Quotes about philosopher
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“The French philosopher Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaïs (1766-1845) formalized the statement that good and evil fortune are exactly balanced in that they produce for each person an equivalent result.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Three, Fundamental Principles Of A Theory Of Gambling, p. 53

Evil, Personality

“Ted Seabrooke, my wrestling coach, had a kind of Nietzschean effect on me in terms of not just his estimation of my limited abilities, but his decidedly philosophical stance about how to conduct your life, what you should do to compensate for your limitations. This was essential to me, both as a student—and not a good one—and as a wrestler who was not a natural athlete but who had found something he loved.”

John Irving (1942) American novelist and screenwriter

"John Irving Interviewed by Suzanne Herel." Mother Jones magazine, May/June 1997.

Love, Life, Nature

“All those agonizing philosophical-theological conundrums amount to "Ask a silly question, get a silly answer."”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Source: Harvest of Stars (1993), Ch. 63

Question

“Let us calculate the motion of bodies, but also consult the plans of the Intelligence that makes them move.
It seems that the ancient philosophers made the first attempts at this sort of science, in looking for metaphysical relationships between numbers and material bodies. When they said that God occupies himself with geometry, they surely meant that He unites in that science the works of His power with the perspectives of His wisdom.
From the all too few ancient geometers who undertook such studies, we have little that is intelligible or well-founded. The perfection which geometry has acquired since their time puts us in a better position to succeed, and may more than compensate for the advantages that those great minds had over us.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Accord de différentes loix de la nature qui avoient jusqu’ici paru incompatibles (1744)

Wisdom, God, Intelligence, Study

“If A is A, a philosopher should equal a philosopher. But that's not the way the cosmos works. Similar things set themselves apart from one another. …What's more, opposites are joined at the hip. Einstein says that most creative acts come from opposition. They come from pitting yourself against someone with another point of view. They come from the law of differentiation. And that was true of Aristotle and his law of identity, his law of noncontradiction, his construction for the base for A is A. Aristotle came up with his idea… to fling a finger in the face of another philosopher [Heraclitus]…”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

When a Frog is a River? Aristotle Wrestles Heraclitus
The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012)

Law, Way, Idea

“Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on.”

Stanisław Lem book His Master's Voice

Source: His Master's Voice (1968), Ch. 2

Truth, Knowledge, Science

“In the beginning, at least for academics, there was philosophy. All of learned inquiry occurred within the discipline of philosophy and was carried out by philosophers. We retain the vestiges of this organization in our practice of awarding a single advanced academic degree, the Ph. D. or Doctor of Philosophy.’ As our understanding of the world around us grew, however, various areas of philosophy became sufficiently well understood to graduate into their own disciplines. Mathematics and the physical and biological sciences were the first to appear, followed more recently by the social sciences. Emerging as its own discipline is only the first step toward becoming a mature field of study. Economics is unique among the social sciences for the number of remaining steps it has taken. Unlike many social sciences, economics has a well-defined core set of methods. The first year graduate program in economics is virtually indistinguishable across American universities, consisting of microeconomics, macroeconomics and econometrics. As a result, economics can be easily defined by its tools of inquiry as by the target of its inquiry.”

Larry Samuelson (1953) American economist

Larry Samuelson. "Bounded Rationality and Game Theory", The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Vol. 36, Special Issue, 1996, pages 17-35.

World, Mathematics, Understanding, Study

“What might be called, perhaps somewhat grandiloquently, the Epistemological Question has received rather scant attention at the hands of economists. There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions, some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the economist or the social scientist. The one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant of the future.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1960s, The economics of knowledge and the knowledge of economics, 1966, p. 1, cited in: Brian Chi-ang Lin (2007) " A New Vision of the Knowledge Economy http://newdoc.nccu.edu.tw/teasyllabus/205016255002/JOES%20(July%202007).pdf"

Lie, Question, Knowledge, Past

“ENGLAND has invited the civilized world to meet in its great commercial centre; asking it, in friendly rivalry, to display for the common advantage of all, those objects which each country derives from the gifts of nature, and on which it confers additional utility by processes of industrial art.
This invitation, universally accepted, will bring from every quarter a multitude of people greater than has yet assembled in any western city: these welcome visitors will enjoy more time and opportunity for observation than has ever been afforded on any previous occasion. The statesman and the philosopher, the manufacturer and the merchant, and all enlightened observers of human nature, may avail themselves of the opportunity afforded by their visit to this Diorama of the Peaceful Arts, for taking a more correct view of the industry, the science, the institutions, and the government of this country. One object of these pages is, to suggest to such inquirers the agency of those deeper seated and less obvious causes which can be detected only by lengthened observation, and to supply them with a key to explain many of the otherwise incomprehensible characteristics of England.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. v-vi: Preface

People, World, Peace, Art

“[T]he mytaphysicks and logick of the Bráhmens, comprised in their six philosophical Sástras… have never yet been accessible to Europeans; and, by the help of the Sanscrit language, we now may read the works of the Saugatas, Bauddhas, A'rhatas, Jainas, and other heterodox philosophers, whence we may gather the metaphysical tenets prevalent in China and Japan, in the eastern peninsula of India, and in many considerable nations of Tartary: there are also some valuable tracts on these branches of science in Persian and Arabick, partly copied from the Greeks, and partly comprising the doctrines of the Súfís which anciently prevailed, and still prevail in great measure over this oriental world, and which the Greeks themselves condescended to borrow from eastern sages.”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

"On the Philosophy of the Asiatics" (1794)

World, Science, Reading, Help

“Dialectics and reflection play the same role for the philosopher as does verse for the poet.”

Sarah Kofman (1934–1994) philosopher from France

Source: Nietzsche et la métaphore (1972), p. 13

“Many people don’t know that my mother was the driving force that kept my father’s legacy at the forefront of American consciousness. Dr. King was a great man, a scholar, philosopher, theologian, orator—a leader with character and integrity. But in 1968 there was no guarantee that he would be in the annals of history the way that he is today had it not been for her solidifying his legacy.”

Bernice King (1963) American minister, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr.

People, Way, History

“I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.”

Jack Kevorkian (1928–2011) American pathologist, euthanasia activist

Quoted in "Years of Minutes"‎ - Page 332 - by Andy Rooney - 2004
2000s, 2004

Death, Penalty

“See, therefore, how you, the philosophers of various schools of thought, agree in the religion of the one God, whom you all presupposed in that which you as lovers of wisdom acknowledge”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

De Pace Fidei (The Peace of Faith) (1453)

Wisdom, God, School, Religion

“What is God? The telescope by which we hold converse with the stars, the microscope which unveils the secrets of nature, the crucible of the chemist, the knife of the anatomist, the reflective faculties of the philosopher, all the common instruments of science, avail not here. On the threshold of that impenetrable mystery, a voice arrests our steps. From out the clouds and darkness that are round about God's throne, the question comes, "Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?"”

Thomas Guthrie (1803–1873) British divine

Source: The Gospel in Ezekiel Illustrated in a Series of Discourses (1856), PP. 63-64 (Man Suffering).

God, Secret, Search, Star

“Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: 1930s, Adventures of Ideas (1933), p. 203.

Understanding, Success

“Anyone who wants to paint should read Bacon. He defined the artists as homo additus naturae... Bacon had the right idea, but listen Monsieur Vollard, speaking of nature, the English philosopher, [Bacon] didn't for-see our open-air school, nor that other calamity which has followed close upon its heels: open-air indoors.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote in a conversation with Vollard in museum The Luxembourg, Paris 1897 - standing before the 'Olympia' of Manet; as quoted in Cézanne, by Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 36
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1880s - 1890s

School, Idea, Nature, Reading

“An exoteric book contains then two teachings: a popular teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground; and a philosophic teaching concerning the most important subject, which is indicated only between the lines.”

Leo Strauss book Persecution and the Art of Writing

Source: Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), Persecution and the Art of Writing, p. 36

Books

“Kandinsky understood 'form' as a form, like an object in the real world; and a object, he said, was a narrative – and so, of course, he disapproved of it. He wanted ‘his music without words’. He wanted to be 'simple as a child'. He intended, with his 'inner-self' to rid himself of 'philosophical barricades' (he sat down and wrote something about all this). But in turn his own writing has become a philosophical barricade, even it is a barricade full of holes. It offers a kind of Middle European idea of Buddhism or, anyhow, something too theosophical for me.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

World, Music, Idea

“Measuring people and issues in terms of political parties has turned out to be philosophically fallacious if not totally misleading. This is because the platforms or positions of political parties are often superficial and structured on shifting sand. The platform of a political party of one generation can hardly be recognized by the next. Furthermore, Communism and Fascism turned out to be different names for approximately the same thing ~ the police state. They are not opposite extremes but, for all practical purposes, are virtually identical.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The 5,000 Year Leap (1981)

People, Communication

“Theologian: But what is to love?
Philosopher: To be delighted by the happiness of another.”
Theologus: Amare autem? Philosophus: Felicitate alterius delectari.

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

Confessio philosophi (1673)

Love, Happiness

“We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through but not a genocide […] Israel should not determine a historical or philosophical position on the Armenian issue. If we have to determine a position, it should be done with great care not to distort the historical realities.”

Shimon Peres (1923–2016) Israeli politician, 8th prime minister and 9th president of Israel

As quoted in "The Holocaust and Armenian Case: Highlighting the Main Differences" by Ibrahim Kaya http://www.turkishweekly.net/articles.php?id=61, in Turkish Weekly (10 April 2001)

Reality

“In his attempt to unite the Good and the True by making the Good the highest Idea of all, Plato is nevertheless usurping aretês place with dialectically determined truth. Once the Good has been contained as a dialectical idea it is no trouble for another philosopher to come along and show by dialectical methods that aretê, the Good, can be more advantageously demoted to a lower position within a "true" order of things, more compatible with the inner workings of dialectic. Such a philosopher was not long in coming. His name was Aristotle.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

Truth, Idea

“The primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

“Tis not Wit merely, but a Temper which must form the Well-Bred Man. In the same manner, 'tis not a Head merely, but a Heart and Resolution which must compleat the real Philosopher.”

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) English politician and Earl

Vol. 2, p. 206; "Miscellany III".
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)

Heart

“Without the aid of these, then, it is not possible to deal accurately with the forms of being nor to discover the truth in things, knowledge of which is wisdom, and evidently not even to philosophize properly, for "just as painting contributes to the menial arts toward correctness of theory, so in truth lines, numbers, harmonic intervals, and the revolutions of circles bear aid to the learning of the doctrines of wisdom," says the Pythagorean Androcydes. Likewise Archytas of Tarentum, at the beginning of… On Harmony, says… in about these words: "It seems to me that they do well to study mathematics, and it is not at all strange that they have correct knowledge about each thing, what it is. For if they knew rightly the nature of the whole, they were also likely to see well what is the nature of the parts. About geometry, indeed, and arithmetic and astronomy, they have handed down to us a clear understanding, and not least also about music. For these seem to be sister sciences; for they deal with sister subjects, the first two forms of being."”

Nicomachus (60–120) Ancient Greek mathematician

Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic (1926)

Wisdom, Truth, Art, Music

“The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.”

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher

Theonas: Conversations of a Sage (1921). Sheed & Ward, 1933, p. 77.

God, Knowledge

“It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both. This was the great American achievement—and if concern for the actual welfare of other nations were our present leaders' motive, this is what we should have been teaching the world. Instead, we are deluding the ignorant and the semi-savage by telling them that no political knowledge is necessary—that our system is only a matter of subjective preference—that any prehistorical form of tribal tyranny, gang rule, and slaughter will do just as well, with our sanction and support. It is thus that we encourage the spectacle of Algerian workers marching through the streets [in the 1962 Civil War] and shouting the demand: "Work, not blood!"—without knowing what great knowledge and virtue are required to achieve it. In the same way, in 1917, the Russian peasants were demanding: "Land and Freedom!" But Lenin and Stalin is what they got. In 1933, the Germans were demanding: "Room to live!" But what they got was Hitler. In 1793, the French were shouting: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!"”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

What they got was Napoleon. In 1776, the Americans were proclaiming "The Rights of Man"—and, led by political philosophers, they achieved it. No revolution, no matter how justified, and no movement, no matter how popular, has ever succeeded without a political philosophy to guide it, to set its direction and goal.
The Ayn Rand Column

