Critical Philosophy Quotes

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.

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

However good an argument in philosophy may happen to be, it is generally not good enough.

The few existing writings against Kantian philosophy are the most important documents in the case history of sound common sense.

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.

A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable

Philosophy has its bugbears, as well as superstition.

It is a proof of philosophical mediocrity, today, to look for a philosophy.

Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.

How I understand the philosopher - as a terrible explosive, endangering everthing... my concept of the philosopher is worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of academic "ruminants" and other professors of philosophy.

Morality is similar to religion - it is a somniferous drug which blinds people from seeing the squalor of their lives.

Kant ... stated that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge ... to make room for faith," but all he had "denied" was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.

A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.

Kant's style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense.

Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown.

The philosopher will ask himself ... if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.