Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.
Now that we do not have priests and philosophers any more, artists are the most important people in the world.
There was once a philosopher who said, ‘I don’t believe in God, but I fear him greatly.’ That’s about where I am.
Under Freud’s influence, many ambitious biographers – not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians – have sought answers in their subject’s childhood.
Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.
It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
What we owe future generations is the subject of growing debate by economists, philosophers, ethicists, public policymakers, and academics of all stripes. But for me as a mother, the moral implications are very clear. We owe them clean air and fresh water, a healthy planet and a secure future.
The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
I worked among many famous philosophers, and I tried to observe how they treated students. I knew which ones I wanted to be like, and which ones I didn’t.
No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it’s the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.
Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
I felt the question of the afterlife was the black hole of the personal universe: something for which substantial proof of existence had been offered but which had not yet been explored in the proper way by scientists and philosophers.
There’s no books out there articulating what the alt-right is. If they’re such great philosophers, and they have such good ideas, and they’re on the vanguard of intellectualism, where are their books? They don’t have any.
Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy be still a man.
He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher… or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
For my future I have no concern, and as a true philosopher, I never would have any, for I know not what it may be: as a Christian, on the other hand, faith must believe without discussion, and the stronger it is, the more it keeps silent.
It is not meant that the artist, in arriving at truth, must follow the way of the scientist, or, in stating it, the way of the philosopher.
Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.
A great philosopher has stated that the worst evil of poverty is, that it makes folks ridiculous; by which, I hope, he only means that, as in the above case, it places them in incongruous positions.
Brazil is a country largely resistant to ideology. This is a strange fact given its founding by followers of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who inscribed an epigram from his philosophy of positivism in the national flag: Order and Progress.
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.
Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the existence of the small but important post-Zionist movement in Israel, including the philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram, the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet Yitzhak Laor.
All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.
Women do not often fall in love with philosophers.
I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ‘divine service.’
A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.
Success is a lousy teacher, but failure is a friend, philosopher, and guide.
Labor is the fabled magician’s wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.
The great Jewish scientists and philosophers of the last few generations – Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Robert Oppenheimer and others – were natives of Europe and America.
I grew up in a household that really encouraged reading and writing. My mother loves philosophy and is constantly reading philosophy and talking to me about different philosophers and different ways of life.
Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language.
Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it’s a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.
Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
In taking action we must remember that the things which are happening to the Jews today are but a part of the general disintegration anticipated by philosophers and historians of different schools for almost half a century.
The world’s philosophers and theologians searched for answers to the same mysteries.
A woman finds the natural lay of the land almost unconsciously; and not feeling it incumbent on her to be guide and philosopher to any successor, she takes little pains to mark the route by which she is making her ascent.
If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.
When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then – and not until then – will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher become a real and blessed truth.
The ancient Greek philosophers were blonde and blue-eyed and, even then, talked about how their race was mixed with others and how this affected their society negatively. When there were no more natural blondes and no more blue eyes in Greece, they incidentally stopped producing great philosophers.
Well, I don’t know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I’m no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.
However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract between citizens and governments sharply into political thinking, paving the way for popular democracy and constitutional republicanism.
I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.
Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.
I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I’m really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.
The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.
Teenagers are philosophers. They are thinking about the big things like existence and identity at a time when their identities are changing so fast.
A philosopher is, no doubt, entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages… in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy.
Scientists search for truth. Philosophers search for morality. A criminal trial searches for only one result: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
I see the beard and cloak, but I don’t yet see a philosopher.
We were promised a society of philosophers. But the Blogosphere is looking more and more like a nation of ankle-biters.
The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.
To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
