Philip Kitcher Quotes

In the end, we learn about the most basic philosophical questions - like "How to live?" - from a broad mixture of sources, including literature and philosophy, history and anthropology. These sources can guide our reflections on our own experiences, as we explore and reconsider. Mann contributed to such explorations in a distinctive way, and I hope my book brings that out.

If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

I think Poe had a mission to tell us what it's all about. To answer some of the great questions of life.

The Gay Science, section 108

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

There was a message written in pencil on the tiles by the roller towel. This was it: What is the purpose of life? Trout plundered his pockets for a pen or pencil. He had an answer to the question. But he had nothing to write with, not even a burnt match. So he left the question unanswered, but here is what he would have written, if he had found anything to write with: To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool.

I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.

Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.

Everyone asks me about being so worried or thinking about existence as if I'm the only person who can't understand why a tree grows the way it does or why a person is in power when they're not that great. These are questions everyone has.

The ancient Greeks were the first ones to say an unexamined life is not worth living. They don't tell you of course what we found out, an examined life not that fascinating either.

Philosophy, most broadly viewed, is the critical survey of existence from the standpoint of value.

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Whenever you're talking about meaning, basically... I think a lot of the human experience has to do with trying to understand what things mean, and there's not really any tools to do that unless you're thinking about it in a more spiritual or philosophical realm.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

I kind of feel, in a way, all of us will forever be asking those questions of ourselves: Who am I and how do I fit in in the world and what is all this about? Because those aren't really... there are no answers to those questions, in a sense.

Probably the only way Woody Allen and I are similar is that he has a lot to say about Nietzsche.

How do we describe the fact of human existence? At a certain point, perhaps, style fails us. Language, even and in particular at its most evocative, becomes less of an aid and more of a difficulty.

Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.