Tim Crane Quotes

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• I do think that philosophy and science are very different intellectual enterprises, but that does not mean that when we get knowledge from philosophy it is a different kind of knowledge.

  Tim Crane

  Philosophy, Mean, Thinking

  "Mindful". Interview With Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com.

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• I have a general moral: great philosophers may be great, but that is not a reason to follow them. Don't be a follower. Work it out for yourself.

  Tim Crane

  Followers, May, Philosopher

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There are no a priori obstacles to the scientific knowledge of the mind, but the scientific knowledge of the mind is not all the knowledge of the mind that there is. This is not an objection to science, it is just a distinction between different kinds of knowledge.

  Tim Crane

  Mind, Different, Obstacles

  "Mindful". Interview With Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com.

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• I think we atheists should tolerate the religious not because their views are just as valid as ours, but because experience has shown that we are unlikely to convert them, and so we have to find some way to live in peace with them, even if we find their views false or otherwise objectionable.

  Tim Crane

  Religious, Atheist, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Would it be better if religions were to disappear? I have no idea. Since I do not have any confidence in the association of truth with virtue, I am not sure if the world would be a better place if people believed more true things. But what is undeniable is that we cannot understand our own culture unless we recognise that it was formed, for good or bad, as a Christian culture. It's an illusion that we could somehow recover a human essence which is independent of the way it was created by culture.

  Tim Crane

  Christian, Independent, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Since I don't believe in externalism, I don't think it can explain consciousness!

  Tim Crane

  Believe, Thinking, Consciousness

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Catholicism is the most philosophical branch of Christianity.

  Tim Crane

  Philosophical, Branches, Christianity

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• A lot of humanists treat religion as if it were simply a kind of rival cosmological hypothesis, and that this is all it is. My view is that to the extent that religions are cosmological hypotheses, this is not the only important thing about them, and we - atheists- will never get a proper understanding of what religion is if we focus too much on the cosmology.

  Tim Crane

  Focus, Understanding, Important

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Taken as hypotheses, religious claims do very badly. Yet the striking fact is that this does not worry Christians.

  Tim Crane

  Christian, Religious, Taken

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• The wine itself has aesthetic value; but what it is for a wine to have aesthetic value cannot be understood without making reference to the experience to tasting it

  Tim Crane

  Wine, Aesthetic, Understood

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• Wine is not discovered but made: it is an artifact that can be appraised that can be appraised aesthetically

  Tim Crane

  Wine, Made, Artifacts

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• One philosophically fascinating aspect of Catholicism is the very strange conception of reality it presents (the incarnation, the eucharist, judgement day etc.).

  Tim Crane

  Reality, Judgement, Etc

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I do think it's important to distinguish between intentionalism about consciousness and externalism about consciousness. Intentionalism says that consciousness is a form of intentionality - the representation of things to the mind. Externalism says that these things have to exist in order for them to be represented, or presented. These are different views.

  Tim Crane

  Thinking, Views, Order

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  10 Copy quote

• Unlike art which contains a message, wine conveys nothing, it has no intellectual or cognitive content

  Tim Crane

  Art, Wine, Intellectual

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• One odd thing about the current debate between religious people and atheists is that the participants don't seem to care that they entirely fail to communicate with the other side. They therefore have no account of why the religious or the atheists believe what they do, except that they are stupid or deluded. I think philosophers should try and make sense of their disputes with their opponents as far as possible without treating them as idiots. This applies to the religious participants in the debate as much as to the atheists.

  Tim Crane

  Religious, Atheist, Stupid

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Music is one of my big interests - I once had a rather fanciful ambition to be a singer - and of course music is philosophically fascinating. What it is for music to express emotion strikes me as one of the most difficult questions - it's hard to say what it precisely means, although it plainly does mean something. But whenever I have tried to say something about this, it has come out as either banal or pretentious or both.

  Tim Crane

  Ambition, Mean, Emotion

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The thing I think I have learned from Wittgenstein is the importance of not making things up: philosophers should not invent problems, and they should also be conscious of the risk of inventing pointless 'technical' machinery which do not offer real explanations, but often just re-state the known facts in a more complex way.

  Tim Crane

  Real, Thinking, Risk

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• I think you can have a science of the taste of chicken soup, or the taste of Chateau Latour. My point is only that knowing this science alone will not tell you what chicken soup or Chateau Latour tastes like.

  Tim Crane

  Thinking

  "Mindful". Interview With Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com.

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• I like to think of myself as a naturalist - insofar as that term is at all clear.

  Tim Crane

  Thinking, Term, Naturalist

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There's that great Irish joke: a man is lost in the countryside, stops a passer-by: 'how do I get to Dublin?'. The passer-by says 'well, I wouldn't start from here'. Rather than starting by talking in the abstract about materialism, dualism, 'material stuff' and things like that in regard to the mind, I would rather start from somewhere else.

  Tim Crane

  Men, Mind, Materialism

  "Mindful". Interview With Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com.

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• Problems come and go over time, and to understand why is a difficult historical task. If one wanted to find the origin of a problem, historical research and close attention to texts is what is needed, not unconstrained speculation about the 'pictures' that philosophers must be in the grip of.

  Tim Crane

  Historical, Attention, Philosopher

  "Mindful". Interview With Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com.

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• I do not claim to have any developed or sophisticated views in political philosophy, but I think that one of the lessons of the last few hundred years of history is that the greatest threat to human prosperity and well-being is fanaticism and intolerance, even in the name of apparently laudable goals.

  Tim Crane

  Philosophy, Thinking, Goal

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Even if we ignore the 'non-theoretical' knowledge which we acquire through experience (such as the knowledge of what something tastes like) and concentrate on theoretical knowledge, there is no good reason to think that physics can literally give the theory of everything. Here I want to be really pedantic. Although everything may be subject to physical law, not everything can be explained or described in physical terms. Physics has literally nothing to say about society, morality and the mind, for example - but of course these are parts of 'everything'.

  Tim Crane

  Thinking, Giving, Mind

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• I do think that if you are trying to think empirically about the relationship between conscious experience and the underlying physical reality, wine provides an excellent practical example. Winemakers manipulate the chemicals they are dealing with in a way that is very sensitive to the kinds of effects it will have on the subjective experience of tasters - this is not an accident.

  Tim Crane

  Wine, Reality, Thinking

  "Mindful". Interview With Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com.

  4 Copy quote

• I had abandoned Catholicism, but even during my short militant atheist period I maintained an interest in western religious art and music.

  Tim Crane

  Religious, Art, Atheist

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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