War, World, Way, Motivation

“The origins of secularism in the west may be found in two circumstances—in early Christian teachings and, still more, experience, which created two institutions, Church and State; and in later Christian conflicts, which drove the two apart. Muslims, too, had their religious disagreements, but there was nothing remotely approaching the ferocity of the Christian struggles between Protestants and Catholics, which devastated Christian Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and finally drove Christians in desperation to evolve a doctrine of the separation of religion from the state. Only by depriving religious institutions of coercive power, it seemed, could Christendom restrain the murderous intolerance and persecution that Christians had visited on followers of other religions and, most of all, on those who professed other forms of their own.Muslims experienced no such need and evolved no such doctrine. There was no need for secularism in Islam, and even its pluralism was very different from that of the pagan Roman Empire, so vividly described by Edward Gibbon when he remarked that "the various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful." Islam was never prepared, either in theory or in practice, to accord full equality to those who held other beliefs and practiced other forms of worship. It did, however, accord to the holders of partial truth a degree of practical as well as theoretical tolerance rarely paralleled in the Christian world until the West adopted a measure of secularism in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

People, Truth, World, Religion

“The sixth pre-Christian century—the miraculous century of Buddha, Confucius and Lâo-Tse, of the Ionian philosophers and Pythagoras—was a turning point for the human species. A March breeze seemed to blow across the planet from China to Samos, stirring man into awareness, like the breath of Adam's nostrils. In the Ionian school of philosophy, rational thought was emerging from the mythological dream-world. …which, within the next two thousand years, would transform the species more radically than the previous two hundred thousand had done.”

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Hungarian-British author and journalist

The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

World, School, Dreams

“Conservatives — Republicans — are socialists.
True, they may desire to hold you down atop the stone altar and cut your still-beating heart out with an obsidian knife for a set of entirely different reasons — national security, Judaeo-Christian traditions, 'common' decency — than the liberals or 'progressives' or Democrats do, but to you, the important part is cutting your heart out with an obsidian knife, not whatever excuse they may offer for doing it.
This is why, no matter which political party happens to be in power, ordinary people — whose thinking and hard work maintain this civilization each and every day — never seem to get an even break with regard to their individual liberty or holding onto the fruits of their labor. It's why the late philosopher Robert LeFevre referred to Democrats and Republicans as 'Socialist Party A' and 'Socialist Party B.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"To Reduce Them Under Absolute Despotism".

People, Thinking, Heart, Parting

“According to … the French counterrevolutionaries and German Romantics, … the corpus of prejudices was a country’s cultural treasure, its ancient and tested intelligence, present as the consciousness and guardian of its thought. Prejudices were the “we” of every “I”, the past in the present, the revered vessels of the nation’s memory, its judgements carried from age to age. Pretending to spread enlightenment, the philosophes had set out to extirpate these precious residua. … The result was that they had uprooted men from their culture at the very moment when they bragged of how they would cultivate them. … Convinced that they were emancipating souls, they succeeded only in deracinating them. These calumniators of the commonplace had not freed understanding from its chains, but cut it off from its sources. The individual who, thanks to them, must now cast off childish things, had really abandoned his own nature. … The promises of the cogito were illusory: free from prejudice, cut off from the influence of national idiom, the subject was not free but shrivelled and devitalised. … Everyday opinion should therefore be regarded as the soil where thought was nourished, its hearth and sanctuary, … and not, as the philosophes would have it, as some alien authority which overwhelmed and crushed it. … The cogito needed to be steeped in the profundities of the collective mind; the broken links with the past needed repairing; the quest for independence should yield to that for authenticity. Men should abandon their scepticism and give themselves over to the comforting warmth of majoritarian ideas, bowing down before their infallible authority.”

Alain Finkielkraut (1949) French essayist, born 1949

Source: The Undoing of Thought (1988), pp. 25-26.

Men, Age, Soul, Intelligence

“She shrugged her shoulders slightly.
“What can one do?”
“You are a philosopher, Mademoiselle.””

Agatha Christie book Murder on the Orient Express

Murder on the Orient Express (1934)

“It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong.”

Saul Kripke book Naming and Necessity

Naming and Necessity (1980, p. 64)

Thinking

“The connection between facts and values is straightforward and philosophically uninteresting… values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures; the well-being of conscious creatures is what can be valued in this universe… Now, here’s the one bit of philosophy I’m going to anchor this to: imagine a universe in which every conscious creature suffers as much as it can for as long as it can – I call this the worst possible misery for everyone. The worst possible misery for everyone is bad. If the word bad is to mean anything, surely it applies to the worst possible misery for everyone… the moment you grant me that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and therefore worth avoiding… well then you have every other possible constellation of conscious experience which, by definition, is better. So you have this continuum here of states of consciousness and given that consciousness is related to the way the universe is, it’s constrained by the laws of nature in some way, there are going to be right and wrong ways to move along this continuum… now this is, in philosophy, a somewhat controversial statement. I do not see how.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, Sam Harris: Can Science Determine Human Values? http://fora.tv/2010/11/10/Sam_Harris_Can_Science_Determine_Human_Values (2010/11/10) 2010s

Law, Way, Imagination, Nature

“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

Paragraph 3.
De Motu (1721)

Sense, Effort, Animals

“Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as "the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine." I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories), when they actually belong to another. The dogma is therefore a philosopher’s myth.”

Gilbert Ryle book The Concept of Mind

Source: The Concept of Mind (1949), Ch. I: Descartes' Myth, (2) The Absurdity of the Official Doctrine

Life, Hope, Falseness

“Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was “the software, not the hardware”, increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind.”

Patricia Churchland (1943) philosopher

Introductory message at her homepage at the University of California, San Diego http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/pschurchland/presentation.html, 2013

Understanding

“Development of Western Science is based on two great achievements, the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (Renaissance). In my opinion one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to J.S. Switzer (23 April 1953), quoted in The Scientific Revolution: a Hstoriographical Inquiry By H. Floris Cohen (1994), p. 234 http://books.google.com/books?id=wu8b2NAqnb0C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA234#v=onepage&q&f=false, and also partly quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein edited by Alice Calaprice (2010), p. 405 http://books.google.com/books?id=G_iziBAPXtEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA405#v=onepage&q&f=false 1950s

Science

“If, in pursuing this object, we employ our skill in research, not in forming vain conjectures; and if data are to be found, on which Science may form just conclusions, we should not long remain in ignorance with respect to the natural history of this Earth, a subject on which hitherto opinion only, and not evidence, has decided. For in no subject is there naturally less defect of evidence, although philosophers, led by prejudice, or misguided by false theory, have neglected to employ that light by which they should have seen the system of the world.”

Stephen Baxter (1957) author

Source: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 14, “We have now got to the end of our reasoning” (p. 130)

World, History, Nature, Light

“Shouldness is being flouted here,” said Launcelot. “Shouldness is perhaps self-explanatory, but I have never seen it adequately dealt with, either in print or in the lecture hall. When that huntress got me in the bum with an arrow, it was an offense to shouldness. It shouldn’t have gone that way. I told the story to Sir Roger, and now he never tires of telling it, tells it to everyone who comes down the pike. That a knight of the Round Table could be pierced in that way by a female has a significance quite apart from the ludicrous. It’s in the realm of those things which should not happen—a category which holds much philosophical interest, as anyone who has ever looked into anomaletics will recognize. The insult to my dignity was not nearly so grave as the insult to shouldness.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

Source: The King (1990), p. 106.

Way

“Some philosophers have believed that a philosophical clarification of space also provided a solution of the problem of time. Kant presented space and time as analogous forms of visualization and treated them in a common chapter in his major epistemological work. Time therefore seems to be much less problematic since it has none of the difficulties resulting from multidimensionality. Time does not have the problem of mirror-image congruence, i. e., the problem of equal and similarly shaped figures that cannot be superimposed, a problem that has played some role in Kant's philosophy. Furthermore, time has no problem analogous to non-Euclidean geometry. In a one-dimensional schema it is impossible to distinguish between straightness and curvature. …A line may have external curvature but never an internal one, since this possibility exists only for a two-dimensional or higher continuum. Thus time lacks, because of its one-dimensionality, all those problems which have led to philosophical analysis of the problems of space.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Problem, Time

“Aristotle’s view that philosophy begins with wonder, not as in our day with doubt, is a positive point of departure for philosophy. Indeed, the world will no doubt learn that it does not do to begin with the negative, and the reason for success up to the present is that philosophers have never quite surrendered to the negative and thus have never earnestly done what they have said. They merely flirt with doubt.”

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

Journals and Papers III 3284 (1841)
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

World, Departure, Learning, Success

“As indicated by its title "A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology", this book is not just concerned with the chronology of events or with biographical details of great psychiatrists and psychopathologists. It has as its main interest, a study of the ideas underlying theories about mental illness and mental health in the Western world. These are studied according to their historical development from ancient times to the twentieth century.
The book discusses the history of ideas about the nature of mental illness, its causation, its treatment and also social attitudes towards mental illness. The conceptions of mental illness are discussed in the context of philosophical ideas about the human mind and the medical theories prevailing in different periods of history. Certain perennial controversies are presented such as those between the psychological and organic approaches to the treatment of mental illness, and those between the focus on disease entities (nosology) versus the focus on individual personalities. The beliefs of primitive societies are discussed, and the development of early scientific ideas about mental illness in Greek and Roman times. The study continues through the medieval age to the Renaissance. More emphasis is then placed on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the enlightenment of the eighteenth, and the emergence of modern psychological and psychiatric ideas concerning psychopathology in the twentieth century.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Introduction text.
A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology, (1990)

Health, Books, Age, World

“Philosophic clarity has been a key to his life in business, and he doesn’t fall for facile or self-flattering descriptions—not even, usually, for the self-flattery of thinking he is immune to self-flattery.”

John Barnes book Mother of Storms

Source: Mother of Storms (1994), p. 45

Life, Business, Thinking

“The ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus, propounded an hypothesis of the constitution of matter, and gave the name of atoms to the ultimate unalterable parts of which he imagined all bodies to be constructed. In the 17th century, Gassendi revived this hypothesis, and attempted to develope it, while Newton used it with marked success in his reasonings on physical phenomena; but the first who formed a body of doctrine which would embrace all known facts in the constitution of matter, was Roger Joseph Boscovich, of Italy, who published at Vienna, in 1759, a most important and ingenious work, styled Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis ad unicam legem virium, in Natura existentium redacta. This is one of the most profound contributions ever made to science; filled with curious and important information, and is well worthy of the attentive perusal of the modern student. In more recent days, the theory of Boscovich has received further confirmation and extension in the researches of Dalton, Joule, Thomson, Faraday, Tyndall, and others.”

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) Croat-Italian physicist

Alfred Marshall Mayer, Lecture-notes on Physics (1868) Part 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=hqsLAAAAYAAJ

Imagination, Science, Success, Parting

“I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you please; that there is no centre to the maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only “one undisturbed song of pure concent” to which we are ever likely to lend our musical voices.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

Crabbed Age and Youth.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

Music, Thinking

“I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.”

Donald Davidson (philosopher) (1917–2003) scriitor amator

Davidson, Donald. " A nice derangement of epitaphs http://www.hf.uio.no/csmn/english/research/news-and-events/events/davidson_derangement.pdf." Philosophical grounds of rationality: Intentions, categories, ends 4 (1986): 157.

Communication, Idea, Thinking, Sense

“I do reproach a school of modern philosophers for wishing to force, so to speak, impersonal philosophy, a moral science, indifferent nature, to speak the same language as our aspirations and our passions — even, I grant, our generous aspirations, our noble passions. Our innate and psychic tendencies (in the moral, social, and religious realms) are phenomena for science to record and authenticate, not to justify or legitimize. The epoch of scholasticism ought to be left behind for good and all.”

Albert Schinz (1870–1943) American writer

Anti-Pragmatism; an Examination into the Respective Rights of Intellectual Aristocracy and Social Democracy (1909), pp. xvii-xviii.

