Philosopher Quotes - Page 15

• The neuroscience of consciousness is not going to stop in its tracks because some philosophers guesses that project cannot be productive.

  Patricia Churchland

  Track, Consciousness, Projects

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• Even philosophers who did not mind psychology, claimed the brain was irrelevant because it was the hardware, and we only need to know about the software.

  Patricia Churchland

  Psychology, Brain, Mind

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• My first degree was in mathematics. That was great, but it didn't help with many of the things that puzzled me. I became a philosopher because I wanted to understand everything, especially those things that didn't make sense. And that has continued to be my philosophical motivation. That's one reason I have such a roving philosophical eye - once I have figured out a philosophical topic to my satisfaction, I find myself moving on to new problems.

  David Papineau

  Motivation, Moving, Philosophical

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

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• A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a 'downwards' causal influence on the physical realm in a straightforwardly interactionist way. It was only in the middle of the last century that science finally concluded that there are no such non-physical forces. At which point a whole pile of smart philosophers (Feigl, Smart, Putnam, Davidson, Lewis) quickly pointed out that mental, biological and social phenomena must themselves be physical, in order to produce the physical effects that they do.

  David Papineau

  Smart, Order, Way

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

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• Philosophers sometimes also use 'reductionist' more strictly, to mean 'type-identities' between mental and physical categories, and to exclude 'non-reductive physicalisms' like metaphysical functionalism.

  David Papineau

  Mean, Identity, Use

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

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• Schiller is an important philosopher because he shows just how integral the idea of beauty is in normal life.

  Frederick C. Beiser

  Ideas, Important, Normal

  "Diotima’s child". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. September 21, 2012.

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• Of course, there remains the question of why we should find mind-brain identities so persistently counter-intuitive, if they are true. But this is a simple psychological question, and there are a number of plausible explanations. Indeed this is a topic that is quite extensively discussed outside philosophy, by developmental psychologists and theorists of religion among others, under the heading of 'intuitive dualism'. It is rather shocking that so few of the many philosophers working on 'the explanatory gap' are familiar with this empirical literature.

  David Papineau

  Philosophy, Simple, Numbers

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

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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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• Western philosophers gained access to Asian and African traditions initially by noting similarities and differences. But that, as A.C. Mukerji, of Allahabad, was to note in 1932, is not to do philosophy, but is at best a preparation.

  Jay L. Garfield

  Philosophy, Differences, Preparation

  "Buddhist howls". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. December 28, 2012.

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• Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.

  Thomas Metzinger

  School, Self, Saws

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• As a philosopher, you define constraints for any good theory explaining what you are interested in, then you go out and search for help in other disciplines.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Discipline, Helping, Theory

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• One of the interesting characteristics of the Ego Tunnel is that it creates (as Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo called it) a robust "out-of-the brain experience", a highly realistic experience of not operating on internal models, but of effortlessly being in direct and immediate contact with the external world - and oneself.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Tunnels, Interesting, Ego

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• 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

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• 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

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• Most influential of all is the philosopher Stanley Cavell, and a younger generation of philosophers who have attempted to follow his pioneering work in thinking about literature philosophically.

  Philip Kitcher

  Thinking, Generations, Literature

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• So this is my attempt to give a preliminary - probably far too crude - account of how philosophy by showing can really teach us. The attempts we make to work through problems by reasoning always presuppose starting points, and even the most self-critical philosophers adopt some of those starting points simply by picking them up from the social environments in which they grow up.

  Philip Kitcher

  Growing Up, Philosophy, Self

  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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• The kind of approach I take is different from much of experimental philosophy. Although the experimental philosophers and I are certainly in agreement about the relevance of empirical work to philosophy, a good deal of their work is devoted to understanding features of our folk concepts, and in this respect, at least, I see them as making the same mistake as those armchair philosophers who are interested in conceptual analysis.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Mistake, Agreement

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The experimentalists think that we can only get at our concepts by way of empirical investigation, while the armchair philosophers think that we can skip the experiments and figure things out from our armchairs. What they have in common, however, is regarding our concepts as the targets of philosophical theorising, and I just don't think that, in the vast majority of cases, the subject matter of philosophy has our concepts as its target.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Epistemologists should be concerned with knowledge and justification and so on, not our concepts of them; philosophers of mind should be concerned with various features of our mental life and the large-scale structure of the mind, not our concepts of mind, or consciousness, or anything else

  Hilary Kornblith

  Mind, Consciousness, Structure

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries did not think that epistemological questions floated free of questions about how the mind works. Those philosophers took a stand on all sorts of questions which nowadays we would classify as questions of psychology, and their views about psychological questions shaped their views about epistemology, as well they should have.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Thinking, Views, Should Have

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• 17th century philosophers were not in a position to understand the mind as well as we can today, since the advent of experimental methods in psychology. It shows no disrespect for the brilliance of Descartes or Kant to acknowledge that the psychology which they worked with was primitive by comparison with what is available today in the cognitive sciences, any more than it shows disrespect for the brilliance of Aristotle to acknowledge that the physics he worked with does not compare with that of Newton or Einstein.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Psychology, Disrespect, Mind

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I largely defer to the cognitive ethologists. I believe that the arguments that they make on this score are extremely persuasive. More than this, I do think as well that a priori objections by philosophers to successful research programs in the sciences have a very bad track record.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Believe, Successful, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The fact that these scientific theories have a fine track record of successful prediction and explanation speaks for itself. (Which is not to say that I don't directly discuss the work of those philosophers who would disagree.) But even if we grant this, many will argue that scientific knowledge in humans, and, indeed, reflective knowledge in general, is quite different in kind from the knowledge we see in other animals.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Successful, Animal, Track

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I argue is that philosophers have had a tendency to present a kind of mystical view of the powers of reflection. Unreflective belief acquisition is seen in mechanistic terms, but when philosophers talk about reflection, it is as if reflective processes are not bound by the kinds of limitations which inevitably arise from being embedded within the same causal structure which governs unreflective belief acquisition.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Reflection, Views, Acquisition

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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