Quotes about philosophy
page 10

“Some people criticize philosophy as pointless navel-gazing. But there is a lot more to it than just that. There’s also a lot of beard-stroking: and to my experience, quite a lot of arrogant condescension too.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Philosophistry http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/04/12/philosophistry/ (April 12, 2017)

People

“My personal philosophy is that all writers need to put GET PAID in their mission statement. All that artistic creative stuff is nice too, but make sure GET PAID is in there”

Larry Correia (1977) American fantasy writer

in all caps <br class="br">"How Authors Get Paid, part 2", Monster Hunter Nation http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/06/25/how-authors-get-paid-part-2/, 2015-06-15

Personality

“Nietzsche’s arrival in modern philosophy signaled an unprecedented necessity: “probity”, “intellectual conscience”, Enlightenment radicalized by a new bravery that scorns any comforts like God.”

Laurence Lampert (1941) American academic

Source: Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (1996), p. 5

God

“Peoples views on how the government should conduct its financial operations are heavily influenced by their political philosophies.”

Harvey S. Rosen (1949) American economist

Getting Started, p. 1
Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition

People

“As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs. In Kant's time the creed of conventional people was Christian, now it is humanist. Nor are these two faiths so different from one another.Over the past 200 years, philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error — the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Deception: At the Masked Ball (p. 37)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

People, Faith, Error, Time

“The trouble with the world today is philosophical: only the right philosophy can save us. But this party plagiarizes some of my ideas, mixes them with the exact opposite—with religionists, anarchists and every intellectual misfit and scum they can find—and call themselves libertarians and run for office.”

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

Rand, Ayn (2005). Mayhew, Robert, ed. Ayn Rand Answers, the Best of Her Q&A. New York: New American Library. p. 73. (1976)

World, Idea

“Ernest Bramah's China, then, is the fantastic bogus China of convention, not the real historical thing at all. He wrote of it in a prose so perfectly conceived that it becomes a miracle of style. As Hilaire Belloc once observed, the sly humor and philosophy of Bramah's stories is a trick he achieves by pretending to adapt the flavor of Chinese literary conventions into the English. But the thing I love most about the tales is their irony and the brilliance of their wit.”

Ernest Bramah (1868–1942) English author

Lin Carter Discoveries in Fantasy (London, 1974) pp. 5-6.
Criticism

Love

“O'Reilly: Mr. Silverman, it is a fact that Christianity is not a religion, it is a philosophy. If the government were saying that the Methodist religion, all right, deserves a special place in the public square, I will be on your side.
Silverman: So you are going to actually tell me on live television that Christianity is not a religion?
O'Reilly: Correct. It is a phil-o-so-phy.”

Bill O'Reilly (1949) American political commentator, television host and writer

2012-11-28
The O'Reilly Factor
Fox News
Television, quoted in * 2012-11-29
O'Reilly calls atheists fascists, claims Christianity not a religion
Michael
Stone
Examiner.com
http://www.examiner.com/article/o-reilly-calls-atheists-fascists-claims-christianity-not-a-religion
2012-12-12

Religion

“An innovative discussion of building empirical models and the fitting of surfaces to data. Introduces the general philosophy of response surface methodology, and details least squares for response surface work, factorial designs at two levels, fitting second-order models, adequacy of estimation and the use of transformation, occurrence and elucidation of ridge systems, and more. Some results are presented for the first time. Includes real-life exercises, nearly all with solutions.”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

Introduction, book summary
Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987)

Life, Exercises, Time

“What the structure of Rawls’s argument indicates is a more fundamental feature of his thought. This is an amphibious world, which contains just enough land of real social reference to avoid the tricky deeps of first philosophy (the gesture is roughly: let’s start out from where we’re at – in other words, Bush–Clinton country), while floating carefully enough on the waters of abstraction to avoid contact with the ground of actual political change (for example: what has happened in the US since the 1970s). The result is a kind of political cabotage, a critique of existing society that clings nervously to its shores. Readers of Rawls might well ask: where is the actual justice in the United States that corresponds to the ideal construct he offers us, if it is based on ‘plain truths widely accepted by citizens’?”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 4. "Designing Consensus, John Rawls" (1994), p. 108-9

Truth, World, Justice, Water

“Many innovations of current history and philosophy of science were, in fact, anticipated in Neurath’s oeuvre. The rediscovery of Neurath was therefore not merely a phenomenon of academic nostalgia, but itself constitutes research into the conditions and possibilities of changing a paradigm in the philosophy of science.”

Friedrich Stadler (1951) Austrian historian

Friedrich Stadler (1996). "Otto Neurath—encyclopedia and utopia." In: E. Nemeth & F. Stadler (Eds.). Encyclopedia and utopia: The life and work of Otto Neurath (1882–1945), Boston: Kluwer. Stadler, 1996, p. 3

History, Nostalgia, Science, Change

“Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

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

Vol. V, par. 265
Collected Papers (1931-1958)

Heart

“Since its Parmenidean organization, ontology has built the portico of its ruined temple out of the following experience: what presents itself is essentially multiple; what presents itself is essentially one. The reciprocity of the one and being is certainly the inaugural axiom of philosophy - Leibniz formulation is excellent; 'What is not a being is not a being - yet it is also its impasse; an impasse in which the revolving doors of Plato's Parmenides introduce us to the singular joy of never seeing the moment of conclusion arrive. For if being is one, then one must posit that what is not one, the multiple, is not. But this is unacceptable for thought because what is presented is multiple and one cannot see how there could be an access to being outside all presentation. If presentation is not, does it still make sense to designate what presents (itself) as being? On the other hand, if presentation is, then the multiple necessarily is.”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology
Being and Event (1988)

