Quotes About Sophism

For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fathers are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.

reasonings on this subject can only be drawn from effects to causes; and that every argument, deducted from causes to effects, must of necessity be a gross sophism; since it is impossible for you to know anything of the cause, but what you have antecedently, not inferred, but discovered to the full, in the effect.

On the numberless references to this impious sophism, see the learned notes of Valckenaer and Monk. Compare more particularly Aristoph. Ran. 102, 1471. Thesmoph. 275. Arist. Rhet. iii. 15. B.

How childish is   the attempt to meet this argument by the following sophism! "We were   chosen because we were worthy, and because God foresaw that we would be   worthy." We

totdeauna r?mîne în conÈ™tiin?? ceva din sofismele strecurate în ea; p?streaz? un iz, ca dup? o b?utur? rea./ ... il reste toujours dans la conscience quelque chose des sophismes qu'on y a versés; elle en garde l'arrière-goût,comme d'une liqueur mauvaise.(©BeQ)

In the first place, the word universal conceals a gross sophism.

The apparent effect of truth which operates in the sophism is in reality a quasi-juridical bond between a discursive event and a speaking subject. Hence the fact that we find two theses in the Sophists: Everything is true (as soon as you say something, that thing exists.). Nothing is true (whatever words you employ, they never express what exists).

No sophism is too gross to delude minds distempered by party spirit.

Oh, come off your perch! said the other man, who wore glasses. Your premises won't come out in the wash. You wind-jammers who apply bandy-legged theories to concrete categorical syllogisms send logical conclusions skallybootin' into the infinitesimal ragbag. You can't pull my leg with an old sophism with whiskers on it.

The sophism that ruined me is the one made by the majority of men, who complain about lacking strength when it is already too late to make use of it. [...] Virtue costs us only through our own fault, and if we always wanted to be wise, we would rarely need to be virtuous. But inclinations that would be easy to overcome sweep us away without resistance: we give way to slight temptations whose danger we scorn

And none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or non-existence of a God. What I'm saying is that the thought of the man and the way this thinking-feeling can reach an extreme degree of incommunicability - that, without sophism or paradox, is at the same time, for that man, the point of greatest communication. He communicates with himself.

In order to transform the idea of the "social contract" into an eminently democratic thesis, one needs the sophism of suffrage. Where one supposes, in effect, that the majority is equivalent to the totality, the idea of consensus is twisted into totalitarian coercion.