I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion - I am fighting for reason.
Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.
I am not a positivist. Positivism states that what cannot be observed does not exist. This conception is scientifically indefensible, for it is impossible to make valid affirmations of what people 'can' or 'cannot' observe. One would have to say 'only what we observe exists,' which is obviously false.
The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.
Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.
You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.
A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.
The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the miraculous also.
It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.
The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy , taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.
Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues.
It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.
He could dismiss several schools of philosophy by shifting slightly in his chair or toting his whisky glass.
There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.
Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.
Anyone who does not believe in miracles is not a realist.
We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.
Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.-Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain
I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief.
The next time anyone asks you "What is Bertrand Russell's philosophy?" the correct answer is "What year, please?"
If we believe not with faith divine and supernatural, we believe not at all.
One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.
Philosophy has its bugbears, as well as superstition.
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
