Chapman Cohen Quotes

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

When a false argument puts on the appearance of a true one, then it is properly called a sophism or fallacy.

To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization.

Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.

Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.

It is true the orator may make a myriad replica of his own passion out of those who listen to him. But that does not prove he is right or they are not fools.

Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.

You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove.

We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough.

It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.

You can't assert an answer just because it's not something else.

Reason was for suckers and Presbyterians.

The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie. Then you're all the time defending what you can never justify.

Reason is simply a vast tautology.

The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading

But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.

Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.

I really do not know, Socrates, how to express what I mean. For somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us.

The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning.

Science...has become identified with a philosophy known as materialism or scientific naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is, or at least the only thing about which we can have any knowledge. It follows that nature had to do its own creating, and that the means of creation must have included any role for God.

It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God.