Philip Kitcher Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• One of the things I want to do in the book is to explore how philosophy can be done in literature. I start doing that in the first chapter, by introducing the idea of "philosophy by showing". What literature/philosophy shows is how to look at some important facets of life in a new way, thus changing the frame in which subsequent philosophical argument proceeds.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Book, Philosophical

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• When we read a literary work (or, in some instances, listen to music) our imagination is stimulated, we feel various emotions, and we arrive at new judgments. These attitudes are brought into relation with many others, including our standing tendencies to think and feel in particular ways, and we try to fit our psychological capacities and responses together.

  Philip Kitcher

  Attitude, Thinking, Imagination

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I use biography, I use literary connections (as with Platen - this seems to me extremely helpful for appreciating the nuances of Mann's and Aschenbach's sexuality), I use philosophical sources (but not in the way many Mann critics do, where the philosophical theses and concepts seem to be counters to be pushed around rather than ideas to be probed), and I use juxtapositions with other literary works (including Mann's other fiction) and with works of music.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Ideas, Appreciate

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Read Mann's notes, which contain precise accounts of cholera and its symptoms, and observe how careful he is throughout his fiction in getting medical details straight - then you might begin to wonder whether cholera is the only candidate for the cause of Aschenbach's death. What results from this, I think, is a deeper appreciation of Mann's brilliance in keeping so many possibilities in play. The ambiguity is even more artful than people have realized.

  Philip Kitcher

  Appreciation, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Because the problems are objective features of the human situation - social animals without the capacities for making social life come easily - ethics is objectively constrained. It's not the case that "anything goes".

  Philip Kitcher

  Animal, Anything Goes, Ethics

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Was Mann himself fully aware of all the facets of his irony? Probably not - any more than Shakespeare was fully aware of all the riches subsequent critics have found in his plays.

  Philip Kitcher

  Play, Riches, Irony

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• To my mind, Death in Venice represents an enormous advance in Mann's literary development, not simply for the commonly appreciated reason that he crafted a superbly supple and elegant style, apparently well suited to the kind of prose Aschenbach is supposed to write.

  Philip Kitcher

  Writing, Venice, Style

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Those citizens are distracted by the toys technology has supplied, and fail to recognize the ways in which what they most deeply want is made vulnerable by the coming disruptions of human relations on an over-heated planet.

  Philip Kitcher

  Technology, Citizens, Want

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'm quite pessimistic about climate change. This is an urgent problem, and much of the world is only now waking up to the easiest part of solving - the realization that anthropogenic global warming is real.

  Philip Kitcher

  Real, Climate, Wake Up

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The result can be quite new - perhaps a tendency to judge that something we've never conceived of is possible, or to feel sympathy for a trait or a type of person whom we've regarded with indifference or even hostility.

  Philip Kitcher

  Judging, Indifference, Results

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The amalgam of psychological attitudes we form is the synthetic complex. It may fall apart quite quickly as further reflection or further experience bears on it, and we may revert to our former judgments, feelings and tendencies.

  Philip Kitcher

  Attitude, Fall, Reflection

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Mann's sexuality and his attitudes towards it are extremely complex - and the complexities are inherited in the figure of Aschenbach. Mann had lived through a series of (almost certainly unconsummated) relationships with young men.

  Philip Kitcher

  Attitude, Men, Sexuality

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Mann was conscious of adopting different perspectives in different parts of the novella, but my guess is that there are plenty of passages in which the resonance of the words he chose struck him as exactly right (even though he didn't probe to discover exactly what tone or narrative device gave them that effect).

  Philip Kitcher

  Perspective, Different, Narrative

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There are actually two separate issues here. The first is whether (as ancient philosophers and Nietzsche assume) only the privileged elite can live a worthwhile life. The second is whether it's possible to fulfill the roles of both serious artist and upstanding citizen. It seems to me that philosophy can dissect both questions, by delineating clearly the anatomy of the good life and the structural conditions of the roles.

  Philip Kitcher

  Good Life, Philosophy, Artist

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I think the tone of mockery Heller finds is a part of Mann's irony, but only a part - a brilliant further touch consists in juxtaposing perspectives so that we're led to wonder whether the mockery itself is the last word.

  Philip Kitcher

  Thinking, Perspective, Lasts

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Any writer who could handle all these different voices would deserve high praise, but to do so without any sense of jarring or incoherence is an extraordinary accomplishment.

  Philip Kitcher

  Voice, Accomplishment, Different

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Critics who perceive the first level of Mann's irony recognize that the second voice is giving us reasons to be dubious about various aspects of Aschenbach's life and work. But many of them don't appreciate the second level of irony, the one exemplified in setting this narrative voice alongside the more sympathetic one, and inviting us to choose.

  Philip Kitcher

  Narrative Voice, Appreciate, Giving

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• We find in the novella a seamless interweaving of at least two narrative voices, one of which is that of an observer so sympathetic that his language appears to be Aschenbach's own, the other of which is superficially celebratory (except at the moment of moralistic condemnation) but undercuts Aschenbach by means of an ironic detachment.

  Philip Kitcher

  Mean, Narrative Voice, Two

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The more you read the novella, the more you should wonder, I think, which judgments are to be taken as bedrock.

  Philip Kitcher

  Taken, Thinking, Wonder

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Even though I want to expand the number of ways in which skilful ironic play happens, I suspect I'm probably guilty of the same shortcoming - and I hope that, one of these days, someone will claim that my book, while it goes in a salutary expansive direction, doesn't go far enough, that there are assumptions I make that show I've missed aspects of Mann's irony and ambiguity.

  Philip Kitcher

  Book, Play, Numbers

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I don't think readers of Mann have overlooked the fact that he was a great ironist, but they have tended to see the irony in particular parts of the novella, and to miss it in others.

  Philip Kitcher

  Thinking, Missing, Facts

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In the end, we learn about the most basic philosophical questions - like "How to live?" - from a broad mixture of sources, including literature and philosophy, history and anthropology. These sources can guide our reflections on our own experiences, as we explore and reconsider. Mann contributed to such explorations in a distinctive way, and I hope my book brings that out.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Book, Philosophical

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I suspect that any worthwhile exploration of these deep questions about living requires going beyond abstract discussions to the vivid presentation of possibilities. If readers are to be prompted to serious examination of their lives, anatomy isn't enough. We have to be stimulated to imagine, in some detail, what it would be like to live in particular ways.

  Philip Kitcher

  Details, Would Be, Examination

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Mann's Death in Venice actually contains a snippet of philosophy about the second question, when Aschenbach, collapsed in the plaza, engages in his quasi-Socratic, anti-Socratic, ruminations.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Venice, Rumination

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I suggest in my own discussion of this episode, Mann invites us to set the attempt to philosophize about his predicament in the context of Aschenbach's life. The literary presentation thus adds to the naked philosophical skeleton.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Skeletons, Naked

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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