School, Nature, Passion, Science

“In writing this book, I hope I have offered some guidance to those—the young especially—trying to articulate their objections to our way of life. However, this is not enough. As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge. Philosophers, it was famously observed, have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Conclusion: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

Life, Books, World, Hope

“In order to try to remove what we are going to say from what risks happening, if we judge by the many signs, to Marx's work today, which is to say also to his injunction. What risks happening is that one will try to play Marx off against Marxism so as to neutralize, or at any rate muffle the political imperative in the untroubled exegesis of a classified work. One can sense a coming fashion or stylishness in this regard in the culture and more precisely in the university. And what is there to worry about here? Why fear what may also become a cushioning operation? This recent stereotype would be destined, whether one wishes it or not, to depoliticize profoundly the Marxist reference, to do its best, by putting on a tolerant face, to neutralize a potential force, first of all by enervating a corpus, by silencing in it the revolt [the return is acceptable provided that the revolt, which initially inspired uprising, indignation, insurrection, revolutionary momentum, does not come back]. People would be ready to accept the return of Marx or the return to Marx, on the condition that a silence is maintained about Marx's injunction not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that "changes the world. In the name of an old concept of reading, such an ongoing neutralization would attempt to conjure away a danger: now that Marx is dead, and especially now that Marxism seems to be in rapid decomposition, some people seem to say, we are going to be able to concern ourselves with Marx without being bothered-by the Marxists and, why not, by Marx himself, that is, by a ghost that goes on speaking. We'll treat him calmly, objectively, without bias: according to the academic rules, in the University, in the library, in colloquia! We'll do it systematically, by respecting the norms of hermeneutical, philological, philosophical exegesis. If one listens closely, one already hears whispered: "Marx, you see, was despite everything a philosopher like any other; what is more [and one can say this now that so many Marxists have fallen silent], he was a great-philosopher who deserves to figure on the list of those works we assign for study and from which he has been banned for too long.29 He doesn't belong to the communists, to the Marxists, to the parties-, he ought to figure within our great canon of Western political philosophy. Return to Marx, let's finally read him as a great philosopher."”

Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx

We have heard this and we will hear it again.
Injunctions of Marx
Specters of Marx (1993)

People, World, Fear, Fashion

“How few philosophers are to be found who are such in character, so ordered in soul and in life, as reason demands; who regard their teaching not as a display of knowledge, but as the rule of life; who obey themselves, and submit to their own decrees!”
Quotus enim quisque philosophorum invenitur, qui sit ita moratus, ita animo ac vita constitutus, ut ratio postulat? qui disciplinam suam non ostentationem scientiae, sed legem vitae putet? qui obtemperet ipse sibi et decretis suis pareat?

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book II, Chapter IV; translation by Andrew P. Peabody
Tusculanae Disputationes – Tusculan Disputations (45 BC)

Life, Soul, Knowledge

“The term “introspective psychology” is misleading in that it covers a variety of diverging positions on the theory and practice of introspection. From the beginning there was a basic discrepancy between the British and the German philosophic tradition, the former relying more exclusively on introspection than the latter. Wilhelm Wundt’s advocacy and use of introspection was extremely circumscribed and essentially limited to simple judgments tied to external stimulation. During the first decade of the twentieth century some experimental psychologists, notably E. B. Titchener and the, greatly enlarged the scope of introspection, ushering in the brief vogue of “systematic introspection.” The latter never gained wide support in North America and was supplanted in Germany by developments that do not constitute “introspective psychology” in any precise sense.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: "The history of introspection reconsidered." 1980, p. 241

Support, Sense

“Not being a philosopher I've had to work through my feelings and puzzlements in poems.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

Feeling

“He [the Philosopher] should have made many mistakes and been saved often by the skin of his teeth, for the skin of one’s teeth is the most teaching thing about one. He should have been, or at any rate believed himself, a great fool and a great criminal. He should have cut himself adrift from society, and yet not be without society.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

The Philosopher
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XI - Cash and Credit

Fools

“We write in the language of Dryden and Addison, of Milton and Shakespeare, but the intellectual world we inhabit is that of Flaubert and Baudelaire; it is to them, and not to their English contemporaries, that we owe our conception of modern life. The artist whose reward is perfection and where perfection can be obtained only by a separation of standards from those of the non-artist is led to adopt one of four rôles: the High Priest (Mallarmé, Joyce, Yeats), the Dandy (Firbank, Beerbohm, Moore), the Incorruptible Observer (Maugham, Maupassant) or the Detached Philosopher (Strachey, Anatole France). What he will not be is a Fighter or Helper.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 4: The Modern Movement (p. 30)

Life, World, Perfection

“As a bio-philosopher — as someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and in a sense, we have become the process itself — through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and to anticipate the future and to choose from amongst alternatives.”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

Responding to a question of whether he holds his views as a philosopher or as a biologist.
The Open Mind interview (1985)

Imagination, Nature, Sense, Future

“Philosophy is said to have taken the 'linguistic turn' in this century. One hundred years ago, a philosopher would think in terms of mind, spirit, experience, consciousness; now the by-word is language.”

David Wood (1946) British philosopher, born 1946

Source: Philosophy At The Limit (1990), Chapter 2, Metaphysics and Metaphor, p. 26

Thinking

“To begin again at the beginning in a proper philosophical manner, one person is a unity, and somehow, after the long complex process, a work of art is a similar unity. But the person is fairly unintelligible and the art is intelligible. Primarily what is intelligible is the nature of the artist, either of the past or now. The interests, thought and quality of the artist make the final total quality of the work.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Donald Judd (1983) in: Donald Judd (1987) Complete writings, 1975-1986. p. 28 ; Quoted in: " Archives http://www.juddfoundation.org/archives" at juddfoundation.org, 2014 1980

Art, Intelligence, Nature, Past

“Poetry, as nearly as I can understand it, is a statement in words about a human experience, whether the experience be real or hypothetical, major or minor; but it is a statement of a particular kind. Words are symbols for concepts, and the philosopher or scientist endeavors as far as may be to use them with reference to nothing save their conceptual content. Most words, however, connote feelings and perceptions, and the poet, like the writer of imaginative prose, endeavors to use them with reference not only to their denotations but to their connotations as well. Such writers endeavor to communicate not only concepts, arranged, presumably, either in rational order or in an order of apprehensible by the rational mind, but the feeling or emotion which the rational content ought properly to arouse.”

Yvor Winters (1900–1968) American poet and literary critic

The Audible Reading of Poetry (1951)

Feeling, Imagination, Communication, Understanding

“The story of the brain's separation from the body begin with Rene Descartes. The most influential philosopher of the seventeenth century, Descartes divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clock-like," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs.”

Jonah Lehrer book Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Source: Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007), Chapter 1, page 3.

Life, Soul, Light, Science

“Books are the tools of both teacher and pupil. A library is perhaps the most important adjunct of instruction. It is open to all and is used by all. In every department of science throughout the world the keenest intellects are at work, seeking for solutions to the unending series of problems that present themselves in the physical and natural world. 'Light, more light,' said the dying philosopher, and the longing of the world is but the echo of his last faint cry. To do our duty and to give reply to the many demands made upon us requires all the light and all the experience of other minds, wheresoever they may be found.”

Henry H. Goodell (1839–1905)

Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, (1900), p. 17.

Books, World, Nature, Problem

“The term "cult" is always one of individual judgment. It has been variously applied to groups involved in beliefs and practices just off the beat of traditional religions; to groups making exploratory excursions into non-Western philosophical practices; and to groups involving intense relationships between followers and a powerful idea or leader. The people I have studied, however, come from groups in the last, narrow band of the spectrum: groups such as the Children of God, the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Krishna Consciousness movement, the Divine Light Mission, and the Church of Scientology. I have not had occasion to meet with members of the People's Temple founded by the late Reverend Jim Jones, who practiced what he preached about being prepared to commit murder and suicide, if necessary, in defense of the faith.”

Margaret Singer (1921–2003) clinical psychology

Coming Out of the Cults http://www.cultfaq.org/coming-out-of-the-cults.html, Dr. Margaret Singer, Psychology Today, January, 1979 1970s

God, Children, People, Faith

“The philosopher will ask himself … if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) French phenomenological philosopher

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 47

God, History, Falseness

“Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel? …We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap [a term due to J. Levine, "Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap" Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64:354-61, 1983] between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it.”

David Chalmers (1966) Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist

"Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," 1995

Feeling

“It [chess] is eminently and emphatically the philosopher's game.”

Paul Morphy (1837–1884) American chess player

As quoted in Testimonials to Paul Morphy: Presented at University Hall, New York, May 25, 1859

Game

“THERE is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality.”

David Hume book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Of Liberty and Necessity, Part II (http://www.bartleby.com/37/3/12.html)
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
Context: THERE is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of dangerous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the person of an antagonist odious.

Religion

“How does the philosophical question differ from the non-philosophical question? To philosophize means, we said, to direct one's view toward the totality of the world. So is that a philosophical question (and that alone) which has for its explicit and formal theme the sum-total of all existing things? No! What is peculiar and distinctive about a philosophical question is that it cannot be posed, considered, or answered (so far at least as an answer is possible) without "God and the world" also coming into consideration, that is, the whole of what exists.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Since "the answers of the special sciences" do not reach "the horizon of total reality", they are given "without having to speak at the same time of 'God and the world.'" (p. 96)
Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, p. 95

God, World, Question

“O Petronius, thou hast seen what endurance and comfort that religion gives in misfortune, how much patience and courage before death; so come and see how much happiness it gives in ordinary, common days of life. People thus far did not know a God whom man could love, hence they did not love one another; and from that came their misfortune, for as light comes from the sun, so does happiness come from love. Neither lawgivers nor philosophers taught this truth, and it did not exist in Greece or Rome; and when I say, not in Rome, that means the whole world. The dry and cold teaching of the Stoics, to which virtuous people rally, tempers the heart as a sword is tempered, but it makes it indifferent rather than better.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz book Quo Vadis

Quo Vadis (1895)

Love, Life, Death, God

“There exists an alternative to reductionism for studying systems. This alternative is known as holism. Holism considers systems to be more than the sum of their parts. It is of course interested in the parts and particularly the networks of relationships between the parts, but primarily in terms of how they give rise to and sustain in existence the new entity that is the whole whether it be a river system, an automobile, a philosophical system or a quality system.”

Mike Jackson (1951) systems scientist

Source: Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers (2003), p. 4

Study, Parting

“Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

Byron
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)

“Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the organisation.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1816)

Way, Idea, Appearance, Time

“Only Bowgentle, the philosopher-poet, his old friend, had an inkling of what he meant and even then Bowgentle believed that it reflected not on the nature of the landscape but on the particular nature of Count Brass’s mind.
“You’re exhausted, disorientated,” Bowgentle would say. “The ordering mechanism of the brain is working too hard, so you see a pattern to existence that, in fact, only stems from your own weariness and disturbance…””

Michael Moorcock book The Sword of the Dawn

Book 1, Chapter 2 “The Flamingoes’ Dance” (p. 261)
The Sword of the Dawn (1968)

Nature

“The chief requisite for the making of a good chicken pie is chicken; no amount of culinary legerdemain can make up for the lack of chicken. In the same way, the chief requisite for the history of science is intimate scientific knowledge; no amount of philosophic legerdemain can make up for its absence.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

"The Teaching of the History of Science" Sci. Monthly 7, 193-211 (1918).

Way, History, Knowledge, Science

“The Corn Law is as great a robbery of the man who follows the plough as it is of him who minds the loom…If there be one view of the question which stimulates me to harder work in this cause than another, it is the fearful sufferings which I know to exist amongst the rural laborers in almost every part of this kingdom…And then a fat and sleek dean, a dignitary of the Church and a great philosopher, recommends for the consumption of the people—he did not read a paper about the supplies that were to be had in the great valley of the Mississippi—but he said that there were swede, turnip and mangel-wurzel; and the Hereditary Earl Marshal of England, if to out-Herod Herod himself, recommends hot water and a pinch of curry-powder. The people of England have not, even under thirty years of Corn Law influence, been sunk so low as to submit tamely to this insult and wrong. It is enough that a law should be passed to make your toil valueless, to make your skill and labor unavailing to procure for you a fair supply of the common necessaries of life—but when to this grievous iniquity they add the insult of telling you to go, like beasts that perish, to mangel-wurzel, or to something which even the beasts themselves cannot eat, then I believe the people of England will rise, and with one voice proclaim the downfall of this odious system.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech at an Anti-Corn Law League meeting (summer 1843), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 93-94.
1840s

Life, People, Fear, Law

““Good God!” he mummered. “I don‘t know what to believe.”
“In that respect,” returned Vance, “you‘re in the same disheartenin‘ predic‘ment as all the philosophers.””

