Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

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.

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

Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

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.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.

I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.

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

Philosophy begins in wonder.

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?

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

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.

I want to study philosophy. That fascinates me.

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

Once you reject evidence as a source of knowledge, you don't gotta believe nothin' you don't like.

When did ignorance become a point of view?

I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.

Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

Belief may be a regrettably unavoidable biological weakness to be kept under the control of criticism: but commitment is for Popper an outright crime.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

We cannot begin with complete doubt.

The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.