Sense, Joy

“(…) I have written so far around 200 books and articles on different aspects of science, philosophy, theology, and hekmat (wisdom). (…) I never entered the service of any king as a military man or a man of office, and if I ever did have a conversation with a king, it never went beyond my medical responsibility and advice. (…) Those who have seen me know, that I did not into excess with eating, drinking or acting the wrong way. As to my interest in lil pump yuhh!! people know perfectly well and must have witnessed how I have devoted all my life to science since my youth. My patience and diligence in the pursuit of science has been such that on one special issue specifically I have written 20,000 pages (in small print), moreover I spent fifteen years of my life - night and day - writing the big collection entitled Al Hawi. It was during this time that I lost my eyesight, my hand became paralyzed, with the result that I am now deprived of reading and writing. Nonetheless, I've never given up, but kept on reading and writing with the help of others. I could make concessions with my opponents and admit some shortcomings, but I am most curious what they have to say about my scientific achievement. If they consider my approach incorrect, they could present their views and state their points clearly, so that I may study them, and if I determined their views to be right, I would admit it. However, if I disagreed, I would discuss the matter to prove my standpoint. If this is not the case, and they merely disagree with my approach and way of life, I would appreciate they only use my written knowledge and stop interfering with my behaviour.”

Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (865–925) Persian polymath, physician, alchemist and chemist, philosopher

Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, and Artists

Life, Wisdom, People, Books

“Hints towards the solution of the problem of Eternity can be found in the various symbols and allegories of ancient religions and in some of the modern as well as ancient philosophies.”

P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) Russian esotericist

A New Model of the Universe (1932)

Religion, Problem

“Thy steady temper, Portius,
Can look on guilt, rebellion, fraud, and Cæsar,
In the calm lights of mild philosophy.”

Joseph Addison book Cato

Act I, scene i.
Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

Fraud, Light

“[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 6

Boy, Housing

“Thus we have the spectacle, still to be seen today, of the western rancher who accepts federal aid for his cattle operations and federal aid for his grazing requirements, but bitterly opposes all social programs that do not concern him, and the philosophy that lies behind them.”

Charles A. Reich book The Greening of America

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter III : The Failure Of Reform, p. 55

“The warfare between poetry and philosophy certainly started with Plato, who was both poet and philosopher.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

“In the sixth century B. C., Gautama, an Aryan princeling on the northern frontier of India, formulated a bleakly pessimistic philosophy that markedly resembles Schopenhauer's. This high doctrine of negation, for reasons that would require an extensive historical explanation, became extremely popular, but was variously interpreted by at least eighteen rival schools, each of which claimed alone to preserve the true teaching of Gautama the Buddha, and Gautama's austere atheism was gradually contaminated and obscured by the usual theological techniques, so that a philosophy that was intended to supplant religion was converted into just another elaborate and learned superstition.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"On the Roof of the World", Liberty Bell magazine (December 1987)
1970s, 1980s

School, Religion, Learning

“Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Stand up for the real meaning of freedom," http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/01/the-right-way/ The Spectator (January 2014).

“Autonomy means acting on reasons I have chosen; but the lesson of cognitive science is that there is no self to do the choosing. We are far more like machines and wild animals than we imagine. But we cannot attain the amoral selflessness of wild animals, or the choiceless automatism of machines. Perhaps we can learn to live more lightly, less burdened by morality. We cannot return to a purely spontaneous existence. If humans differ from other animals, it is partly in the conflicts of their instincts. They crave security, but they are easily bored; they are peace-loving animals, but they have an itch for violence; they are drawn to thinking, but at the same time they hate and fear the unsettlement thinking brings. There is no way of life in which all these needs can be satisfied. Luckily, as the history of philosophy testifies, humans have a gift for self-deception, and thrive in ignorance of their natures.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Vices of Morality: Animal virtues (p. 115-6)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Love, Life, Hate, Fear

“Some students of philosophy have unreasonably high expectations of the subject. They expect it to provide them with a complete and detailed picture of the human predicament. They think that philosophy will reveal to them the meaning of life, and explain to them every facet of our complex existences. Now, although studying philosophy can illuminate fundamental questions about our lives, it does not provide anything like a complete picture, if indeed there could be such a thing. Studying philosophy isn’t an alternative to studying art, literature, history, psychology, anthropology, sociology, politics, and science.”

Nigel Warburton (1962) British author and lecturer

Philosophy : the basics (Fifth Edition, 2013), Introduction

Life, Art, History, Literature

“Our agrarian revolution has been a process in which the landlord class owning the land is transformed into a class that has lost its land, while the peasants who once lost their land are transformed into small holders who have acquired land, and it will be such a process once again. In given conditions having and not having, acquiring and losing, are interconnected; there is identity of the two sides. Under socialism, private peasant ownership is transformed into the public ownership of socialist agriculture; this has already taken place in the Soviet Union, as it will take place everywhere else. There is a bridge leading from private property to public property, which in philosophy is called identity, or transformation into each other, or interpenetration.”

