“Solicitation and effort or conation belong properly to animate beings alone. When they are attributed to other things, they must be taken in a metaphorical sense; but a philosopher should abstain from metaphor.”

— George Berkeley , book De Motu

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De Motu (1721)

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George Berkeley 18

Anglo-Irish philosopher 1685–1753

Christopher Tilley (1955) British postprocessual archaeologist.

[Buchli (Ed.), Victor, Christopher, Tilley, The Material Culture Reader, 2002, Berg, 1-85973-559-2, Oxford]

“Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.”

Dorianne Laux (1952) American poet

Source: The Poet's Companion: A Guide To The Pleasures Of Writing Poetry

“We often attribute "understanding" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

Minds, Brains and Programs (1980)

“So people should abstain from other animals just as they should from the human.”

Porphyry (philosopher) (233–301) Neoplatonist philosopher

4, 9, 6
On Abstinence from Killing Animals

“The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Introduction (1969)

“But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.”

Aristotle book Poetics

1459a.4
Poetics

“The new philosopher does not put metaphor to rhetorical use but subordinates it … to the strategic objective of using non-stereotyped metaphors in order to unmask the metaphors which constitute every concept.”

Sarah Kofman (1934–1994) philosopher from France

Source: Nietzsche et la métaphore (1972), p. 18

“Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

Minds, Brains and Programs (1980)

“The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

"Taboo and Metaphor"
The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)
Context: The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another — from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second.

“A metaphor is a sign of desperation when we need another world to describe what we are feeling. Metaphors are about desperation and safety. We call out to metaphor because a metaphor makes us feel safe.”

Jericho Brown (1976) American writer

On how he employs metaphors in “Jericho Brown: ‘Poetry is a veil in front of a heart beating at a fast pace” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/28/jericho-brown-book-interview-q-and-a-new-testament-poetry in The Guardian (2018 Jul 28)

“Solicitation and effort or conation belong properly to animate beings alone. When they are attributed to other things, they must be taken in a metaphorical sense; but a philosopher should abstain from metaphor.”

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George Berkeley 18

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