American Philosopher Quotes

One cannot properly appreciate the human realities so long as one labors under the adolescent delusion that people get the fates they deserve.

Nicholas Rescher
Nicholas Rescher
If what I want when I drink fine wine is information about its chemical properties, why don't I just read the label?

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.

The secret of all true persuasion is to induce the person to persuade himself.

Statism – the subordination of the individual to the state -
leads inevitably to the most hideous oppression.

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.

Rebecca Goldstein
Rebecca Goldstein
Any individual can be, in time, what he earnestly desires to be, if he but sets his face steadfastly in the direction of that one thing, and bring all his powers to bear upon its attainment.

What solidarity we do find exists despite the society, against all its realities, as an unending struggle between the innate decency of man and the innate indecency of the society. Can we imagine how men would behave if this decency could find full release, if society earned the respect, even the love of the individual?

Murray Bookchin
Murray Bookchin
In the logic of science there is a principle as important as that of parsimony: it is that of sufficient reason.

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.

Sometimes duplicity and treason are markers of the enemy, and sometimes, the failed intention of a masterful ally. But, nevertheless, as they burden you with a vexing brand of love, they become nothing more than the kiss of Judas, pressing a crown of thorns into your flesh.

Hope provides comfort, and hope does not always require probability.

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

Nicholas Murray Butler
Nicholas Murray Butler
Reason is the power or capacity whereby we see or detect logical relationships among propositions.

Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Plantinga
We may not feel as confident as once we did that the way to truth lies all open before us the moment we have brought our vague questionings to a form that "leaves the rest to experiment."

Ethical Egoism advocates that each of us divide the world into two categories of people—ourselves and all the rest—and that we regard the interests of those in the first group as more important than the interests of those in the second group. But each of us can ask, what is the difference between myself and others that justifies placing myself in this special category? Am I more intelligent? Do I enjoy my life more? Are my accomplishments greater? Do I have needs or abilities that are so different from the needs and abilities of others? What is it that makes me so special? Failing an answer, it turns out that Ethical Egoism is an arbitrary doctrine, in the same way that racism is arbitrary.

The overwhelming presence of machines and instrumentation must be one of the most salient features of the modern scientific laboratory.... The development of science depends at least as much on new machinery as it does on new ideas.

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.

Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical, sentimental irresponsibility and when it is a valid expression of our deepest desires and values.

Once the idea of a supernaturalistic creation is fully overcome, the idea returns that the universe must be self-organizing and therefore composed of self-moving parts. Also, insofar as dualistic assumptions are fully overcome and human experience is accepted as fully natural, it begins to seem probable that something analogous to our experience and self-movement is a feature of every level of nature.

David Ray Griffin
David Ray Griffin
We are scientific people and we want our students to feel the enthusiasm and promise of the scientific method. We want them to feel the moral quality of exact technique, as exact as the subject matter permits. We want them to feel that science is a spiritual experience.

Thus a eukaryotic cell may be thought of as an empire directed by a republic of sovereign chromosomes in the nucleus. The chromosomes preside over the outlying cytoplasm in which formerly independent but now subject and degenerate prokaryotes carry out a variety of specialized service functions.

The only proper role of government, according to libertarians, is that of the protector of the citizen against aggression by other individuals. The government, of course, should never initiate aggression; its proper role is as the embodiment of the retaliatory use of force against anyone who initiates its use.

John Hospers
John Hospers
As philosophy becomes academic and tends to repudiate its responsibility to the culture in which it flourishes, the layman in need of wisdom and vision turns to evangelic practicalists, who confirm him in his myopic prejudice that the exclusive end of moral philosophy is actually to direct social activity toward the concrete and immediate improvement of social conditions. But, since there is no way of knowing except by arduous philosophical criticism whether the ends to which a reformer would lead us represent genuine improvement, the practicalist's impatience with theory is at best hasty.