epistemological perspective Quotes

By convention sweet is sweet, by convention bitter is bitter, by convention hot is hot, by convention cold is cold, by convention color is color. But in reality there are atoms and the void. That is, the objects of sense are supposed to be real and it is customary to regard them as such, but in truth they are not. Only the atoms and the void are real.

The idealist regards facts as provisional.

There is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature.

But this is the kind of ass-clownery that stems from the fact that all philosophy looks weird when you don't have one.

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

In a certain way, we're always toggling back and forth between the absolute and the relative, if that makes sense.

Methodology is applied ideology.

For academics like Stanley, shackled to the media machine, the past is not of interest either for its own sake or as a means of illuminating the complexity of the present. It is, rather, little more than a wellspring of justifications for liking and disliking things in the world today.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.