Philosophy Quotes
If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
If the omniscient author of nature knew that the study of his works tends to make men disbelieve his Being or Attributes, he would not have given them so many invitations to study and contemplate Nature.
If determinism is true, the future is set - and this includes all our future states of mind and our subsequent behavior. And to the extent that the law of cause and effect is subject to indeterminism - quantum or otherwise - we can take no credit for what happens. There is no combination of these truths that seems compatible with the popular notion of free will.
We philosophers are mistake specialists. (I know, it sounds like a bad joke, but hear me out.) While other disciplines specialize in getting the right answers to their defining questions, we philosophers specialize in all the ways there are of getting things so mixed up, so deeply wrong, that nobody is even sure what the right questions are, let alone the answers. Asking the wrongs questions risks setting any inquiry off on the wrong foot. Whenever that happens, this is a job for philosophers! Philosophy - in every field of inquiry - is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.
Experience teaches, [...] that there is no such thing as a thought experiment so clearly presented that no philosopher can misinterpret it.
The history of philosophy is in large measure the history of very smart people making very tempting mistakes, and if you don`t know the history, you are doomed to making the same darn mistakes all over again.
When you`re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for "surely" in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word "surely" is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument.
In 99 percent of the stuff we do, perfection is superfluous. It’s not necessary, not expected, and likely won’t be noticed or appreciated.