Mao Zedong book On Contradiction

On Contradiction (1937)
Original: (zh-CN) 我们实行过的土地革命，已经是并且还将是这样的过程，拥有土地的地主阶级转化为失掉土地的阶级，而曾经是失掉土地的农民却转化为取得土地的小私有者。有无、得失之间，因一定条件而互相联结，二者具有同一性。在社会主义条件之下，农民的私有制又将转化为社会主义农业的公有制，苏联已经这样做了，全世界将来也会这样做。私产和公产之间有一条由此达彼的桥梁，哲学上名之曰同一性，或互相转化、互相渗透。

“Today we know that on the sub-atomic level the fate of an electron or a whole atom is not determined by its past. But this discovery has not led to any basically new departure in the philosophy of nature, only to a state of bewildered embarrassment, a further retreat of physics into a language of even more abstract symbolism. Yet if causality has broken down and events are not rigidly governed by the pushes and pressures of the past, may they not be influenced in some manner by the "pull" of the future—which is a manner of saying that "purpose" may be a concrete physical factor in the evolution of the universe, both on the organic and unorganic levels. In the relativistic cosmos, gravitation is a result of the curvature and creases in space which continually tend to straighten themselves out—which, as Whittaker remarked, "is a statement so completely teleological that it certainly would have delighted the hearts of the schoolmen."”

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

Epilogue [footnote referenced E.T. Whittaker's Space and Spirit (1946)]
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

Fate, Departure, Nature, Universe

“They opposed brute force to reason and philosophy, and battalions of foreign mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas were to be impaled on bayonets!”

Rafael Sabatini book Scaramouche

Book III : Chapter 2. Quos Deus Vult Perdere
Scaramouche (1921)

Idea

“Being good is the same as being a philosopher. If you obey your father, you will follow the will of a man; if you choose the philosopher's life, the will of God. It is plain, therefore, that your duty lies in the pursuit of philosophy.”

Gaius Musonius Rufus (25–95) Roman philosopher

Fragment 16 "What is the best provision for old age," in Moral Exhortation (1986), p. 32

Life, God

“A major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one’s own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason. The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias.”

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

“Neither History Nor Praxis,” pp. 38-39.
Outside Ethics (2005)

History, Nature, Study, Help

“To say that I did not support the candidacy of Mr. Trump is the understatement of the year. I fiercely opposed it… I have criticized as unnecessary his policy on pausing immigration from certain countries, and I have criticized as weak to the point of meaningless his executive order on religious freedom. Indeed, I characterized it as a betrayal of his promise to reverse Obama era anti-religious-liberty policies. Donald Trump is not, and usually doesn't pretend to be, a man of strict or high principles… As a pragmatist, he doesn't have a governing philosophy — he's neither a conservative nor a liberal. On one day he'll give a speech to some evangelical pastors that makes him sound like a religious conservative, but the next day he'll lavishly praise Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is waging an all-out war on those who stand up for traditional moral values in Canada.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

2017, Interview with Matthew Bunson (2017)

War, Support, Freedom, Betrayal

“The dichotomies which are the signature of their work – the esoteric and the exoteric, the civil and the managerial, the friend and the foe, the lawful and the legislative – are so many cordons. Their function is to hold popular sovereignty at bay. The different gifts displayed in this enterprise, whatever view is taken of it, were remarkable. For all his later tendency to textual dressage, Strauss's range and subtlety as a master of the canon of political philosophy had no equal in his generation. Schmitt's moral instability never impaired an extraordinary capacity to fuse conceptual insight and metaphoric imagination in lightning flashes of illumination around the state. Hayek could seem tactically ingenuous, but he fashioned a theoretical synthesis out of his epistemology and economics whose scope and strength has yet to be supplanted. Oakeshott was the literary artist in this gallery. His writing varies considerably in quality, and can be whimsically arch at one moment and curiously crude at another, disconcertingly close to Punch or Cross-Bencher. But at its best, when it moves into high register, it can rise to a lyrical beauty.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 1. "The Intransigent Right, Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich von Hayek" (1992), p. 27

Law, Beauty, Imagination, Fashion

“Mr. Wilson does not write as one who believes in a particular religion but rather as an intellectual who is being forced more and more into accepting religion as the only solution to the problem of the Outsider. In other words, the anxiety and uneasiness, the sheer horror of being oneself in the modern world is not to be cured by reason or even of study of philosophies which set out to explain them, like Existentialism; the unpleasant symptoms have to be lived through, leading to the worst, in order that the final, mystical experience may be attained. The Outsider has it within him to become a saint. Yet, though Mr. Wilson is drawn to religion, and all his arrows point that way, he never departs from his standards of intellectual analysis.”

Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) British author

'Loser Take All', Sunday Times, p. 5 (27 May 1956)

World, Religion, Way, Problem

“The Philosophy of Nature takes up the material, prepared for it by physics out of experience, at the point to which physics has brought it, and again transforms it, without basing it ultimately on the authority of experience. Physics therefore must work into the hands of philosophy, so that the latter may translate into a true comprehension (Begriff) the abstract universal transmitted to it, showing how it issues from that comprehension as an intrinsically necessary whole.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1816)

Nature, Universe

“The highest activities are always essentially lonely and private, and these men had a robust sense of their independence and the ultimate self-sufficiency of the mind. In this they were just like Socrates. The only change they operated was to bring philosophy out of the closet into the open, instead of seeking protection behind a little wall like men in a storm. Of course, in so doing they made philosophy, on the one hand, more vulnerable to the public if the hopes of controlling the public are not fulfilled, and, on the other, put at risk that inner intransigence which is the necessary condition of the quest for truth. Not only the rewards but the new responsibilities might prove irresistible temptations to compromise.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 290.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Men, Truth, Hope, Sense

“If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Miracles

Source: Miracles (1947), Ch. 1: "The Scope of this Book"

“For four or five centuries, Islam was the most brilliant civilization in the Old World. (…) At its higher level the golden age of Muslim civilization was both an immense scientific success and a exceptional revival of ancient philosophy. These was not its only triumphs; literature was another: but they eclipse the rest. First, science: it was there that the Saracens (…) made the most original contributions. These, in brief, were nothing less than trigonometry and algebra (with its significantly Arab name). (…) Equally distinguished were Islam's mathematical geographers, its astronomical observatories and instruments (…). The Muslims also deserve high marks for optics, for chemistry (…) and for pharmacy. More than half the remedies and healing aids used by the West came from Islam (…). Muslim medical skill was incontestable. (…) In the field of philosophy, what took place was rediscovery - a return, essentially of the peripatetic philosophy. The scope of this rediscovery, however, was not limited to copying and handling on, valuable as that undoubtely was. It also involved continuing, elucidating and creating.”

Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) French historian and a leader of the Annales School

A History of Civilizations , Penguin, 1995, p. 73-81

Age, World, Literature, Mathematics

“Most merciful and gracious God, who hast preserved me unto this hour, I most humbly acknowledge Thee as the guide and companion of my youth. Thou hast protected me through the dangers of infancy and childhood, and in my youth Thou didst bless me with the full enjoyment, the happy intimacy, of the best of fathers. Be as gracious and merciful then as Thou hast hitherto been, now that I am about to enter a new stage of existence. Teach me, I beseech Thee, to strengthen in my soul the cultivation of Thy truth, the recollection of the uncertainty of life, the greatness of the objects for which I was created. Revive those delightful religious impressions which in early days I felt more strongly than now; and as Thou hast been pleased lately to permit me to look to a way of life to which formerly I dared not to do, let the leisure I shall enjoy enlarge my warmth of heart towards Thee. Make every branch of study which I may pursue strengthen my confidence in Thy ever-ruling providence, that, undeceived by views of false philosophy, I may ever in singleness of heart elevate my mind from Thy works unto Thy divine essence. Keep from me a vain and overbearing spirit; let me- ever have a thorough sense of my own ignorance and weakness; and keep me through all the trials and troubles of a transitory state in body and soul unto everlasting life, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen.”

James David Forbes (1809–1868) Scottish physicist and glaciologist

"Completing my Twenty-first Year" (1839), a prayer written by Forbes on April 20th, 1830. Life and letters of James David Forbes p. 450.

Life, God, Happiness, Truth

“Thus the word reveals the Divine Essence; His incarnation makes that Life, that Love, that Light, which is eternally resident in God obvious to souls that steadily contemplate Himself. These terms Life, Love, Light — so abstract, so simple, so suggestive — meet in God; but they meet also in Jesus Christ. They do not only make Him the centre of a philosophy; they belong to the mystic language of faith more truly than to the abstract terminalogy of speculative thought. They draw hearts to Jesus; they invest Him with a higher than any intellectual beauty.”

Henry Liddon (1829–1890) British theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 91.

Love, Life, God, Faith

“Take heed not to be transformed into a Caesar, not to be dipped in the purple dye, for it does happen. Keep yourself therefore, simple, good, pure, grave, unaffected, the friend of justice, religious, kind, affectionate, strong for your proper work. Wrestle to be the man philosophy wished to make you. Reverence the gods, save men. Life is brief; there is but one harvest of earthly existence, a holy disposition and neighborly acts.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

VI, 30
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VI

Life, Men, God, Justice

“There are many serious political scientists who have argued that the age of sovereignty is over. They want a frontier less, borderless world, and that is a very dangerous philosophy which may suit the most developed and powerful countries of the world, and not those who are small and developing. That is why we are rather cautious in our liberalisation policy. We went ahead in certain sectors. We went rather slowly in other sectors. And, this has helped us.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

Age, World, Help, Country

“When we say 'This flag (Muslim League's flag) is the flag of Islam' they think we are introducing religion into politics - a fact of which we are proud. Islam gives us a complete code. It is not only religion but it contains laws, philosophy and politics. In fact, it contains everything that matters to a man from morning to night. When we talk of Islam we take it as all embracing word. We do not mean any ill. The foundation of our Islamic code is that we stand for liberty, equality and fraternity.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) Founder and 1st Governor General of Pakistan

Address to the Gaya Muslim League Conference in January 1938

Religion, Law, Thinking, Night

“No one can examine this record and escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology, the popular preaching of George Whitefield, had aroused the thought and stirred the people of the Colonies in preparation for this great event. No doubt the speculations which had been going on in England, and especially on the Continent, lent their influence to the general sentiment of the times. Of course, the world is always influenced by all the experience and all the thought of the past. But when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live. They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

God, People, World, Search

“Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Dylan Revisited http://europe.newsweek.com/dylan-revisited-174056?rm=eu, Newsweek (1997)

Truth, Music

“My primary object is to defend and advance a principle in which I see the only possible relief from much that enthralls and degrades and distorts, turning light to darkness and good to evil, rather than to gage a philosopher or weigh a philosophy. Yet the examination I propose must lead to a decisive judgment upon both.”

Henry George (1839–1897) American economist

Introduction : The Reason for the Examination
A Perplexed Philosopher (1892)

Decision, Light, Evil

“The claim of philosophy to be about the whole can be secured only if the many "ordinary" languages in the whole can be taken over by an act of persuasion into a language about the whole.”

