Philosopher Quotes - Page 21

• Henry Corbin creates the world - most of all his examination of the imagination and what the imagination was for him. Some philosophers would think of the imagination as a synthetic ability, how you put different things together. Artists more think of the imagination as creativity. So I really like the way that he presents the imagination as a faculty that allows one to experience worlds that are not exactly physical but are real nonetheless.

  Ben Chasny

  Real, Creativity, Thinking

  Source: thequietus.com

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• I hope that people will come and experience our play 'A Small Oak Tree Runs Red' . I don't want anybody to suffer, but I source the 18th Century philosopher David Hume in association with the experience. He asserted that when we go to a tragic play, and when the form of tragedy is well put together, then we can experience a catharsis that is soul cleansing, and an anodyne to what our life would be like without it.

  Harry Lennix

  Running, People, Tree

  Source: www.hollywoodchicago.com

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• Philosophers and psychologists have long puzzled over the question of how we know as much as we do despite our limited experiences. One way is to see how children learn. Another example is consciousness. The concept is usually explored by armchair academics. Looking at kids expands our conceptions of consciousness.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Kids, Long

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• I am not sure just what Marx had in mind when he wrote that "philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." Did he mean that philosophy could change the world, or that philosophers should turn to the higher priority of changing the world? If the former, then he presumably meant philosophy in a broad sense of the term, including analysis of the social order and ideas about why it should be changed, and how. In that broad sense, philosophy can play a role, indeed an essential role, in changing the world.

  Noam Chomsky

  Philosophy, Mean, Priorities

  "Noam Chomsky: On Trump and the State of the Union". Interview with George Yancy, www.nytimes.com. July 5, 2017.

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• You can be horrified by the state of the prisons, the misery in certain neighborhoods of its cities, or their level of poverty. Anti-Americanism, by which I mean a hatred for America as such-its transformation into a metaphysical category, which incarnates all the evil in the world-is one of fascism's favorite themes. Look at writer and political theorist Charles Maurras in France. The philosopher Martin Heidegger in Germany. The radical Islamists of today!

  Bernard-Henri Levy

  Mean, Evil, Political

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Philosophy, Thinking, People

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I'm not a philosopher so why should I provide anyone with the answers? I'm just a musician, I don't have any solutions. All I'm doing is questioning the status quo, with every record I've made, to a certain extend.

  Ayshay

  Musician, Questioning, Status Quo

  Source: www.acclaimmag.com

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• In Iran, the women are like Italian women, they rule the house inside. But it's full of life. The history is very rich. The mystic of the Middle Ages. We have to learn from them. They influence all the philosophers when they came to Europe all those many many years ago.

  Juliette Binoche

  Italian, House, Age

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• Philosophers often think all scientists must be scientific realists. If you ask a simple question like "Are electrons real?" the answer will be "Yes". But if your questions are less superficial, for example whether some well-known scientist was a good scientist. Then, they had insisted that only empirical criteria matter and that they actually did not believe in the reality of sub-atomic entities. Ask "If that turned out to be true, would you still say they were good scientists?" The answer would reveal something about how they themselves understood what it is to be a scientist.

  Bas van Fraassen

  Real, Believe, Simple

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'm interested in the fact that comics are people who are oddly courageous in their desire and their commitment to sacrificing any sense of normalcy in their lives, any sense of security, and most of them are oddly unique individuals. Let's have a broader conversation with people that have spent their last however-many-years thinking about their lives. I mean, they're philosophers. They're poets. They're people who are on the outside looking in at the world through a different set of values.

  Marc Maron

  Mean, Commitment, Sacrifice

  Source: music.avclub.com

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• I consider myself a 3-D philosopher. I am not a designer at all. I studied aerodynamics, I studied philosophy, I studied sculpture. High technology on one side, and on the other side, art.

  Luigi Colani

  Art, Philosophy, Technology

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The world is super-stupid. You have by far the best designers in America! And you do the most stupid cars in the world! They put billions into their stupid designs for General Motors, Chrysler, Buick, or who knows what. The designers in America must be frustrated. I am not frustrated, because I am not a designer - I am a philosopher, and all philosophers have said for ages that the world around them is stupid.

  Luigi Colani

  Stupid, Car, Design

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Abraham Lincoln did have intellectual instincts, a tremendous curiosity on a broad range of subjects, and a near-photographic memory for what he read. He was, at the end of the day, a politician: politics were his heaven, said William Herndon. But Lincoln did take comfort in ideas and books, more so than almost any other president, and he went to books and ideas in moments of perplexity to sort things out. Philosopher, no, but thoughtful and "surprisingly well-read" for his day.

