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
Morality cannot be based on religion. If anything, the opposite is partly true, for nothing can be God unless he or it is an object worthy of worship and it is our own moral insight that must tell us if anything at all could possibly be
worthy of worship.

It is not unity that we must seek but collective consciousness. In Afrocentricity there is a remarkable surge of consciousness that transcends the current emphasis on unity; this is the next act in our drama.... Consciousness precedes unity.

Molefi Kete Asante
Molefi Kete Asante
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.

When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.

Jacob Needleman
Jacob Needleman
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
Observation and experiment, without a rational hypothesis, is like a man groping at objects at random with his eyes shut.

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

In any remembering, thinking or imagining, although the object of my intending is some state of affairs or other, I am also potentially aware as I intend that what I am doing is an act of remembering, thinking, or imagining. My asserting that S is P is not an assertion of mine unless I am implicitly aware as I assert that I am asserting, not entertaining the possibility that, S is P.

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.

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.

Much as we complain about our condition or feel victimized by fortune or fellow humans, we simply love being alive. We love life in others and in ourselves. We are in love with life. To love life is to love the activities of which it consists and to hope for more.

No problem is more crucial for a naturalistic view of the world than the mind-body problem.

The Encyclopedia presents a contemporary version of the ancient encyclopedic ideal of Aristotle, the Scholastics, Leibniz, the Encyclopedists, and Comte.

What sort of personality does one need to have, as a twenty-first-century mechanic, to tolerate the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines?

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.