Mark D. Jordan (1953)

Authority and persuasion in philosophy (1985)

“Wundt initiated the first systematic psychological research programme. This achievement occurred at the same time as his elaboration of a philosophy of science which was anti-inductivist and stressed the priority of explanatory motives. Specifically psychological explanations depended on concepts of psychological causality as manifested in apperceptive or volitional processes. The major differences between the Wundtian and other models of psychological experimentation can be understood in the light of this general approach. Thus experimenters and subjects had to be enlightened collaborators and the role of introspection was more significant in an explanatory than in a purely observational context. Wundt's special requirements for the psychological experiment led him to reject other early models as exemplified by the hypnotic experiment in which the experimenter-subject relationship was closer to what was to become the norm in the twentieth century.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Kurt Danziger, "Wundt's psychological experiment in the light of his philosophy of science." Psychological Research 42.1-2 (1980). p. 109; Summary

Motivation, Light, Science, Time

“For the longest time, I didn't know the name of anyone in Led Zeppelin. I didn't care about what they looked like or ate. I wanted to listen, not read about them. I've always had that philosophy. I never started playing drums to get chicks or money or anything else. Long before I had concepts of those things, I wanted to be a drummer. That's the basic concept of what I do. I'm a drummer. I play drums. We are artists as drummers, and people should realize that. Not everyone can sit down and use all four of your limbs simultaneously to create something out of wood and plastic. We're creating something beautiful, and it may not sound pretty, but if you listen with the right ear, it sounds very pretty. If you try and listen to a song without drums, you haven't got anything.”

John Dolmayan (1973) Lebanese-born Armenian–American songwriter and drummer

[Artist Features: Steal This Article: John Dolmayan, Weiss, David, May 2003, http://drummagazine.com/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=241, 2007-01-08]

Money, People, Beauty, Time

“Phenomenology is not a philosophy; it is a philosophical method, a tool. It is like an adjustable spanner that can be used for dismantling a refrigerator or a car, or used for hammering in nails, or even for knocking somebody out.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966), p. 92

Cars

“I always say—a prejudice on my part, I'm sure—you can tell a lot about a person's character from his choice of sofa. Sofas constitute a realm inviolate unto themselves. This, however, is something that only those who have grown up sitting on good sofas will appreciate. It's like growing up reading good books or listening to good music. One good sofa breeds another good sofa; one bad sofa breeds another bad sofa. That's how it goes. There are people who drive luxury cars, but have only second- or third-rate sofas in their homes. I put little trust in such people. An expensive automobile may well be worth its price, but it's only an expensive automobile. If you have the money, you can buy it, anyone can buy it. Procuring a good sofa, on the other hand, requires style and experience and philosophy. It takes money, yes, but you also need a vision of the superior sofa. That sofa among sofas.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter Five: Tabulations, Evolution, Sex Drive

Money, People, Books, Music

“Political philosophy was concerned with the best or just order of society which is by nature best or just everywhere or always, while politics is concerned with the being and well-being of this or that particular society (a polis, a nation, an empire) that is in being at a given place for some time.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy (1971)

Nature, Time

“Too much philosophy makes men mad.”

Alan Judd (1946) British writer

Page 21.
The Noonday Devil (1987)

Men, Madness

“The legislator of the Jews in a bolder spirit went to a further extreme and in the practice of his “naked” philosophy, as they call it, ventured to speak of him who was possessed by love of the divine.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

43.
Every Good Man is Free

Love

“The absolute and static were even taken over by such dynamically oriented psychological schools as the Freudian in the form of the permanent unconscious ideas. In Jung, the unconscious psychic life was enlarged to the static "racial unconscious" and to the static "collective unconscious". Along with the static viewpoint, these psychologies took over the idea of guilt, even after their separation from philosophy. In so doing, they fell into a cul de sac from which there was no way out.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

On Jungian psychology, in Ch. 2 : "The Two Basic Pillars of Human Thinking: "God" and "Ether".
Ether, God and Devil (1949)

Life, School, Way, Idea

“Philosophy is an everlasting fire, sometimes damped down by setting itself limits, then flaring into new life as it consumes them. Every field of inquiry is limited, but philosophy has an essential relation to the question of limits, to its own limits.”

David Wood (1946) British philosopher, born 1946

Introduction, p. xiii
Philosophy At The Limit (1990)

Life, Question

“The mark of Platonic philosophy is a radical dualism. The Platonic world is not one of unity; and the abyss which in many ways results from this bifurcation appears in innumerable forms. It is not one, but two worlds, which Plato sees when with the eyes of his soul he envisages a transcendent, spaceless, and timeless realm of the Idea, the thing-in-itself, the true, absolute reality of tranquil being, and when to this transcendent realm he opposes the spacetime sphere of his sensuous perception-a sphere of becoming in motion, which he considers to be only a domain of illusory semblance, a realm which in reality is not-being.”

Hans Kelsen (1881–1973) Austrian lawyer

"Platonic Justice", Ethics, April 1938. Translated by Glenn Negley from "Die platonische Gerechtigkeit," Kantstudien, 1933. (The author corrected the translation in 1957), published in What is Justice? (1957)

World, Way, Soul, Idea

“Framed with regard to the established religion, this philosophy runs essentially parallel thereto; and so, being perhaps intricately composed, curiously trimmed, and thus rendered difficult to understand, it is always at bottom and in the main nothing but a paraphrase and apology of the established religion. Accordingly, for those teaching under these restrictions, there is nothing left but to look for new turns of phrase and forms of speech by which they arrange the contents of the established religion. Distinguished in abstract expressions and thereby rendered dry and dull, they then go by the name of philosophy.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

In Folge hievon wird, so lange die Kirche besteht, auf den Universitäten stets nur eine solche Philosophie gelehrt werden dürfen, welche, mit durchgängiger Rücksicht auf die Landesreligion abgefaßt, dieser im Wesentlichen parallel läuft und daher stets,—allenfalls kraus figurirt, seltsam verbrämt und dadurch schwer verständlich gemacht,—doch im Grunde und in der Hauptsache nichts Anderes, als eine Paraphrase und Apologie der Landesreligion ist. Den unter diesen Beschränkungen Lehrenden bleibt sonach nichts Anderes übrig, als nach neuen Wendungen und Formen zu suchen, unter welchen sie den in abstrakte Ausdrücke verkleideten und dadurch fade gemachten Inhalt der Landesreligion aufstellen, der alsdann Philosophie heißt.
Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, pp. 152–153, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 140
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

