Philosopher Quotes - Page 18

• I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you'll get a philosopher.

  Bill Mollison

  Garden, People, Teach

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

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• I could never teach people to be philosophers - and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

  Bill Mollison

  People, Teach, Gardener

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

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• When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don't grow their own vegetables, in fact they're not deep ecologists - they're my enemies.

  Bill Mollison

  Vegetables, Car, Enemy

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

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• I had the idea that there were secret laws of the universe that could explain the baffling human reality around me, and that philosophers maybe had the key to them.

  Catherine Wilson

  Reality, Keys, Law

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Oddly, since by now I've written quite a lot on early modern philosophers, I didn't care for the history of philosophy, which I thought dull and obscure, until I got a minor job writing articles for a children's encyclopedia in the history of science and began to make connections between science and philosophy.

  Catherine Wilson

  Jobs, Children, Philosophy

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Aristotle saw nature as intelligent and purposive, whereas for the Epicureans, and the 17th century 'mechanical' philosophers, there is no intentionality in nature except where there are animal minds and bodies.

  Catherine Wilson

  Animal, Intelligent, Mind

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I have to say that some philosophers such as the late Bernard Williams, and I would include myself in this group, would say that tranquillity is overrated as the goal of life.

  Catherine Wilson

  Goal, Groups, Late

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• We use and need to use both systems in complex political societies, and we oscillate in our commitments, because both oligarchy and rule by the will of masses have their bad points, as the ancient philosophers all knew.

  Catherine Wilson

  Commitment, Political, Needs

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• People formerly seemed unable to evaluate a woman's c.v. or to accept a range of personal and communicative styles from the exuberant and confident to the sober and pedantic. It's much better than it was, and a number of male philosophers have been extraordinarily helpful in detecting and criticising everyday sexism in the profession.

  Catherine Wilson

  Numbers, People, Everyday

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock, which is a novelist.

  Frederick Busch

  Novelists, Jocks, Next

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• I call myself an experimental philosopher which is as ambiguous a term as comprehensive anticipatory design scientist.

  Jonathon Keats

  Design, Scientist, Term

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I don't really know what that job [experimental philosopher] entails.

  Jonathon Keats

  Jobs, Knows

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Methodological naturalism gives advice to scientists about what they should include in their theories. There is a second type of methodological naturalism that gives advice to philosophers, which I call "methodological naturalismp." It says that the methods that philosophers should use in assessing philosophical theories are limited to the methods that scientists ought to use in assessing scientific theories.

  Elliott Sober

  Philosophical, Giving, Advice

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Unfortunately, philosophers of science usually regard scientific realism and scientific anti-realism as monistic doctrines. The assumption is that there is one goal of all scientific inference - finding propositions that are true, or finding propositions that are predictively accurate. In fact, there are multiple goals. Sometimes realism is the right interpretation of a scientific problem, while at other times instrumentalism is.

  Elliott Sober

  Goal, Doctrine, Facts

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Philosophers of biology generally recognize that evolutionary fitness (roughly, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment) is multiply realizable.

  Elliott Sober

  Environment, Biology, Ability

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The upshot is that most philosophers of biology now hold that biological properties supervene on physical properties (where supervenience is taken to include some kind of "in virtue of" relation), and that fitness and other biological properties are not identical with physical properties.

  Elliott Sober

  Taken, Kind, Biology

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Most "process" philosophy is historicist (e.g., Hegel) and not concerned with "deep time." Maybe Whitehead is an exception. He may be a really important philosopher for all I know. I've never been able to read him.

  Dale Jamieson

  Philosophy, Important, May

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Even those who specialize in the history of philosophy often ignore the political and cultural context, and the natural world in which their philosophers were philosophizing. This has consequences both trivial and important. If you systematically read the last fifty years of the major journals in our discipline you would be amazed at the amount of redundancy. Most of this is unacknowledged because most of us know so little about the history of our discipline and even the subfields in which we work.

  Dale Jamieson

  Philosophy, Years, Discipline

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Sometimes I say philosophers should be at the table because they're the only people who know that they're not going to walk away with big money to support their research or to fund their crackpot solutions.

  Dale Jamieson

  People, Support, Research

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.

  Dale Jamieson

  Smart, Unbiased, Reason

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Some philosophers have begun writing sympathetically about predator elimination as a way of reducing animal suffering. From an environmental perspective this is somewhere between naïve and potentially disastrous.

  Dale Jamieson

  Writing, Animal, Perspective

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Philosophers (and probably most intellectuals) are more interested in pursuing what they see as the logical implications of their theories than they are in paying attention to the shlumpy diversity of defensible values that people actually have, and then trying to figure out how these might be negotiated in the life of an agent or community.

  Dale Jamieson

  People, Diversity, Community

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as "reduce suffering") and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.

  Dale Jamieson

  Distance, Mean, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Philosophers are often actively disinterested in what happens between the cup and the lips (after all, that's "non-ideal theory").

  Dale Jamieson

  Cups, Lips, Theory

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• A common rhetorical strategy of politicians and others is to frame their opponents' views in the worst possible light, tacitly suggesting that all versions of the view must be committed to some particularly deplorable conclusion. Philosophers are not immune to this way of arguing.

  Dale Jamieson

  Rhetorical Strategies, Light, Views

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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