Nancy Pearcey Quotes

I don't think there's an interesting boundary between philosophy and science. Science is totally beholden to philosophy. There are philosophical assumptions in science and there's no way to get around that.

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

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

Metaphysical problems about "mind" versus "matter" arise only from epistemological confusions.

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.

It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics.

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.

People into hard sciences, neurophysiology, often ignore a core philosophical question: 'What is the relationship between our unique, inner experience of conscious awareness and material substance?' The answer is: We don't know, and some people are so terrified to say, 'I don't know.'

When it comes to the real operational issues that govern our understanding of physical reality, ontological definitions of classical philosophers are, in my opinion, sterile.

Whoever says he is starting from a given in nature may be right, and so is he who says he is starting from nothing!

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?

Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737.

Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.

Philosophy was once considered science.

Philosophy is altogether less pure now. It's been impurified by science and social science and history.

Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.

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

I bought some books in order to learn the first principles of philosophy.

If somebody is going to try to paste a person's view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don't give me Ayn Rand.

As a scientist, of course, we have to believe there is no supernatural. There are only natural entities in the universe. And those are the things that we study as natural scientists.

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

I discovered philosophy in my youth when I read 'wildly,' and thus I was exposed to the world of ideas.