Philosophical Assumptions Quotes

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

One will meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is relative to sight, but the fact that this or that is in that relation to vision that we call being red is not itself relative to sight; it is a real fact.

We are assuming that we exist, that there is reality, and that the matter of which we are made is real.

The underlying assumption that human nature is basically the same at all times, everywhere, and obeys eternal laws beyond human control, is a conception that only a handful of bold thinkers have dared to question.

Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.

To admit one's own presuppositions and to point out the presuppositions of others is therefore to maintain that all reasoning is, in the nature of the case, circular reasoning. The starting-point, the method, and the conclusion are always involved in one another.

Philosophy is a necessary activity because we, all of us, take a great number of things for granted, and many of these assumptions are of a philosophical character; we act on them in private life, in politics, in our work, and in every other sphere of our lives -- but while some of these assumptions are no doubt true, it is likely, that more are false and some are harmful. So the critical examination of our presuppositions -- which is a philosophical activity -- is morally as well as intellectually important.

You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him.

The materialistic point of view in psychology can claim, at best, only the value of an heuristic hypothesis.

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.

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.

Philosophy rests on a proposition that whatever is is right. Preaching begins by assuming that whatever is is wrong.

From the outset, however, this whole controversy has been plagued by tacit assumptions, very often of a philosophical rather than a physical character.

All philosophers make the common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of trying, through an analysis of him, to[21] reach a conclusion. "Man" involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things. Yet everything uttered by the philosopher on the subject of man is, in the last resort, nothing more than a piece of testimony concerning man during a very limited period of time.

It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.

Logic, having been invented by Greeks in the Northern hemisphere, does not apply south of the equator.

All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence... logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies.

Agnosticism is epistemologically self-contradictory on its own assumptions because its claim to make no assertion about ultimate reality rests upon a most comprehensive assertion about ultimate reality.

This is an important distinction, because most of the modern philosophies that deny that we can know reality, and ultimately truth, make the mistake of constructing epistemological systems to explain how we know reality without first acknowledging the fact that we do know reality. After they begin within the mind and find they can't construct a bridge to reality, they then declare that we can't know reality. It is like drawing a faulty road map before looking at the roads, then declaring that we can't know how to get from Chicago to New York!

We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.

Greek philosophy departs from the assumption that we can understand the world autonomously using our rational faculties. Islam is not saying this.