20th-century Philosopher Quotes

Only in the West did a philosophy develop that was not only no longer the love of wisdom but went so far as to deny the category of wisdom as a legitimate form of knowledge. The result was a hatred of wisdom that should more appropriately be called 'misosophy' (literarily hatred of Sophia, Wisdom) rather than philosophy.

Hossein Nasr
Hossein Nasr
I am a 21st Century person who was accidentally launched in the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future.

FM-2030
FM-2030
No one has a right to speak who, in the midst of thinking, hasn't been overcome with the experience of glimpsing the essence of history.

The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

A collection of errors does not make a truth: quality cannot stem from quantity – a value is not a weight. The reasons of the majority cannot be taken as good reasons.

Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious moralists.

If the power of government rests on the widespread acceptance of false indeed absurd and foolish ideas, then the only genuine protection is the systematic attack of these ideas and the propagation and proliferation of true ones.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Roark, … like Socrates before him, appears quite willing to martyr himself. … The leading characters in Atlas Shrugged, however, have chosen voluntary exile—reminiscent of Aristotle's response to Athens when he was charged with the same crimes as Socrates.

Douglas Den Uyl
Douglas Den Uyl
When mind is quiet, all is Self. When mind moves the world arises. So be Still, throw away everything and be Free.

Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.

The distinction between identifying reference and uniquely existential assertion is something quite undeniable. The sense in which the existence of something answering to a definite description used for the purpose of identifying reference, and its distinguishability by an audience from anything else, is presupposed and not asserted in an utterance containing such an expression, so used, stands absolutely firm, whether or not one opts for the view that radical failure of the presupposition would deprive the statement of a truth-value. It remains a decisive objection to the theory of Descriptions... that... it amounts to a denial of these undeniable distinctions.

The principal way that cognitive science can contribute to epistemology, I claim, is to identify basic belief-forming, or problem-solving processes. Once identified, these processes would be examined by primary epistemology according to the evaluative dimensions and standards adduced in Part I.

An answer, once found, is dull; and the only remaining interest lies in a further effort to render equally dull what is still obscure enough to be intriguing.

Nelson Goodman
Nelson Goodman
Modern experimentation is often like driving an automobile. The details and theory of the instruments being used in the experiment are not known to the experimenter except in a very general way. (...) Experimenters are taught in an explicit way, often, how to write up reports of their experiments. But the tradition here is like sports reporting. Only the results of the experiment are reported in any serious detail. The procedures are not.

Not only may particular decisions made according to rules result in material injustice, but a rule may systematically discriminate against the poor and the oppressed. In such circumstances, to be committed to applying the rules, however fairly or impartially administered, come what may, is to ignore the more obvious and direct demands of justice and human welfare.

Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live.

We should not confuse complete faith in God with complete faith in our ability to discern God's voice.

Science doesn't give authentically access to the Real in the ontological meaning of the word, but only to the links between phenomena.

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.

Mental events such as perceivings, rememberings, decisions, and actions resist capture in the net of physical theory.

Donald Davidson (philosopher)
Donald Davidson (philosopher)
The (post) structuralist temper requires too great a depersonalization of the writing/speaking subject. Writing becomes plagiarism; speaking becomes quoting. Meanwhile, we do write, we do speak.

Watch the engineer and you will learn many things, but do not ask him about mathematics, unless you want to see quite another thing, how technology and folk-lore get invented and broadcast.

How could any woman love a man who wears a cardigan over his pajamas?

Guts are important. Your guts are what digest things. But it is your brains that tell you which things to swallow and which not to swallow.

The modern scientist looks upon science as a great building erected stone by stone through the work of his predecessors and his contemporary fellow-scientists, a structure that will be continued but never completed by his successors.