Epistemological Exploration Quotes

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

What the philosophers have to say about reality is often as disappointing as a sign you see in a shop window, which reads Pressing Done Here. If you brought your clothes in to be pressed, you would be fooled: for the sign is only for sale.

Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy; research, the progress; ignorance, the end. There is, by heavens, a strong and generous kind of ignorance that yields nothing, for honour and courage, to knowledge: an ignorance to conceive which needs no less knowledge than to conceive knowledge.

Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.

As does every young man studying philosophy, I naturally asked myself questions about the truth of all this, and about the meaning of freedom, predestination, and liberty of choice and so on. But to have asked questions of yourself about it, I think is not too important. Let's say - I remain - I remained a believer.

All the progress we have made in philosophy ... is the result of that methodical skepticism which is the element of human freedom.

Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.

I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to

Philosophy appears to some people as a homogenous milieu: there thoughts are born and die, there systems are built, and there, in turn, they collapse. Others take Philosophy for a specific attitude which we can freely adopt at will. Still others see it as a determined segment of culture. In our view Philosophy does not exist.

Fine. Since the tea is not forthcoming, let's have a philosophical conversation.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

If you've never met a student from the University of Chicago, I'll describe him to you. If you give him a glass of water, he says, 'This is a glass of water. But is it a glass of water? And if it is a glass of water, why is it a glass of water?' And eventually he dies of thirst.

To put it boldly, it is the attempt at a posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization.

A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foresight of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement.

I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.

The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.

Decades spent in contact with science and its vehicles have directed my mind and senses to areas beyond their reach. I now see scientific accomplishments as a path, not an end; a path leading to and disappearing in mystery.

In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.

The word philosophy simply means a pursuit of wisdom, the purpose of life, and a search for Truth. However, this quest, because it originates with man, can never find the answers. In fact, man cannot reach God or know God by intellectual pursuit.

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Make philosophy thy journey, theology thy journey's end: philosophy is a pleasant way, but dangerous to him that either tires or retires; in this journey it is safe neither to loiter nor to rest, till thou hast attained thy journey's end; he that sits down a philosopher rises up an atheist.

A thousand years ago, scientists who wondered about consciousness and the nature of reality were burned at the stake. We still haven't recovered from that and it's left us with a culture that no longer investigates consciousness, except on the fringes.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.