Philip Kitcher Quotes

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.

A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.

I think if we could turn the dial a bit, and try to take what the philosopher Henry Sidgwick called "the point of view of the universe", and look from above, and realize that we are not special, none of us are, I think it would just cause a transformation.

When I started to get disillusioned with psychoanalysis I reread philosophy and was reminded of the constructivist notion that Epictetus had proposed 2,000 years ago: "People are disturbed not by events that happen to them, but by their view of them." I could see how that applied to many of my clients.

I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing.

Any profound view of the world is mysticism. It has, of course, to deal with life and the world, both of which are nonrational entities.

Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.-Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain

I am very Aristotelian in approach - not in detail - so I always find I'm saying things that get people frustrated like 'It's a matter of balance and judgement'. To a lot of philosophers these are terrible words because they're admitting of vagueness and uncertainty. The more I've done philosophy, the more I've become convinced that that is the way it is.

I don't really believe in dialogue; I am too Nietzschean for that. We need to have a warrior conception of philosophy.

The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.

It needs a good deal of philosophy not to be mortified by the thought of persons who have voluntarily abandoned everything that for the most of us makes life worth living and are devoid of envy of what they have missed. I have never made up my mind whether they are fools or wise men.

I want the principles of a timeless muse, I want to eradicate my negative views.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

World-view is a product of life-view, not vice versa.

The province of philosophy is not so much to prevent calamities befalling as to demonstrate that they are blessings when they have taken place.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

To take a gloomy view of life is not part of my philosophy; to laugh at the idiocies of my fellow creatures is. However, at this particular moment I cannot find so much to laugh at as I would like.

I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.

The whole point of view of the anarchist is that everything must start from the bottom up, from man. It seems to me so human a philosophy.

The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.

The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.

In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan's anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called 'contemporary philosophers'.

I have a theory that you can make any sentence seem profound by writing the name of a dead philosopher at the end of it.