Philip Kitcher Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• When I try to outline the history of ethical life, it's sometimes possible to find evidence for a hypothesis about how important transitions actually went. Often, however, that isn't so. There are many facts about human life in the Paleolithic we're never likely to know.

  Philip Kitcher

  Important, Trying, Transition

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• A different vision of ethics is that of a collection of resources people can use to act better. The resources might be firm rules that could always be relied on. Or they might be ideals that could often be followed without thinking but that sometimes conflicted with one another.

  Philip Kitcher

  Thinking, Often Is, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Ethical inquiry has always been motivated by the aim of improving human conduct. It doesn't follow from that that the goal is to produce a complete rule book that would be applicable to all cases.

  Philip Kitcher

  Book, Goal, Would Be

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• In my view, we ought to replace the notion of analytic philosophy by that of synthetic philosophy.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Views, Synthetic

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• If the intuition-mongering were abandoned, would that be the end of philosophy? It would be the end of a certain style of philosophy - a style that has cut philosophy off, not only from the humanities but from every other branch of inquiry and culture.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Cutting, Humanity

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• For a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language we actually use.

  Philip Kitcher

  Issues, Important, Purpose

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Aschenbach is not only a projection of Mann in the obvious ways - same daily routines, author of the works Mann had planned - nor even in sharing his author's aspirations, doubts, and sexual identity. His watchword, "Durchhalten!" [persevere, keep going] could be Mann's own.

  Philip Kitcher

  Doubt, Identity, Way

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Sometime during the 1990s, when I was teaching philosophy at UCSD, my friend, colleague, and music teacher, Carol Plantamura, discussed the possibility of teaching a course together looking at ways in which various literary works (plays, stories, novels) had been treated as operas, and how different themes emerged in the opera and in its original. One of the pairings we planned to use was Mann's great novella and Britten's opera. Unfortunately, the course was never taught, but the idea remained with me.

  Philip Kitcher

  Teacher, Philosophy, Teaching

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I intend Deaths in Venice to contribute both to literary criticism and to philosophy. But it's not "strict philosophy" in the sense of arguing for specific theses. As I remark, there's a style of philosophy - present in writers from Plato to Rawls - that invites readers to consider a certain class of phenomena in a new way. In the book, I associate this, in particular, with my good friend, the eminent philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, who practices it extremely skilfully.

  Philip Kitcher

  Plato, Philosophy, Book

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Mann was profoundly influenced by two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who returned to the most ancient of all philosophical questions - "How to live?" - and whose writings offered novel perspectives for considering that question (much more perspective-offering than rigorous argument!)

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Writing, Offering

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Part of my methodological approach is made explicit when I discuss ways in which literature can have philosophical significance. Literature doesn't typically argue - and when it does, it's deadly dull. But literature can supply the frame within which we come to observe and reason, or it can change our frame in highly significant ways. That's one of the achievements I'd claim for Mann, and for Death in Venice.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Venice, Achievement

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• In elaborating how "philosophy by showing" works, and in defending the idea that literature and music can contribute to philosophical "showing", I am also doing something more standardly philosophical. But I view most of the book as an interweaving of philosophy and literary criticism. If that entails a broadening of a standard idea of philosophy, it's a broadening I'd like to see happen.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Book, Philosophical

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm a pluralist about perspectives on literature. There seem to me to be all sorts of illuminating ways of responding to major literary works, some of them paying considerable attention to context, others applying various theoretical ideas, yet others focusing on details of language, or linking the work to the author's life, or connecting it with other works.

  Philip Kitcher

  Ideas, Perspective, Details

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Mann is widely recognized as a master of irony and ambiguity, yet it's remarkable how quickly people foreclose options he carefully leaves open. Lots of readers - including eminent critics - jump to conclusions: that Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy is a central background text, that Aschenbach is an inferior writer, that he's never been attracted by pubescent male beauty before, that he dies of cholera.

  Philip Kitcher

  People, Tragedy, Males

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Consider the different narrative styles within the story, and the glee with which the "moralistic narrator" celebrates Aschenbach's fall - maybe, then, this is a hostile verdict and the international fame is warranted after all (given that Mann modeled his protagonist so closely on himself, it would be quite odd if he had intended Aschenbach's literary inferiority to be a fixed part of the interpretation).

  Philip Kitcher

  Fall, Style, Narrators

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Think about Mann's own daily routine (ascribed to Aschenbach), read the extant diaries and the letters in which he discusses the novella's themes, and it won't be so obvious that the attraction to Tadzio is completely unprecedented; it also won't be obvious that what Aschenbach wants is full sexual contact.

  Philip Kitcher

  Thinking, Routine, Diaries

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• There are many critics whose work I greatly admire. Even though I diverge from T.J. Reed in several important ways, I've learned greatly from his writings on Mann.

  Philip Kitcher

  Writing, Important, Way

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I didn't know that Mahler would come to play so large a role, nor that music and literature and philosophy can interinanimate one another in the way I've come to think they do in this case.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Using the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth is one of the touches of pure genius in Visconti's film (even though Mahlerians complain very loudly that the piece has been ruined), since it corresponds perfectly to Aschenbach's yearnings and to his circling walks around Venice.

  Philip Kitcher

  Venice, Complaining, Genius

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• As I read Mann in German for the first time, the full achievement - both literary and philosophical - of Death in Venice struck me forcefully, so that, when I was invited to give the Schoff Lectures at Columbia, the opportunity to reflect on the contrasts between novella and opera seemed irresistible.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Opportunity, Venice

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• First, my frame of reference for the Britten opera shifted. I'd always thought of Britten's approach in Death in Venice as another exploration of the plight of the individual whose aspirations are at odds with those of the surrounding community: his last opera returning to the themes of Peter Grimes. As I read and listened and thought, however, Billy Budd came to seem a more appropriate foil for Death in Venice.

  Philip Kitcher

  Odds, Venice, Community

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I felt I should also contrast Visconti's treatment of the novella - usually damned by Mann fans (who typically respect Britten's more "faithful" adaptation). The Visconti film does many quite wonderful things, although there are good reasons for the condemnation.

  Philip Kitcher

  Faithful, Fans, Doe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Presenting Aschenbach as a composer - based on Mahler - leads to some dreadful scenes (especially those in which Aschenbach is berated by his student), and it surely distorts the character Mann created. Yet, we know that Mann's novella was based on a holiday in Venice he took with his wife and brother, and that while he was there he followed the reports in the German newspapers, describing the dying Mahler's progress as he returned from New York to Vienna.

  Philip Kitcher

  Brother, New York, Holiday

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• We know that he gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name, and also his facial features. So Visconti picks up on something interesting. That led me to think about ways of developing further the Aschenbach-Mahler connection.

  Philip Kitcher

  Thinking, Names, Interesting

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but perhaps, above all literary critics, I'm indebted to Wayne Booth (several people have suggested to me that I'm trying to reinvent "ethical criticism").

  Philip Kitcher

  People, Criticism, Trying

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

Page 3 of 5

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin