed. That's why it completely avoids the whole issue.

The merit of Locke 's 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' is its adequacy, and not its consistency. . . He should have widened the title of his book into 'An Essay Concerning Experience.

In its use of this method natural science has shown a curious mixture of rationalism and irrationalism. Its prevalent tone of thought has been ardently rationalistic within its own borders, and dogmatically irrational beyond those borders. In practice such an attitude tends to become a dog- matic denial that there are any factors in the world not fully expressible in terms of its own primary notions devoid of further generalization. Such a denial is the self-denial of thought.

Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doingin addition to caring for mans well-beingthey were providing rights for themselves.

Contrary to rationalism, there are no a priori concepts; but contrary to empiricism, there are axiomatic concepts about which we can be certain; contrary to both schools, perception is not awareness of images, impressions, or sense data, but of objects that exist independent of our awareness of them.

I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.

But when I'm talking about God, I'm talking about the divine being who can't be located tangibly with the kind of evidence that the rationalism of reductionism demands in the same way that you cannot be located in your eyelashes or spine or shoulder.

The New Fundamentalists have some dim respect for Rule A, which is deeply embedded in modern Western culture, even while their Faith drives them to act on Rule B. This leads them to remarkable flights of Irrational Rationalism.

The Old Agnosticism defined itself chiefly by its opposition to the dogmas of religious Fundamentalism. The New Agnosticism of this book seems to define itself by its opposition to the dogmas of materialist/rationalist Fundamentalism. Yet the agnostic attitude — which I keep gently hinting is also the creative attitude, the Po attitude — remains similar. The agnostic does not want to be bulldozed into joining a stampede of any sort, or bowing to any Idol.

If rationalism and secularism have taken us so far that we can no longer imagine what Phidippides saw, then we are incapable of understanding—and consequently defending ourselves against—religious movements that reverse the Enlightenment and affect today's geopolitics.

There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

Evangelicals have like millions of rules. And it's just, uh, we have sort of an accepted, rationalism within which we frame religion. And we think that belief, intellectually, is of the same as relationship. And in our Western family conversation, that's become an incredible impediment toward actual wholeness, where the heart and the head are aligned and relationship -- with not just God but with each other.

W gimnazjum panowaÅ' kult rozumu, ale, jak wiadomo, nic bardziej nie wpÅ'ywa na rozwój okultyzmu ni? urzÄ™dowy racjonalizm.

But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.

Today the lack of faith is an expression of profound confusion and despair. Once skepticism and rationalism were progressive forces for the development of thought; now they have become rationalizations for relativism and uncertainty.