Aristotle Quotes

In Aristotle the mind, regarded as the principle of life, divides into nutrition, sensation, and faculty of thought, corresponding to the inner most important stages in the succession of vital phenomena.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

The individual is the brain, not the heart.

There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.

Thought is invisible nature.

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.

I think, therefore matter is capable of thinking.

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

If he had a mind, there was something on it.

Thought is the thought of thought.

Thinking... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

...physics is the study of the structure of consciousness.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think. Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.

every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.

There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

Once it is recognized that productive thinking in any area of cognition is perceptual thinking, the central function of art in general education will become evident.