Philosopher Quotes - Page 20

• When we call a philosopher distinguished, we are not saying that she is worthy and not saying that she is recognized, but we are saying that she occupies the intersection of both - that she is recognized and worthy; even that she is recognized because she's worthy.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Worthy, Distinguished, Intersections

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.146, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I never think in terms of alienation; it's the others who do. Alienation means one thing to Hegel, another to Marx and yet another to Freud; so it is not possible to give a single definition, one that will exhaust the subject. It is a question bordering on philosophy, and I'm not a philosopher nor a sociologist. My business is to tell stories, to narrate with images - nothing else. If I do make films about alienation - to use that word that is so ambiguous - they are about characters, not about me.

  Michelangelo Antonioni

  Philosophy, Character, Mean

  Source: scrapsfromtheloft.com

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• For many years, questions about the meaning of life were dismissed as senseless. We were told that life, not being a word or sentence or anything language-like, can't intelligibly be said to have meaning. An encouraging development in the last couple of decades is a return by philosophers to addressing - as nearly all people do at some time or another - the question of life's meaning.

  David E. Cooper

  Couple, Years, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I started my professional life as a philosopher of language and for several years took the orthodox line that meaning is an essentially linguistic phenomenon. Whether as a result of simply listening to everyday talk about meaning, or reading books of anthropology, sociology and art history, it dawned on me that there is nothing at all privileged or central about linguistic meaning.

  David E. Cooper

  Art, Reading, Book

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Bill Russell, a famous philosopher from Boston Celtics once "When things go bad, things go bad." The [Iraq] war was terribly mismanaged-it was terribly mismanaged.

  Jon Stewart

  War, Boston, Iraq

  "Bill Moyers talks with Jon Stewart". "Bill Moyers Journal", www.pbs.org. April 27, 2007.

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• It is interesting that liberals don't mind a strong faith at all. When it's their guy with a strong faith - whether it's Jimmy Carter or Woodrow Wilson or Harry Truman - that's just great. FDR inscribing Bibles and sending them to the troops. God bless him! But when a Republican president cites Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher, as George W. Bush did on a famous occasion, then, well, the liberals cry out that [Tomás de] Torquemada is on the loose and warn gravely of the coming Inquisition.

  Paul Kengor

  Strong, Jesus, Interesting

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• I already knew about this friendship between St. John Paul II and this philosopher [Ana Teresa Tymieniecka] when I was in Buenos Aires. It was known. Also her books are known.

  Pope Francis

  Book, Buenos Aires, John Paul Ii

  Source: www.catholicnewsagency.com

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• In building up a democratic model I think that Cuba's contribution, little by little, has contributed to getting closer to the ideals of those philosophers, of those Greeks who thought about how a society could be fairer, how a society could really represent the interests of the people. We have tried to get closer to that from a Latin-American perspective and from the Cuban perspective.

  Alejandro Castro Espin

  Latin, Thinking, Building Up

  "The Future of Cuba". Interview with Lasonas Pipinis Velasco, www.counterpunch.org. February 27, 2015.

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• When I was 16 I started keeping a diary in which I recorded my disagreements with the famous philosophers. I didn't insist that they were wrong, that I was right and I had to prevail. I just agreed and disagreed with them. I thought there was a high degree of probability that I was right and some other thinkers were wrong. But I wasn't positive about it.

  Albert Ellis

  Degrees, Diaries, Thinker

  Source: business.highbeam.com

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• I think Eddie Izzard is one of the brightest minds of our generation. I don't see him as a comedian as much as I see him as a philosopher. I hope I get to work with him on everything until I die, because I think he has a great mind and is a very talented actor.

  Bryan Fuller

  Thinking, Our Generation, Comedian

  "Bryan Fuller walks us through Hannibal's debut season (2 of 4)". Interview with Todd VanDerWerff, tv.avclub.com. July 24, 2013.

