American Philosopher Quotes

That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.

Patricia Hill Collins
Patricia Hill Collins
Would you reach the infinite? Then enter into finite things, working out all that they contain.

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.

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

Jacob Needleman
Jacob Needleman
If there is a widely shared concept of intentional action... a philosophical analysis of intentional action that is wholly unconstrained by that concept runs the risk of having nothing more than a philosophical fiction as its subject matter.

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

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.

Any first-order, substantive normative theory worth its salt will require attention to the mental states of agents in a variety of quite complex ways. But realism, being a view about the status of such normative theories, insists that the truth of any firstorder normative standard is not a function of what anyone happens to think of it.

As the world of science has grown in size and in power, its deepest problems have changed from the epistemological to the social.

Jerome Ravetz
Jerome Ravetz
There is no such thing as the probability of four aces in one hand, or the probability of anything else. Given all the relevant data which there are to be known, everything is either certainly true or certainly false.

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.

It seems to me that philosophers should be more relaxed about whether or not some form of materialism is true.

The discovery that the universe has no purpose need not prevent a human
being from having one.

Hitherto, it must be admitted that American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact, or to be exact, more in sentiment than in experience. The chief bond between them has been that of a common condition rather than a common consciousness; a problem in common rather than a life in common.

Alain LeRoy Locke
Alain LeRoy Locke
Its women are lovely and stubborn, its men angry and ingenious. Is there a land anywhere like southern Illinois?

The centipede was happy quite Until the toad for fun Said: "Pray which leg comes after which?" This wrought his mind to such a pitch, He lay distracted in the ditch Considering how to run.

Equations seem like treasures, spotted in the rough by some discerning individual, plucked and examined, placed in the grand storehouse of knowledge, passed on from generation to generation. This is so convenient a way to present scientific discovery, and so useful for textbooks, that it can be called the treasure-hunt picture of knowledge.

The very essence of civilized culture is that we deliberately institute, in advance of the happening of various contingencies and emergencies of life, devices for detecting their approach and registering their nature, for warding off what is unfavorable or at least for protecting ourselves from its full impact.

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.

We live in a world populated by structures - a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history

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

We don't call war hell because it is fought without restraint. It is more nearly right to say that, when certain restraints are passed, the hellishness of war drives us to break with every remaining restraint in order to win. Here is the ultimate tyranny: those who resist aggression are forced to imitate, and perhaps even to exceed, the brutality of the aggressor.

Michael Walzer
Michael Walzer
The moral and religious teachings of no bible reach a higher altitude than the intelligence and mental development of the age and country which produced it.

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.