American Philosopher Quotes

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.

Holmes Rolston III

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

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.

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.

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.

Marshall Berman

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 (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.

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

Donald Davidson (philosopher)

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.

Clearly, Enlightenment thinkers were seeking a God substitute.

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

Roy Wood Sellars

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

Elisabeth Lloyd

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

As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation "intergenerational intimacy": that's euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term "sodomy": that's avoidance. My students don't know the word "fornication" at all: that's forgetfulness.

J. Budziszewski

I am here to argue against the existence of the Christian God. I am not here to defend atheism, contrary to the impression Dr. Craig's talk might have given you. Look, I think there are many ways of thinking about God. And I think some of them are ways I might accept. I just can't accept the Christian God.

It is the desire for explanations that are at once systematic and controllable by factual evidence that generates science; and it is the organization and classification of knowledge on the basis of explanatory principles that is the distinctive goal of the sciences.

Give humanity hope and it will dare and suffer joyfully, not counting the cost - hope with laughter on her banner and on her face the fresh beauty of morning.

John Elof Boodin

Every nursing mother, in the midst of her little dependent brood, has far more right to whine, sulk or scold, as temperament dictates, because beefsteak and coffee are not prepared for her and exactly to her taste, than any man ever had or ever can have during the present stage of human evolution.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

The ability to imagine relations is one of the most indispensable conditions of all precise thinking. No subject can be named in the investigation of which it is not imperatively needed; but it can be nowhere else so thoroughly acquired as in the study of mathematics.

John Fiske (philosopher)

Assigning central importance to the aesthetic in human experience may seem to be a radical inversion, placing what is usually considered secondary and peripheral at the center of the human world as its nourishing source. Isn't this an ingenuous simplification of the vast range and complexity of experience?

Arnold Berleant

It may seem as if Kant was content with such a radically dualistic view of human action, but ultimately he was not.

Unsolved problems generally count as genuine problems only when they are no longer unsolved.

Events of resistance have the power not only to escape control but also to create a new world.

On closer inspection, the hero status accorded to Abraham, Moses and David in the Old Testament (and echoed in the New Testament) is rooted not in their moral perfection but in their uncompromising dedication to the cause of Yahweh and their rugged trust in the promises of God rather than lapsing into the idolatry of many of their contemporaries.

Science acts like an enchantment to disarm criticism; and mental quacks perceiving this, hasten to call their nostrums science.

Borden Parker Bowne