Religion, Understanding

““That the historic systems of philosophy, not only those which have been directly influenced by the historic systems of religion and theology, but also those which have originated more or less in opposition to these, or in correction of them, are unequal to meeting the conditions essential to the existence of a moral order and to the possibility of a moral life in individuals, will appear plainly upon a brief analysis of their leading conceptions.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix B: The System in its Ethical Necessity and its Practical Bearings

Life, Religion, Appearance

“Today we have media … which actually specialize in the kind of obscenity which the cultivated, not the prurient, find repugnant. … It is contended that such material is the raw stuff of life, and that it is the duty of the organs of public information to leave no one deceived about the nature of the world. The assertion that this is the real world begs the most important question of all. The raw stuff of life is precisely what the civilized man desires to have refined, or presented in a humane framework, for which sentiment alone can afford the support. … One of the great conspiracies against philosophy and civilization, a conspiracy immensely aided by technology, is just this substitution of sensation for reflection.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 28-30.

Life, World, Question, Support

“Knowledge conceived as an instrument is a means to the end of power. The goal of philosophy, however, is not to gain power over the Absolute but to know it as it truly is.”

Merold Westphal (1940)

Source: History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology (1979), p. 4

Knowledge

“In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), H. G. Wells pointed out that ever since the beginning of life, most creatures have been 'up against it'. Their lives are a drama of struggle against the forces of nature. Yet nowadays you can say to a man: Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but -- what do you do? His real interest may be in something else -- art, science, literature, philosophy. The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, and man is a creature of the mind.”

Colin Wilson book From Atlantis to the Sphinx

Source: From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1996), p. 346-347

Love, Life, Hate, Family

“The dominant concept in Aristotle's philosophy of nature is his notion of causation. …The final cause states that each substance has an inherent purpose. Thus there must be a purpose or design in the acorn such that it always grows into an oak tree. This aspect of existence is indicated by the word entelechy; this means the purpose that guides things to develop in one way rather than another.”

John Freely (1926–2017) American physicist

Source: Before Galileo, The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe (2012), p. 291

Way, Nature, Tree

“These Thoughts, my dear Friend, are many of them crude and hasty, and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some Reputation in Philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, ’till corrected and improved by Time and farther Experience. But since even short Hints, and imperfect Experiments in any new Branch of Science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good Effect, in exciting the attention of the Ingenious to the Subject, and so becoming the Occasion of more exact disquisitions (as I before observed) and more compleat Discoveries, you are at Liberty to communicate this Paper to whom you please; it being of more Importance that Knowledge should increase, than that your Friend should be thought an accurate Philosopher.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Letter from Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, September 1753.
1750s

Communication, Knowledge, Science, Time

“By science I mean an assemblage of transcendental propositions discoverable by human reason, and reducible to first principles, axioms, or maxims, from which they may all be derived in a regular succession; and there are consequently as many sciences as there are general objects of our intellectual powers: when man first exerts those powers, his objects are himself and the rest of nature; himself he perceives to be composed of body and mind… and in the leisure… his intellect is directed to nature at large, to the substance of natural bodies, to their several properties, and to their quantity… and… arrives at the demonstration of a first intelligent cause; whence his collected wisdom, being arranged in the form of science, chiefly consists of physiology and medicine, metaphysicks and logick, ethicks and jurisprudence, natural philosophy and mathematicks; from which the religion of nature (since revealed religion must be referred to history, as alone affording evidence of it) has in all ages and in all nations been the sublime and consoling result.”

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

p, 125
"On the Philosophy of the Asiatics" (1794)

Wisdom, Age, Religion, History

“Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Italiens ou français, la misère nous regarde tous. Depuis que l'histoire écrit et que la philosophie médite, la misère est le vêtement du genre humain; le moment serait enfin venu d'arracher cette guenille, et de remplacer, sur les membres nus de l'Homme-Peuple, la loque sinistre du passé par la grande robe pourpre de l'aurore.
Letter To M. Daelli on Les Misérables (1862)

People, History, Tear, Past

“Rightly or wrongly, football is very definitely tied up with the status of a university. The majority of people who go to college…they don’t get that wider horizon or that better mental equilibrium. But they do get the opportunity. I think the same thing is true about football. While possibly the majority of boys don’t get those subjective values that I mentioned, certainly the opportunity is there, and I think the values they do get are perhaps more intensely brought out than they are in an educational system itself. As far as any activities I have been connected with are concerned, football has given me the opportunity to round out my philosophy and to change my thinking process more than any other activity with which I have been connected.”

