It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.
Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.
You're either growing or dying. Stagnation does not exist in the universe.
To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.
To know another person is to Know How to live and work with her. To know another person in a moral sense is to Know How to respect her... Respect must show in action.
I know that these mental disturbances of mine are not dangerous and give no promise of a storm; to express what I complain of in apt metaphor, I am distressed, not by a tempest, but by sea-sickness.
There is nothing sadder in this world than the waste of human potential. The purpose of evolution is to raise us out of the mud, not have us grovelling in it
...there is much more to matter than modern science currently would like to acknowledge. By developing insights about the observer, we can describe matter in a new way.
As Plato: What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.
Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.
He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs.
The child-like, gum-chewing naïveté , the glamour rooted in despair, the self admiring carelessness, the perfected otherness, the wispiness, the shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister aura, the pale, soft-spoken magical presence, the skin and bones...
Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.
The moment when someone attaches you to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you. And when you want to have a conversation, they will assert that they already know everyt...
You know, Republicans should have a consistent philosophy. And if your philosophy is about limited government and not intruding in people's lives, you shouldn't just inconveniently take a social issue like gay marriage and say, 'Well, unless we think...
I'm taking a philosophy class and regretting it with everything in me. I'm taking one college class per semester. Philosophy is studying what you already know and dismantling it. I thought it would be right up my alley. I can't tell you how much it's...
While I'm interested in philosophy, I find all the different theories out there somewhat difficult to get a firm grip on. Movies and novels, on the other hand, are easy to understand. So what I like to do is use pop cultural ephemera of all kinds as ...
I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hu...
One might say that there is an "ethics barrier " a speed above which ethics can no longer exit. After that point the only remaining goal is to survive the immediate moment.
The delight we take in our senses is an implicit desire to know the ultimate reason for things, the highest cause. The desire for wisdom that philosophy etymologically is is a desire for the highest or divine causes. Philosophy culminates in theology...
Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by : variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation.
