Philip Kitcher Quotes

I went to Princeton from Amherst, where I split my interests between mathematics and philosophy.

When I came up to Cambridge (in October 1921) to read economics, I did not have much idea of what it was about.

In 1990, I was an undergraduate freshman archeology major sneaking over to the English building and unearthing an amazing repository of books I'd never even suspected. By 1998, I'd have my Ph.D.

I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a fellow. I spent two years there. After that, George Gale made me literary editor of 'The Spectator.'

I abandoned chemistry to concentrate on mathematics and physics. In 1942, I travelled to Cambridge to take the scholarship examination at Trinity College, received an award and entered the university in October 1943.

In the Sanghi family, there is no one who has undertaken intellectual pursuits.

Following Rice, I went to Caltech for a Ph.D in physics, without any strong idea of what I wanted to do for a thesis topic.

When I entered Harvard, my background was mostly combinatorics and algebra.

Well, I think Barkley and I were the only two who were working with Church for a Ph.D.

I did my undergrad at Florida State, got a Bachelor's, and then I got my Masters in Acting at NYU. So I've spent a lot of time in the classroom.

After the first exams, I switched to the Faculty of Philosophy and studied Zoology in Munich and Vienna.

I grew up in Washington State and then eventually found my way back to Iowa City for grad school.

By the time I had got to college, I had begun to read and had decided that most of what Christians believed could not be credible. So I became a philosophy major at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

Even as I pursued a doctorate in the history of ideas in my native Denmark, I realized I had neither the encyclopedic training nor the passion for cool logic - not to mention the nerve - to follow in the footsteps of classical liberal philosophers and economists such as Robert Nozick, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman.

Cambridge was the place for someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish Laboratory that one went to do physics.

My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little.

Mathematicians deal with intellectual concepts which they follow out for their own sake. But they stimulate scientists, philosophers, economists, poets, musicians though without being at all conscious of any need or responsibility to do so.

Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.

I've been in and out of academia ever since I was young.

I love talking to my friends at uni and seeing what they are doing. They're just finishing their dissertations, and I kind of wish I could live their life for a second. I wish my school days could have dragged on a little longer, or that I could go back and do it later in life.

I went to college at University of Tennessee.

I loved being in Cambridge. I think about it often. It was this great little capsule of time to me.

I obtained a Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Fellowship and entered the graduate program in History at the University of California. With no Greek or French and minimal Latin and German, I was in no position to pursue my classical interests, so I began work at Berkeley with little more than an open mind.

I was a graduate student at Oxford when I discovered Georgiana.

I was an American Studies student at Berkeley as an undergraduate, and pretty much as a graduate student, too.