S. S. Van Dine book The Benson Murder Case

Source: The Benson Murder Case (1926), Ch. 23

God

“Ascetic rigor? This doesn’t mean something like ‘renounce’ or even a ‘lack’ of something. No, it means, in philosophical manner (and especially in the historic Greek sense of ‘Askesis’), a special kind of internal yearning, a special power wherein, despite all depressions, defeats, and failures you develop a new power to ‘keep’ to something, to create something. It’s something like an obsession. Bach, Mozart, Schubert, they all (and their oeuvre) are filled from this phenomenon, and it’s this spirit which keeps this music so vivid and alive – and fashioned for all times and generations.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Music, Fashion, Failure, Sense

“By these criteria let Alexander also be judged! For from his words, from his deeds, and from the instruction' which he imparted, it will be seen that he was indeed a philosopher.”

Plutarch book Moralia

On the Fortune Of Alexander, I, 4, 328B Loeb, F.C. Babbitt
Moralia, Others

“One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

“Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #54
Athenäum (1798 - 1800)

“There are different levels of organization in the occurrence of events. You cannot explain the events of one level in terms of the events of another. For example, you cannot explain life in terms of mechanical concepts, nor society in terms of individual psychology. Analysis can only take you down the scale of organization. It cannot reveal the workings of things on a higher level. To some extent the holistic philosophers are right.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport, General Systems, Vol. 14, (1969), p. 96; As cited in: Gordon Chen (1980) The General Theory of Systems Applied to Management and Organization, Volume 2, p. 590
1960s

Life

“The new painter owes the abstract artist a debt for giving him his language, but the new painting is concerned with a new type of abstract thought... He [the new painter] is declaring that the art of Western Europe is voluptuous art first, an intellectual art by accident. He is reversing the situation by declaring that art is an expression of the mind first and whatever sensuous elements are involved are incidental to that expression. The new painter is therefore the true revolutionary, the real leader who is placing the artist's function on its rightful plane of the philosopher and the pure scientist who is exploring the world of ideas, not the world of the senses.... so the artist is today giving us a vision of the world of truth in terms of visual symbols.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 2. 1943-1945, p. 127

Truth, World, Art, Idea

“If judges are pragmatic, as I think they largely are in our system, it can only be in the everyday sense of the term. But immediately the counterexample of Holmes, a gifted and serious though not systematic philosophical thinker, comes to mind.”

Richard A. Posner (1939) United States federal judge

Law, pragmatism, and democracy (2003), Ch. 2. Legal Pragmatism.

Thinking, Sense

“Thus far, gentlemen, I have been insisting very strenuously upon what the most vulgar common sense has every disposition to assent to and only ingenious philosophers have been able to deceive themselves about. But now I come to a category which only a more refined form of common sense is prepared willingly to allow, the category which of the three is the chief burden of Hegel's song, a category toward which the studies of the new logico-mathematicians, Georg Cantor and the like, are steadily pointing, but to which no modern writer of any stripe, unless it be some obscure student like myself, has ever done anything approaching to justice.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.59
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)

Justice, Sense, Study

“We must first of all, however, definitely understand, in reference to the end we have in view, that it is not the concern of philosophy to produce religion in any individual. Its existence is, on the contrary, presupposed as forming what is fundamental in every one. So far as man s essential nature is concerned, nothing new is to be introduced into him. To try to do this would be as absurd as to give a dog printed writings to chew, under the idea that in this way you could put mind into it. It may happen that religion is awakened in the heart by means of philosophical knowledge, but it is not necessarily so. It is not the purpose of philosophy to edify, and quite as little is it necessary for it to make good its claims by showing in any particular case that it must produce religious feeling in the individual.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Lectures on the philosophy of religion, together with a work on the proofs of the existence of God. Translated from the 2d German ed. by E.B. Speirs, and J. Burdon Sanderson: the translation edited by E.B. Speirs. Published 1895 p. 4
Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, Volume 1 (1827)

Religion, Dogs, Way, Feeling

“The materialist theory of knowledge amounts, then, to this statement, that the human organ of cognition radiates no metaphysical light, but is a piece of Nature which pictures other pieces of Nature whose essence is explained when we describe it and bring it in connection with the whole Universe as the one Reality and the real Unity. Such a description demands from the epistemologist or philosopher that he should treat his subject in the same precise way as the animal world is treated by the zoologist. Should I be reproached with not following this precept immediately, I would point to Rome which, too, was not built in one day.”

Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888) german philosopher

Excursions of a Socialist into the Domain of Epistemology http://www.marxists.org/archive/dietzgen/1887/epistemology.htm (1887)

World, Way, Nature, Knowledge

“I could not have learned to listen to coyotes without having first learned to listen to my unwillingness to sell my hours, then to listen to the signals of my body, then to listen to the disease that has made my insides my home, and thus become a part of me. And I could not have learned to listen to coyotes without having talked to other people courageous enough to validate my perception of an animate world. I talked to the writer Christoper Manes, who said, 'For most cultures through history--including our own in preliterate times--the entire world used to speak. Anthropologists call this animism, the most pervasive worldview in human history. Animistic cultures listen to the natural world. For them, birds have something to say. So do worms, wolves, and waterfalls.' Later the philosopher Thomas Berry told me, 'The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightning and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees--all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related.”

Derrick Jensen book A Language Older Than Words

Source: A Language Older Than Words (2000), p. 361

People, World, Disease, Home

“Of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently — though as little of one as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Source: Brave New World (1932), Ch. 1

Happiness, Intelligence, Idea, Evil

“Let Divines, and Philosophers, Statesmen and Patriots unite their endeavours to renovate the Age, by impressing the Minds of Men with the importance of educating their little boys, and girls — of inculcating in the Minds of youth the fear, and Love of the Deity, and universal Phylanthropy; and in subordination to these great principles, the Love of their Country — of instructing them in the Art of self government, without which they never can act a wise part in the Government of Societys great, or small — in short of leading them in the Study, and Practice of the exalted Virtues of the Christian system.”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Letter to John Adams (4 October 1790) http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/4sdms10.txt

