Ted Dekker Quotes

New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.

But in philosophy, sometimes the baby ought to go out with the bath water.

Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on.

The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies.

A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.

We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.

Philosophy itself cannot but benefit from our disputes, for if our conceptions prove true, new achievements will be made; if false, their refutation will further confirm the original doctrines.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

In other philosophies, my questions would get answered to some degree, but then I would have a follow-up question and there would be no answer. The logic would dead-end. In Scientology you can find answers for anything you could ever think to ask. These are not pushed off on you as, 'This is the answer, you have to believe in it.' In Scientology you discover for yourself what is true for you.

And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?

I'm interested in philosophy, I studied it, and I also admit I try to read things that are way above me. I have a limit: I take what I need from it, and I do find that some of my favourite philosophical writings tend to be poppier. I admire smart people who are able to describe things simply or in a human, readable way.

The point of philosophy, as I see it, is to change thinking, and thereby to change the conversation.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

On the one hand, philosophy is to keep us thinking about things that we may come to know, and on the other hand to keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn't knowledge

The human mind moves always forward, alters its viewpoint and enlarges its thought substance, and the effect of these changes is to render past systems of thinking obsolete or, when they are preserved, to extend, to modify and subtly or visibly to alter their value.

The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.

I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.

With respect to ingenious subconsciousness, I think, philosophers might well rival poets.

We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and that means that we have to be very careful in the choice of what we learn and teach, for unlearning is not really possible.

Is the ground a philosophical concept? Has mind a relationship to the ground? Is it an idea to be investigated? Is the ground put together by thought?

At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.

Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.

The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.

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.