David Berlinski Quotes

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.

It is, from another angle, an attack on requiring proof in philosophy. And it's also the case, I guess, that my temperament is to like interesting, new, bold ideas, and to try and generate them.

What I always liked about Socrates was his insistence on questioning things for the sake of reaching some sort of clarity - even if it is only clarity about the gaps in our knowledge.

You know, I've taught philosophy for years and one argues in the hypothetical all the time.

Socrates, after all, could be an intensely annoying man, all the time questioning passers-by until they became exasperated.

I'd love to go back to school for philosophy. I love philosophy, so I'm always reading philosophy books, annoying my girlfriend with that type of stuff.

The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

Say, Not so, and you will out circle the philosophers.

Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales

But in philosophy, sometimes the baby ought to go out with the bath water.

A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable

The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority. Its function is to trace the uncritical assumptions of human thought to their hiding places, and in this pursuit it may finally end in denial or a frank admission of the incapacity of pure reason to reach the ultimate reality.

One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.

As a philosopher, I have a right to ask for a rational explanation of religious faith.

Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth.

I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.

There cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason.