Logical Argumentation Quotes

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion - thus: Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man. Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore- Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second. This may be called syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.

Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics - it's not talking about things that have affected computer science; it's mathematical logic.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

Unlike the current occupant of the White House [George W. Bush], he has no difficulty in orally extemporizing a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb.

As if reasoning were any kind of writing or talking which tends to convince people that some doctrine or measure is true and right.

It should now be clear why the method of Philosophy is so different from that of the natural sciences. Experiments are not made, because they would be utterly useless.

I like to regard myself as someone who's capable of critical thought, that is to say, who can evaluate claims.

Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself... Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education... reading, analysis, and discussion is the way we develop reliable judgment, the principle way we come to penetrate covert movements behind the facade of public appearances.

In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

I am an example of a person who got zeroed into a philosophy early.

Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he takes them for granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is sometimes deceived by them.

I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists.

Aristotle writes that persuasion is based on three things: the ethos, or personal character of the speaker; the pathos, or getting the audience into the right kind of emotional receptivity; and the logos, or the argument itself, carried out by abbreviated syllogisms, or something like deductive syllogisms, and by the use of example.

Let philosophy resolutely aim to be as scientific as possible, but let her not forget her strong kinship with literature.

In philosophy, you have to reckon with the implicit level of an accumulated reserve, and thus with a very great number of relays, with the shared responsibility of these relays.

Eloquence is an art of saying things in such a way—(1) that those to whom we speak may listen to them without pain and with pleasure; (2) that they feel themselves interested

The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.