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• I don't see myself as a deep philosopher. The things I write about tend to be what we all have to face, or consider, or experience, that I talk about with my friends and brothers. It's universal stuff, told in my own voice, my own details and truth, which is all I have to offer.

  Anne Lamott

  Brother, Writing, Voice

  Source: www.cosmopolitan.com

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• The great philosophers of the past who wrote so beautifully - Rousseau, John Stuart Mill - had to write beautifully because they had to sell their work to journals. They had to sell books to the general public because they could not hold positions in universities. Mill was an atheist, and, therefore, could not hold a position in a university.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Atheist, Book, Writing

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• Notice that all the traditional things philosophers do, looking for validity and soundness, promote civic friendship. That sounds pretty pie in the sky, yes, but I actually believe it.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Believe, Sky, Pie

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• With the rise of capitalism, it became more obvious that people pursue individual self-interest. The great nationalist in Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini, a wonderful philosopher, said that we need the nation. We need something that people can lean on, from which they can then reach out to the whole world. The idea of all humanity is too vague. It can't motivate human aspiration in a reliable way.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Self, Ideas, People

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• We certainly have to have a view about knowledge in order to decide whether some version of foreknowledge is necessary for inquiry or whether some philosopher or other thinks it is. Roughly, the more demanding our conception of knowledge is, the less plausible foreknowledge is; the weaker our conception of knowledge is, the more plausible foreknowledge is.

  Gail Fine

  Thinking, Views, Order

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The greatest philosopher of all time was Dirty Harry. And if you remember, Dirty Harry took the words right out of my mouth: "A good man needs to know his limitations."

  Ted Nugent

  Dirty, Men, Good Man

  Source: blog.bullz-eye.com

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• When I was at Notre Dame studying under Joe Evans, Frank O'Malley, and others, there was a very lively debate about the distinction between natural law and revealed truth. Most of the philosophers of church and state expected that what was going to be advocated as the law of the land would be related to natural law. If you attempted to draw lines about certain general moral truths that were derivative of logic and reason, they would prove to be widely shared, and therefore suitable to be enacted into law on both the civic and religious sides.

  Bruce Babbitt

  Religious, Church, Logic

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• Democracy is the product of human thought and reasoning. It's true that philosophers and thinkers have always imagined a utopia in which everything is as it ought to be and the people live in freedom and comfort. But this was not achieved until recent centuries.

  Simin Behbahani

  People, Democracy, Comfort

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Philosophers should resist the temptation to be publicly virtuous. Given an unjust society, from the vantage of what counts as the public good, they are corrupters, not edifiers. The desire to be seen to be virtuous, to make a positive contribution, is a deleterious symptom of professionalization. Philosophy's social utility is an ersatz for its duty to mount challenges to the entire social order.

  Ray Brassier

  Challenges, Temptation, Desire

  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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• 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, Problem

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

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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

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• Science will always raise philosophical questions like, is any scientific theory or model correct? How do we know? Are unobserved things real? etc. and it seems to me of great importance that these questions are not just left to scientists, but that there are thinkers who make it their business to think as clearly and slowly about these questions as it is possible to. Great scientists do not always make the best philosophers.

  Tim Crane

  Real, Philosophical, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Sometimes I suspect that there are two prototypes of philosophers who write about humans - I call them "celestials" and "terrestrials", without implying that celestials have their heads in the clouds or that terrestrials have theirs buried in the ground. The difference between these two types is not so much in their theories but in whether or not they would find it a very sad thing if it turned out that the only way a human is superior to a wolf is this: the human brain is significantly more capacious and complex.

  Nomy Arpaly

  Writing, Brain, Sometimes

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Incompatibilists will tell you that a work of art has no meaning unless the artists could have chosen to create a different one, but actual artists often say things like "the book chose me" - that is, the work had to be. Some philosophers would call it "volitional necessity", and a similar case that's discussed is the case of Luther saying "here I stand, I can do no other".

  Nomy Arpaly

  Art, Book, Different

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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