Jean Baudrillard Quotes

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

To me, what philosophy does best is reflect on knowledge that's generated in other areas.

Much of what Karl Popper contributed to the philosophy of science has now passed into mainstream thought, into the currency of that nebulous, tricky ontology known as 'common sense.'

I've loved physics from a young age, but I've also been interested in all sorts of big questions, from philosophy to evolution and neuroscience. And what those fields have in common is that they all aim to capture certain aspects of the same underlying universe.

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.

Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.

There is no knowledge without theory.

Science can't tell you why anything happens.

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

There is no dogma, there isn't anything about how the universe works.

Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it. A posit can be unavoidable except at the cost of other no less artificial expedients. Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built.

Whence? wither? why? how? - these questions cover all philosophy.

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

In the case of Anathem, most of the research had to do with philosophy and metaphysics. Reading this sort of thing has never been my strong suit, so I actually had to be somewhat more "organized and results-driven" than is my habit. I just made up my mind that I was going to have to read some of these philosophy tomes, and I forced myself to read something like 10 pages a day until I had bashed my way through them.

Both religion and natural science require a belief in God for their activities, to the former He is the starting point, and to the latter the goal of every thought process. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.

What I am trying to do is to unmuddle the metaphysical.

During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief.

Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

Theories are usually the over-hasty efforts of an impatient understanding that would gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their place pictures, notions, nay, often mere words.

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.