  Allen C. Guelzo

  Memories, Book, Thoughtful

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• Abraham Lincoln was not philosopher, exactly. But he did have a strong mind, which sought generalizations as well as particulars. He had a terrific memory.

  William Lee Miller

  Strong, Memories, Mind

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• We now have a better biological and psychological understanding of our moral thinking. The idea that we should do what maximizes happiness sounds very reasonable, but it often conflicts with our gut reactions. Philosophers have spent the last century or so finding examples where our intuition runs counter to this idea and have taken these as signals that something is wrong with this philosophy. But when you look at the psychology behind those examples, they become less compelling. An alternative is that our gut reactions are not always reliable.

  Joshua Greene

  Running, Philosophy, Taken

  Source: www.slate.com

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• It was Schopenhauer who made me a philosopher. Real philosophy, I told my appalled colleagues at Auckland, is about sex, death, and boredom. Since then I have expanded my horizons, but I have always retained an affection for the sage of Frankfurt.

  Julian Young

  Real, Philosophy, Boredom

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• When philosophers talk about reason they often have in mind Having been in the business of philosophy more than half my life, I have learned that reason doesn't change many minds. But there's a more ordinary sense of resonableness, which involves not just logic but a sensitivity to other peoples real concerns, a desire to understand, even when you don't agree. Many people are reasonable in this way.I'm willing to think that the world will be made better by the conversations of reasonable people, even if there are unreasonable people and people who don't want to converse as well.

  Kwame Anthony Appiah

  Philosophy, Real, Thinking

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• To a certain extent all philosophers have been involved in a systematic questioning that undermines confidence and certainty. Philosophy as a whole unleashed skeptical forces which, outside of the tightly controlled environment of a rigorous philosophical debate, led a lot of people to throw their hands up in despair and think 'what's the point?'. A lot of the public perception of philosophy is that it leaves you with no answers, and more confused than you were at the beginning.

  Julian Baggini

  Philosophy, Confused, Philosophical

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There have been a number of philosophers who have reveled in the dismantling of truth. I think they did so with good ethical motives, and for good philosophical reasons. I can see the sense in what they were talking about; the idea that truth is often claimed by elites in order to further certain agendas. They crowd-out alternative perspectives - particularly those of the powerless. But the undermining of truth contributed - in the weird, indirect way that philosophy contributes to the culture - to a rejection of the idea of truth as having any kind of proper meaning at all.

  Julian Baggini

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I am very Aristotelian in approach - not in detail - so I always find I'm saying things that get people frustrated like 'It's a matter of balance and judgement'. To a lot of philosophers these are terrible words because they're admitting of vagueness and uncertainty. The more I've done philosophy, the more I've become convinced that that is the way it is.

  Julian Baggini

  Philosophy, People, Frustrated

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In many ways, the effort to study philosophy was my rebellion away from medicine. I'm the son of two Indian immigrant physicians, so the natural path for me would have been to become a doctor. I ended up doing the master's degree at Oxford in politics, philosophy, and economics while already having a seat in medical school. I was keeping that as my escape hatch. But my hope was that I might become a philosopher or something else entirely.

  Atul Gawande

  Philosophy, School, Son

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think that you know you have experts in fields who spend their life studying one thing. When an event goes on that chances are they're going to want that specific expert who has done it to be on the show talking about it, not a writer or an artist of any sort, which I think is a mistake because you know we don't have... I mean we have them, but there is certainly not you know in strong force public philosophers anymore.

  John Buffalo Mailer

  Strong, Mistake, Mean

  Source: bigthink.com

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• When people hear that I have a chronic illness, they'll say things like "Focus on you." Well, my spiritual and emotional fulfillment is based not on who I am but on what I can give. Plus, many of my favorite philosophers suggested that self-fulfillment is found through service. Who am I to argue with them?

  Karen Duffy

  Spiritual, Emotional, People

  Source: www.oprah.com

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• You got this new breed of hipster chicks and hipster men that don't understand anything about sacrifice. They didn't lay it on the line. People like Cat Power, Tom Waits, they are the last of the beats, the real true philosophers.

  Willis Earl Beal

  Hipster, Real, Cat

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• I never went into aesthetics. Aesthetics is what philosophers have to say about art, and a lot of them take an analytics position and raise the question, "What is an art object?" As soon as you fall into that trap, an artist is going to come along and say, "That isn't art - it's something else." That's a hopeless gig.

  Don Ihde

  Art, Fall, Hopeless

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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