Metaphysical Quotes - Page 9

• It [destroying Twin Towers] was a leap into another realm - the realm of crazy abstractions and mythological generalities, involving people who have hijacked Islam for their own purposes. It's important not to fall into that trap and to try to respond with a metaphysical retaliation of some sort.

  Edward Said

  Crazy, Fall, People

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. [...] Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Fighting, Errors, Evil

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1995). “Philosophical Writings: Friedrich Nietzsche”, p.229, A&C Black

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• Christianity - An old metaphysical romance, filled with marvels, contradictions, and absurdity, born in the ardent imagination of Orientals, has spread into our Europe. Enthusiasts have purveyed it, careerists have pretended to accept it, imbeciles have believed it.

  Frederick The Great

  Europe, Imagination, Romance

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• Some think to avoid the influence of metaphysical errors, by paying no attention to metaphysics; but experience shows that these men beyond all others are held in an iron vice of metaphysical theory, because by theories that they have never called in question.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Men, Thinking, Errors

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1998). “His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce”

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• The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Common Sense, Quality, Levels

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.113, Indiana University Press

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• I disagree with the widely held view that it is metaphysical necessity, not nomological, that matters in the mind/body problem.

  Elliott Sober

  Views, Mind, Body

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• It can be a necessary conceptual truth that pains are painful without this ruling out the physicalist thesis that immaterial minds are impossible or the thesis that conscious states supervene on physical states. The necessity involved in these claims is nomological necessity, not metaphysical necessity (assuming that these are different).

  Elliott Sober

  Pain, Mind, Different

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Some authors have what amounts to a metaphysical approach. They admit to inspiration. Sudden and unaccountable urgencies to writecatapult them out of sleep and bed. For myself, I have never awakened to jot down an idea that was acceptable the following morning.

  Fannie Hurst

  Inspirational, Morning, Sleep

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• When philosophers use a word--"knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposition," "name"--and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?--What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Home, Essence, Games

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1973). “Philosophical investigations”

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• The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Philosophical, Self, Soul

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1961). “Notebooks, 1914-1916”

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• "Methodological naturalism" and "metaphysical naturalism" are terms that often surface in the continuing battle between evolutionary biology and creationism/intelligent design. The methodological thesis says that scientific theories shouldn't postulate supernatural entities; the metaphysical thesis says that no such entities exist. In this debate, God is the supernatural entity at issue; the question isn't whether science gets to talk about mathematical entities if Platonism is correct.

  Elliott Sober

  Intelligent, Issues, Design

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The very hope of experimental philosophy, its expectation of constructing the sciences into a true philosophy of nature, is basedon induction, or, if you please, the a priori presumption, that physical causation is universal; that the constitution of nature is written in its actual manifestations, and needs only to be deciphered by experimental and inductive research; that it is not a latent invisible writing, to be brought out by the magic of mental anticipation or metaphysical mediation.

  Chauncey Wright

  Philosophy, Writing, Science

  Chauncey Wright (1871). “Darwinism: Being an Examination of Mr. St. George Mivart's 'Genesis of Species'”, p.8

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• In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining forthe metaphysical foundation of this elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Real, Knowledge, Temples

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1339, Delphi Classics

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• We call 'Slavery is wrong' a moral truth because there is a specific history of theoretical investigation of a particular kind of slavery. We discussed it for centuries in metaphysical, economic, biological, and philosophical terms; we listened to all the arguments pro and con, we read all the testimonies of slaves and witnesses, and we decided. Though this 'we" is not everybody on earth, or even most people, who've never thought about slavery much.

  Catherine Wilson

  Philosophical, People, Slavery

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• These are crystalline - oftentimes incandescent - translations of Juarroz's powerful metaphysical poems where eternity and silence jut up against a world where “writing infects the landscape” and there are “more letters than leaves” - The kind of match one hopes for where both the translator and the poet are in luck; new poems which don't leak and yet old poems in which the original passion shines.

  Jorie Graham

  Powerful, Passion, Writing

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• A certain kind of methodologically-minded philosopher of science is quick to read off metaphysical conclusions from features of scientific practice. Chemists don't derive their laws from fundamental physics, so reductive physicalism must be false. Biologists refer to natural numbers in some of their explanations, so numbers must exist. I think that this kind of thing makes for bad philosophy.

  David Papineau

  Philosophy, Thinking, Law

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy.

  Joseph Alexander Leighton

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Fate

  Joseph Alexander Leighton (1919). “The field of philosophy: an outline of lectures on introduction to philosophy”

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• Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.

  Ayn Rand

  Art, Reality, Judgment

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.60, Penguin

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• In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.

  Albert Camus

  Unity, Demand, Rebellion

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.255, Vintage

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• Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.

  Albert Camus

  Life And Death, Evil, Unity

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.24, Vintage

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• What is enthralling and illuminating about The Metaphysical Club is its portraits of individuals and their milieus. Menand is wonderfully deft at evoking a climate of ideas or a cultural sensibility, embodying it in a character, and moving his characters into and out of one another's lives. What might have been a jumble of intellectual movements and colorful minor figures (...) is instead a subtle weave of entertaining narrative and astute interpretation.

  George Scialabba

  Moving, Character, Ideas

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• Is the world ruled by strict laws or not? This question I regard as metaphysical. The laws we find are always hypotheses; which means that they may always be superseded, and that they may possibly be deduced from probability estimates. Yet denying causality would be the same as attempting to persuade the theorist to give up his search; and that such an attempt cannot be backed by anything like a proof.

  Karl Popper

  Giving Up, Mean, Science

  Karl Popper (2005). “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, p.244, Routledge

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• The American Indians, the ancient Indians would say, the metaphysical ones would say: "Power binds us together." Power, for a while, makes us what we are, perceivers, luminous perceivers of reality.

  Frederick Lenz

  Power, Reality, Together

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• I am sorry the infernal Divinities, who visit mankind with diseases, and are therefore at perpetual war with Doctors, should have prevented my seeing all you great Men at Soho to-day-Lord! what inventions, what wit, what rhetoric, metaphysical, mechanical and pyrotecnical, will be on the wing, bandy'd like a shuttlecock from one to another of your troop of philosophers! while poor I, I by myself I, imprizon'd in a post chaise, am joggled, and jostled, and bump'd, and bruised along the King's high road, to make war upon a pox or a fever!

  Erasmus Darwin

  Kings, Sorry, War

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• I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.

  Herman Melville

  Views, Hands, Knowing

  Herman Melville (2016). “Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale”, p.25, Cosimo, Inc.

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