Jimmy Wales Quotes

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?

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

There's nothing you can know that isn't known.

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

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

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.

Metaphysical world.- It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.

Man is the measure of all things, of the reality of those which are, and of the unreality of those which are not.

Truth happens to an idea

Is not the truth the truth?

My major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality?'

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

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.

Common sense says that chairs and tables exist independently of whether anyone happens to perceive them or not.

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

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!

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

To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.

There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.

The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.