It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.
I would want to conceive of philosophy as grounded in the very long humanist tradition that is the best of the West, which is open to the East and North and South.
It's wrong to look at what we call 'Enlightenment values' as some fad of the 18th century. It's deeply rooted in ancient history.
if we were forced to choose just one, there would be no way to deny that Judaism is the most important intellectual development in human history.
And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?
What many people today assume Christianity to be is basically Plutarch plus Jesus.
Our ideas are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people …. This means that the clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.
... there's nothing new under the sun - everything can be traced back to Archimedes or even earlier.
Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go.
America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other words, you know? It's, again, the only great country in the world that it is formed out of words.
Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.
One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.
My personal view is that such total planning by the state is an absolute good and not simply a relative good... I do not myself think of the attitude I take as deriving from Marx - though this undoubtedly will be suggested - but from Fichte and Hegel.
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
They say that this century is going to be an Asian Century. I am very clear that without embracing the path and ideals shown by Gautam Buddha this century cannot be an Asian century!
There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.
As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.
The environmental crisis has deep spiritual, philosophical, and religious roots and causes. It is not merely the result of bad engineering.
Other countries have been founded by 'accidents of force.' America is a creation of thought.
In my formative years the people who influenced me most were the Christian existentialists, I mean men like Munier and Kierkegaard and perhaps most of all Nicholas Berdyaev and in my travels I looked for one thing more than anything. I rarely discussed, probably mainly because of language difficulties, metaphysics with the various religious people of other groups I'd meet with. But I'd very much try to see how they were incarnated, how their particular soul was incarnated or took roots into reality.
I was born in France. My father was a renowned French philosopher and journalist, and my mother was a painter. So I grew up in Parisian intellectual circles.
In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling block.
Liberalism is a most important by-product of Rationalism, and its origins and ideology must be clearly shown.
I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics.
Climbing has so much more culture than all other activities put together. There is no culture in tennis, just a few names, a few dates. No big culture in soccer. But we have thousands of books, great philosophers, thinkers, painters.