Nile Kinnick (1918–1943) College football player

Audio interview (1942)

People, Education, Boy, Thinking

“Some fundamental unity was surely to be discerned either in the matter or the structure of things. The Ionic philosophers chose the former field: Pythagoras took the latter. …The geometry which he had learnt in Egypt was merely practical. …It was natural to nascent philosophy to draw, by false analogies, and the use of a brief and deceptive vocabulary, enormous conclusions from a very few observed facts: and it is not surprising if Pythagoras, having learnt in Egypt that number was essential to the exact description of forms and of the relations of forms, concluded that number was the cause of form and so of every other quality. Number, he inferred, is quantity and quantity is form and form is quality.
Footnote2 Primitive men, on seeing a new thing, look out especially for some resemblance in it to a known thing, so that they may call both by the same name. This developes a habit of pressing small and partial analogies. It also causes many meanings to be at attached to the same word. Hasty and confused theories are the inevitable result.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

Men, Nature, Drawing, Falseness

“The two great conceptual revolutions of twentieth-century science, the overturning of classical physics by Werner Heisenberg and the overturning of the foundations of mathematics by Kurt Gödel, occurred within six years of each other within the narrow boundaries of German-speaking Europe. … A study of the historical background of German intellectual life in the 1920s reveals strong links between them. Physicists and mathematicians were exposed simultaneously to external influences that pushed them along parallel paths. … Two people who came early and strongly under the influence of Spengler's philosophy were the mathematician Hermann Weyl and the physicist Erwin Schrödinger. … Weyl and Schrödinger agreed with Spengler that the coming revolution would sweep away the principle of physical causality. The erstwhile revolutionaries David Hilbert and Albert Einstein found themselves in the unaccustomed role of defenders of the status quo, Hilbert defending the primacy of formal logic in the foundations of mathematics, Einstein defending the primacy of causality in physics. In the short run, Hilbert and Einstein were defeated and the Spenglerian ideology of revolution triumphed, both in physics and in mathematics. Heisenberg discovered the true limits of causality in atomic processes, and Gödel discovered the limits of formal deduction and proof in mathematics. And, as often happens in the history of intellectual revolutions, the achievement of revolutionary goals destroyed the revolutionary ideology that gave them birth. The visions of Spengler, having served their purpose, rapidly became irrelevant.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Life, People, History, Mathematics

“Philosophies, like old soldiers, do not die, they merely fade away.”

Reuben Abel

Pragmatism and the Outlook of Modern Science (1966)

“Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, research is the means of all learning, and ignorance is the end.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Attributed

Learning

“Philosophy, like speaking prose, is something have to do all our lives, well or badly, whether we notice it or not.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).

“It has often occurred to my mind in digesting my thoughts on this subject, what a pity it is that this most useful science should be so generally neglected in the modern methods of education; and that preceptors and tutors, both in public and private seminaries of learning, should forget that the forming the manners is more necessary to a finished education than furnishing the minds of youth. Socrates, who made all his philosophy subservient to morality, was of this sentiment: and took more pains to rectify the tempers than replenish the understandings of his pupils; and looked upon all knowledge as useless speculation that was not brought to this end, to make us wiser and better men. And, without doubt, if in the academy the youth has once happily learned the great art of managing his temper, governing his passions, and guarding his foibles, he will find a more solid advantage from it in afterlife, than he could expect from the best acquaintance with all the systems of ancient and modern philosophy.”

John Mason (1706–1763) English Independent minister and author

A Treatise on Self-Knowledge (1745)

Men, Pain, Youth, Education

“In history, we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, however, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or to the future, but with that which is, both now and eternally — in short, with reason.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

As translated by H. B. Nisbet (1975)
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

History, Past, Future

“It accords with the most liberal spirit of philosophy to suppose that not a stone can fall, or a plant rise, without the immediate agency of divine power.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter VII, paragraph 10, lines 8-10

“Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance…to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its tides and the life of man…The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to Kent.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 3, Sympathetic Magic.

Life, Death, Secret, Sea

“All of the members of my new team have displayed in their work a strong sense of pragmatism that I promote. … While the backgrounds of principal officials are diverse, they all share a common commitment to our country, our territory and our people and agree with my governing philosophy.”

Donald Tsang (1944) Hong Kong politician

As quoted in "Donald Tsang unveils new HKSAR gov't lineup" at Xinhua News (23 June 2007) http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-06/23/content_6281710.htm

People, Sense, Strong, Country

“The auspices for philosophy are bad if, when proceeding ostensibly on the investigation of truth, we start saying farewell to all uprightness, honesty and sincerity, and are intent only on passing ourselves off for what we are not. We then assume, like those three sophists [Fichte, Schelling and Hegel], first a false pathos, then an affected and lofty earnestness, then an air of infinite superiority, in order to impose where we despair of ever being able to convince.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 22
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real

Truth, Falseness, Sincerity, Despair

“Buddhism … is neither [a philosophy nor] a religion in the sense in which that word is commonly understood, for it is not "a system of faith and worship owing any allegiance to a supernatural being."”

Narada Maha Thera (1898–1983) Sri Lankan monk and missionary

Buddhism in a Nutshell

Faith, Religion, Sense

“I must here acknowledge that the best naturall philosophic that I ever coulde learn in this point, was neither out of Aristotle's Physicks, nor Velcurie's Naturall Philosophy, nor garseous meteors, nor out of any of the olde philosophicall fathers, that writ so many hundred years past; but that little which I have, I gathered it on the backside of Moore fieldes, where, by sundrie undoubted argument, I did heare it maintained, that all the elementes doo onely differ in attenuation and condensation: so as earth beeing attenuated becommeth water; and water condensate, becommeth earth; water attenuated becommeth aier, and aier condensate becommeth water; and so likewise aier attenuated becommeth fire, and fire condensate becommeth aier; and thus all of them spring from one roote, which being admitted is a manifeste proofe that there is a greate and neere affinity betweene the lande and the sea, wherein we shall finde salte water enough for our purpose.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

As cited in: Robert Kemp Philp (1859, p. 74)
The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594