Love, Men, Youth, Age

“The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

“Intelligence has two parts, which we shall call the epistemological and the heuristic. The epistemological part is the representation of the world in such a form that the solution of problems follows from the facts expressed in the representation. The heuristic part is the mechanism that on the basis of the information solves the problem and decides what to do.
[…]
The right way to think about the general problems of metaphysics and epistemology is not to attempt to clear one's own mind of all knowledge and start with 'Cogito ergo sum' and build up from there. Instead, we propose to use all of our knowledge to construct a computer program that knows. The correctness of our philosophical system will be tested by numerous comparisons between the beliefs of the program and our own observations and knowledge.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

John McCarthy and Patrick J. Hayes. " Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcchay69.html", Sect. 2.1, Machine Intelligence 4, ed. Donald Michie (Elsevier, 1969), p. 463 ff., ISBN 0444197443 1960s

World, Way, Intelligence, Knowledge

“As the reader is aware, at the cradle of our learning stood the philosophy of Asia Minor and Greece, itself influenced in turn by Indian and Oriental philosophical and religious conceptions. It is the tragedy of this philosophy that, although it was traditionally directed towards the undogmatic acquisition of wisdom and virtue, always regarding the freedom of human rational thought in visionary fashion as the highest good, it nevertheless inevitably led to a mental hardening of the arteries into coercive thought models.”

Fred Polak (1907–1985) Dutch futurologist

Source: Prognostics, 1971, p. 57. Chapter 4: Philosophical models of the future http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Polak%204.%20Philosophical%20Models.htm

Wisdom, Fashion, Freedom, Learning

“The end of the philosophical dialogue lies in itself; it can never serve a purpose outside of itself. Just as a sculptor does not cease to be a work of art even if it lies at the bottom of the sea, so indeed every work of philosophy endures, even if uncomprehended in its own time. One would be grateful if it were merely a matter of incomprehension. Instead, the work is usually refitted and appropriated by various entities-some playing the part of the opponent; others, that of the proponent. P.3-4”

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) German philosopher (idealism)

Philosophy and Religion 1804)

Art, Time, Parting, Sea

“Criminal history shows us how many torturers of men, and murderers, have first been torturers of animals. The manner in which a nation in the aggregate treats animals, is one chief measure of its real civilization. The Latin races, as we know, come forth badly from this examination; we Germans, not half well enough. Buddhism has done more in this direction than Christianity, and Schopenhauer more than all ancient and modern philosophers together. The warm sympathy with sentient Nature which pervades all the writings of Schopenhauer, is one of the most pleasing aspects of his thoroughly intellectual, yet often unhealthy and unprofitable philosophy.”

David Strauss (1808–1874) German theologian

The Old Faith and the New (Der alte und der neue Glaube, 1872, translated from the 6th edition by M. Blind, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1873), vol. II, part IV, ch. 71, pp. 59 https://archive.org/stream/oldfaithnewconfe01stra#page/59/mode/2up-60.

Men, History, Nature, Animals

“Our failure to discern a universal good does not record any lack of insight or ingenuity, but merely demonstrates that nature contains no moral messages framed in human terms. Morality is a subject for philosophers, theologians, students of the humanities, indeed for all thinking people. The answers will not be read passively from nature; they do not, and cannot, arise from the data of science. The factual state of the world does not teach us how we, with our powers for good and evil, should alter or preserve it in the most ethical manner.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Nonmoral Nature", pp. 42–43
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

People, World, Failure, Nature

“I’m not sure who’s in charge of “The Stone,” the New York Times‘s philosophy column, but that person is not doing their job. Imagine if some of our greatest living philosophers would post there about matters diverse: ethics, animal rights, abortion, drone strikes, and so on. But all too often the column is about God; that is, we have Great Minds lucubrating about nonexistent beings. Among all species of philosophy, the philosophy of religion is the most intellectually depauperate. It’s a waste of time.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Didn’t you know: God’s a question, not an answer! https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/04/10/didnt-you-know-gods-a-question-not-an-answer/" April 10, 2016

God, Religion, Imagination, Time

“Reason has, especially today, many other manifestations than philosophical ones.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928) Peruvian theologian

Source: A Theology of Liberation - 15th Anniversary Edition, Chapter One, Theology: A Critical reflection, p. 5

“The word ontology comes from the Greek ontos for being and logos for word. It is a relatively new term in the long history of philosophy, introduced by the 19th century German philosophers to distinguish the study of being as such from the study of various kinds of beings in the natural sciences. The traditional term for the types of beings is Aristotle's word category, which he used for classifying anything that can be said or predicated about anything.”

John F. Sowa (1940) artificial intelligence researcher

John F. Sowa, "Building, Sharing and Merging Ontologies" http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/ontoshar.htm on jfsowa.com. Last Modified: 01/18/2009.

History, Nature, Study, Science

“Only a few years ago one could observe, at least among German psychologists, a quite pessimistic mood. After the initial successes of experimental psychology in its early stages, it seemed to become clearer and clearer that it would remain impossible for experimental method to press on beyond the psychology of perception and memory to such vital problems as those with which psychoanalysis was concerned. Weighty 'philosophical' and 'methodological' considerations seemed to make such an undertaking a priori impossible.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935, p. v.

Mood, Problem, Memory, Success

“The amazing number of species; their curious forms, so infinitely varied, and yet so nearly and gradually approximating through an endless series of transitions from one species to another; the diversity of structure observable in those parts which afford generic characters, added to the wonderful changes in form which they undergo, with their surprising economy - are circumstances which contribute to render them objects of most curious speculation to the philosopher. And although the study of every class of animals is most indisputably attended with peculiar advantages, yet we shall venture to affirm, that is from a knowledge of the characters, metamorphoses, and various modes of life, this little animals are destined to pursue, that [the natural philosopher] will obtain a more intimate acquaintance with the great laws of nature, and veneration for the Great Creator of all, that can be derived from the contemplation of any other class in nature.”

William Elford Leach (1790–1836) English zoologist and marine biologist

As quoted in Entomology https://archive.org/stream/CUbiodiversity1121039#page/646/mode/2up/search/creator (1816), Volume 8 of the first American edition of Sir David Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, p. 646.

Life, Law, Nature, Knowledge

“Consciousness is an incredibly delicate subject because it offend. It's a subject that scientific groups kept away from. They said it was a philosophical concept.”

Igor Aleksander (1937) scientist

The simple things are hardest (2005)

Quotes about philosopher page 10

Quotes about philosopher
page 10