Sydney Smith Quotes

It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics.

Philosophy changes day by day.

Well, I don't know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I'm no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.

Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else - mind, spirit, morality, meaning - into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.

Truth as such is not a particularly important concept in naturalistic philosophy.

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.

I bought some books in order to learn the first principles of philosophy.

If somebody is going to try to paste a person's view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don't give me Ayn Rand.

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 not me.

I discovered philosophy in my youth when I read 'wildly,' and thus I was exposed to the world of ideas.

It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.

Let us come to the philosophers, whose authority is of greater weight, and their judgment more to be relied on, because they are believed to have paid attention, not to matters of fiction, but to the investigation of the truth.

Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind.

I don't think there's an interesting boundary between philosophy and science. Science is totally beholden to philosophy. There are philosophical assumptions in science and there's no way to get around that.

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

When it comes to the real operational issues that govern our understanding of physical reality, ontological definitions of classical philosophers are, in my opinion, sterile.

To me, what philosophy does best is reflect on knowledge that's generated in other areas.

Metaphysics is a science.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.