Philip Kitcher Quotes - Page 2

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• The "little theme" from Vinteuil, heard by Swann as emblematic of his love for Odette, remains a point of reference for him, as the character of that love changes and as the love eventually fades.

  Philip Kitcher

  Character, Littles, His Love

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I would like to undermine the stereotype of "strict philosophy." J.L. Austin remarked that, when philosophy is done well, it's all over by the bottom of the first page. I take him to have meant that the real work comes in setting up the problem with which you are dealing, and thus getting your reader to take particular things for granted.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Real, Austin

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  6 Copy quote

• After two years of undergraduate study, it was clear that I was bored by the regime of problem-solving required by the Cambridge mathematical tripos. A very sensitive mathematics don recommended that I talk to the historian of astronomy, Michael Hoskin, and the conversation led me to enroll in the History and Philosophy of Science for my final undergraduate year.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Years, Two

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are inexhaustible. They are celebrations of the ordinary, compelling reactions to philosophical elitism about "the good life". I hope to examine both of them further, doing more justice to Joycean comedy than I did in my "invitation" to the Wake, and trying to understand how the extraordinary stylistic innovations, particularly the proliferation of narrative forms, enable Joyce to "see life foully" from a vast number of sides.

  Philip Kitcher

  Good Life, Philosophical, Numbers

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I was occupied by a range of questions, often different from those fashionable in the professional philosophy of the past half century, that have sometimes troubled philosophers in the past. It's taken me several decades to work out my own philosophical agenda, and it is wide.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Taken

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The variety within Mann's fiction is impressive and fascinating. But Joyce is even more various and many-sided. He begins his career with a wonderful sequence of bleak studies about the ways in which human lives can go awry - in my view, Dubliners is underrated.

  Philip Kitcher

  Views, Careers, Fiction

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The hardest problem of all is to appreciate the facts that the poor nations are - quite reasonably - not going to forgo their development, and that they can only afford to develop by consuming fossil fuels.

  Philip Kitcher

  Appreciate, Poor Nations, Development

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Mann and Joyce are very different, and yet their fiction often appeals to the same people: Harry Levin taught a famous course on Joyce, Proust, and Mann, and Joseph Campbell singled out Joyce and Mann as special favorites. To see them as offering "possibilities for living", as I do, isn't to identify any distinctive commonality. After all, many great authors would fall under that rubric.

  Philip Kitcher

  Fall, Offering, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  7 Copy quote

• Mann was less interested, I think, in constructing any kind of "portrait of an age" than he was in delineating an individual consciousness in which profound struggles about identity and direction arise - struggles that Mann himself had not only reflected on but felt keenly. Visconti takes up this central focus of the novella, but he couples it with a more social perspective.

  Philip Kitcher

  Couple, Struggle, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

  Philip Kitcher

  Fighting, Artist, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Sometimes, of course, the artist does give up, saying, in effect, "I've done enough". Prospero declares that the revels are ended, and breaks his staff - his author retires to Stratford. At the very end, Mann did something similar. Interestingly, in both instances, death came quite quickly after that.

  Philip Kitcher

  Giving Up, Artist, Doe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Schopenhauer's thought that Will is insatiable, that once satisfied in one form it must be expressed in new desires, is inherited both by Mann and by Aschenbach (it's in Mahler, as well). So life is inevitably incomplete.

  Philip Kitcher

  Desire, Mahler, Life Is

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I read Aschenbach's constant desire to go beyond the works he has already produced to be the counterpart of Mann's deep wish to surpass his previous fiction; sometimes the diaries express this in terms of a dejected judgment that the summit has already been reached.

  Philip Kitcher

  Wish, Desire, Diaries

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Finally, this is one way to reconcile the delight in beauty with the bourgeois life. Aschenbach, on one reading, has spent virtually all of his adult life balancing his restrained homosexuality, which is bound together with his sensitivity to beauty and thus with his artistic vocation, against the demands of conventional society.

  Philip Kitcher

  Reading, Together, Adults

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Secular humanists should recognize those forms of religion as allies in the struggle for human advancement. They should also learn from them, as they try to build a fully secular world in which people can have the opportunity to live rich and fulfilling lives.

  Philip Kitcher

  Struggle, Opportunity, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I have enormous respect for Derek Parfit, although he seems to me bound within an unfortunate philosophical tradition - rather like the extraordinarily brilliant exponents of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Middle Ages.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Age, Brilliant

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Experiments work when, and only when, they call into action cognitive capacities that might reliably deliver the conclusions drawn.

  Philip Kitcher

  Might, Action, Capacity

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In my view, all students should be given an initial opportunity to pursue the science track as far as it goes. But for those who quickly decide that track isn't for them, a different style of teaching is in order.

  Philip Kitcher

  Teaching, Opportunity, Views

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Current education in science treats all students as if they were going to have scientific careers. They are required to solve problems and memorize lists. For many of them, this kills interest very quickly.

  Philip Kitcher

  Careers, Lists, Students

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'm often quite gloomy about the prospects for the human future. But, although I have no competence to intervene directly in a political movement, I hope that what I write may, in combination with the suggestions of others, cause a shift in perspective that will inspire a world-wide movement to accept the only solution to climate change. And before it's too late.

  Philip Kitcher

  Writing, Perspective, Political

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In my current work on global warming, I argue that the only apparent solution to the deep problem of climate change would require very large transfers of wealth from rich nations to poor nations, so that the entire world can make the transition to renewable forms of energy as fast as possible.

  Philip Kitcher

  Poor Nations, Energy, Climate

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• If the research agenda reflects "market forces", the problems of the poor are likely to be even more neglected than they already are.

  Philip Kitcher

  Agendas, Research, Problem

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'm very concerned about the increasing distortion of research by the intrusion of the market. Universities are beginning to see science as a means of attracting funds.

  Philip Kitcher

  Mean, Research, Intrusion

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I don't deny that scientific investigation is capable of delivering important truths about nature, but that doesn't stop questions about whether, as it is practiced, science today lives up to its potential for benefiting humanity.

  Philip Kitcher

  Today Life, Humanity, Important

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I argue against literal interpretation of religious doctrines. Religions make progress when they emancipate themselves from literalism, and take their doctrinal statements to be metaphors or allegories.

  Philip Kitcher

  Religious, Progress, Doctrine

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

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