Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician
“Commerce and Culture,” p. 286.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)
“Plato began his philosophic career as the result of a conversion. This is surely an existential beginning.”
Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Four, Hebraism And Hellenism, p. 70
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William Barrett (philosopher)25
American academic 1913–1992Related quotes
“Ideal goals are a menace in themselves, as much in more modern philosophers as in Plato.”
Moses I. Finley (1912–1986) American historian
Source: Democracy Ancient And Modern (Second Edition) (1985), Chapter 1, Leaders and Followers, p. 6
“Batman Begins leaks existential phoniness from the first frame.”
Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic
Review http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/movies/review/2005/06/15/batman_begins/index.html of Batman Begins (2005)
“From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.”
Simone de Beauvoir book The Ethics of Ambiguity
Part I : Ambiguity and Freedom
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
Context: From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. It was by affirming the irreducible character of ambiguity that Kierkegaard opposed himself to Hegel, and it is by ambiguity that, in our own generation, Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, fundamentally defined man, that being whose being is not to be, that subjectivity which realizes itself only as a presence in the world, that engaged freedom, that surging of the for-oneself which is immediately given for others. But it is also claimed that existentialism is a philosophy of the absurd and of despair. It encloses man in a sterile anguish, in an empty subjectivity. It is incapable of furnishing him with any principle for making choices. Let him do as he pleases. In any case, the game is lost. Does not Sartre declare, in effect, that man is a “useless passion,” that he tries in vain to realize the synthesis of the for-oneself and the in-oneself, to make himself God? It is true. But it is also true that the most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning. One does not offer an ethics to a God. It is impossible to propose any to man if one defines him as nature, as something given. The so-called psychological or empirical ethics manage to establish themselves only by introducing surreptitiously some flaw within the manthing which they have first defined.
Richard Rorty book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Preface
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)
Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer
[NewsBank, 'Science Guy' Visits Volcano, The Chronicle, Centralia, Washington, May 18, 2009, Paula Collucci]
Alfred North Whitehead book Process and Reality
Pt. II, ch. 1, sec. 1.
Source: 1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
