“Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
Context: Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.

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Alfred North Whitehead112

English mathematician and philosopher 1861–1947

Robert L. Heilbroner book The Worldly Philosophers

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter VIII, Thorstein Veblen, p. 233

“The subjective self emerges most purely in states of sensory deprivation, when the blank screen of consciousness has projected upon it only the individual hallucinatory subjective self, without sensory correction or editing, without reality testing or any such objective “noise.””

Weston La Barre (1911–1996) anthropologist

Source: Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972), p. 263

“Cognitive therapy seeks to alleviate psychological stresses by correcting faulty conceptions and self-signals. By correcting erroneous beliefs we can lower excessive reactions.”

Aaron T. Beck (1921) American Psychiatrist

Cognitive Therapy (1976), Page 216.

“Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

“The excesses of the 80s must not reappear in the 90s, The last thing we need now is a return to the 80s philosophy of 'greed is good' and that the only useful interest is self-interest.”

Paul Keating (1944) Australian politician, 24th Prime Minister of Australia

From a speech he delivered in Bankstown, New South Wales on the 24th of February 1993
Source: http://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1993-paul-keating

“The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“Philosophy … should not imagine that specialized work in epistemological theory, or whatever else prides itself on being research, is actually philosophy. Yet a philosophy forswearing all of that must in the end be irreconcilably at odds with the dominant consciousness. Nothing else raises it above the suspicion of apologetics. Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 6

“Since modern thinking no longer entrusts itself with the translation of self-knowledge into worldly knowledge, and of world experience into self-experience, philosophy has had to withdraw from theories of "objective reason" into those of "subjective reason." The ground is thus taken from under the feet of the ancient holistic pathos, and philosophy sinks into the apparent truncatedness and groundlessness of the subjective.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 538

“In the history of mathematics, the "how" always preceded the "why," the technique of the subject preceded its philosophy.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Number: The Language of Science (1930)

“The estranged ego projects its own disorder on to society and expects the restructuring and integration of the self writ large, the society, to reflect back on to the source of consciousness. Stirner regards this flight from self as a form of suicide, the dissolution of identity and uniqueness.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 79

“Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.”

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