Paul Feyerabend Quotes

All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.

Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.

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

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but 'tis vain to ask. Whether there be body or not? That is a point which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.

All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.

Experience by itself teaches nothing... Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.

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.

Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?

Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

I had some hesitations about philosophy because, if you worked out a philosophical theory, it was hard to know whether you were going to be able to prove it or whether other theories had just as good a claim on belief.

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

Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

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.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Whoever says he is starting from a given in nature may be right, and so is he who says he is starting from nothing!

Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception - that one perceives the world by perceiving one's sense-data, or something like that.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.