Spring, Learning, Water, Bee

“…during a period in history psychology was still a branch of academic philosophy. The psychological concepts developed by philosophers of mind, such as “dominant ideas” (akin to the automatic thoughts of Beck’s cognitive therapy) “habit and association” (a subjective precursor of Pavlovian conditioning), and “imitation and sympathy” (which we now call “role-modelling” and “empathy”), are repeatedly mentioned by Braid as the theoretical framework upon which his science of hypnotism, “neuro-hypnology”, was built. Braid’s friend and collaborator, Prof. William B. Carpenter, discusses the theoretical principles of this in his Principles of Mental Physiology (1889), especially in the chapter ‘Of Common Sense’ which concludes by quoting an approving letter from the philosopher John Stuart Mill sent to Carpenter in 1872. Mill agrees with Carpenter’s contention that “common sense”, by which he means a kind of intellectual intuition analogous to the ancient Greek concept of nous, is a combination of innate and acquired judgements, which have a “reflexive” or “automatic” quality and appear to consciousness as “self-evident” truths.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

James Braid, in The Original Philosophy of Hypnotherapy (from The Discovery of Hypnosis) http://ukhypnosis.wordpress.com/category/james-braid-the-founder-of-hypnotherapy/page/2/.

Truth, Quotes, History, Idea

“I don't understand quite a good deal of what is said by Art-Language, but I admire the investigatory energies, the tireless spade-work (not calling one one), the full commitment to the reestablishment of a valid language by which to discuss art and the occasional humour in their writings. The chaos in their reasons fascinates me, but it is also irritating to be unequipped to evaluate their work. I don't know how it is or if it is evaluated by adepts in philosophy as philosophy, but I find it infuriating to have to take them on faith.”

Lucy R. Lippard (1937) American art curator

Source: Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973), p.151.

Faith, Art, Understanding

“We classify ourselves into vocations, each of which either wields some particular tool, or sells it, or repairs it, or sharpens it, or dispenses advice on how to do so; by such division of labors we avoid responsibility for the misuse of any tool save our own. But there is one vocation — philosophy — which knows that all men, by what they think about and wish for, in effect wield all tools. It knows that men thus determine, by their manner of thinking and wishing, whether it is worthwhile to wield any.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“November: Axe-in-Hand”, p. 68.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "November: Axe-in-Hand," "November: A Mighty Fortress," and "December: Pines above the Snow"

Men, Thinking

“Kuhn had the genius to find the words and sketch the concepts that made important old philosophical problems relevant to the public and newly discussable by philosophers. He had the strength of mind and commitment to lead the discussion. He could speak the truly incommensurable languages of physics, philosophy, and history, all necessary to frame and advance his epistemological quest. He wrote, as one of his admirers, Margaret Masterman, put it, in a "quasi-poetic style," sometimes veiled, sometimes with "rhetorical exaggeration," but always after careful and even painful thought. Or, to switch metaphors, he drew the portrait of science in the manner of the Impressionists. At a distance, where most viewers stand, the portrait appears illuminating, persuasive, and inspiring; close in, where historians and philosophers stare, it looks sketchy, puzzling, and richly challenging.”

John L. Heilbron (1934) American historian

Thomas Samuel Kuhn: 18 July 1922-17 June 1996 (1998)

Pain, History, Problem, Appearance

“If the American Atheists Society or Saddam Hussein himself ever sent an unrestricted gift to any of my ministries, be assured I will operate on Billy Sunday's philosophy: The Devil's had it long enough, and quickly cash the check.”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

Christianity Today (9 February 1998) http://www.thedarwinpapers.com/FalwellMoon.htm

“I think that I have succeeded in making it clear that this doctrine gives room for explanations of many facts which without it are absolutely and hopelessly inexplicable; and further that it carries along with it the following doctrines: first, a logical realism of the most pronounced type; second, objective idealism; third, tychism, with its consequent thoroughgoing evolutionism. We also notice that the doctrine presents no hindrences to spiritual influences, such as some philosophies are felt to do.”

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

The Law of Mind (1892)

Thinking

“Heidegger's philosophy is neither atheism nor theism, but a description of the world from which God is absent.”

William Barrett (philosopher) book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Nine, Heidegger, p. 187

God, World

“Politics is not a self-enclosed activity, organically generating a body of concepts internal to it. What counts as a set of ideas with a bearing on the political conflicts of a time varies according to epoch and region. Today it stretches far beyond the purview of political science, traditionally conceived. Philosophy, economics, history, sociology, psychology, not to speak of the earth and life sciences, and the arts, all intersect at different points with terrain of politics, in its classic definition.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Foreword, p. xi

Life, Art, History, Idea

“Philosophy is not a matter of knowledge; it is a matter of understanding, that is to say, of organizing what is known.”

Anthony Kenny (1931) British philosopher

What I Believe (2006), p. 14
Source: https://books.google.com/books/about/What_I_Believe.html?id=bQnZcFiCz8QC&pg=PA14 What I Believe

Understanding, Knowledge

“Our Constitution has given us the framework for a strong nation, a Union of States; a nation of harmony between the Union and States and between the various institutions of our democratic polity. We can claim to have achieved significant success in the diverse and inter-connected spheres of democratic governance, our Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary. The philosophy of the Constitution nurtures a polity where the precepts and practices of democracy can become second nature to the people. Through the elections to eleven Lok Sabhas, the people of India have repeatedly displayed their determination to fulfil their duties as responsible citizens of the Republic.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

Address By Dr. Shanker Dayal Sharma President Of India On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The First Sitting Of The Constituent Assembly

People, Democracy, Nature, Strong

“Neither party has God on its side, a monopoly on good ideas, or a lock on any single fiscal, social, or moral philosophy.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://mikebloomberg.com/en/issues/public_health/mayor_bloomberg_delivers_opening_address_at_ceasefire_bridging_the_political_divide_conference
Partisanship

God, Idea