British Philosopher Quotes

I loved the opportunity to think about the big questions philosophy asks, and the rigorous way in which philosophy trains the mind to answer them. What is ultimately real? Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there a necessary being or are all beings contingent? What is knowledge and what can we know? Is there something which is objectively right or wrong, or is everything relative? Most people, at some point, will be confronted with some of these questions and will try to answer them in a more or less informal way. Philosophy has been tackling them over the centuries in a formal, rigorous way, engaging in a deep, fascinating, and exciting conversation which continues nowadays.

Maria Rosa Antognazza

Wittgenstein imagined that the philosopher was like a therapist whose task was to put problems finally to rest, and to cure us ofbeing bewitched by them. So we are told to stop, to shut off lines of inquiry, not to find things puzzling nor to seek explanations. This is intellectual suicide.

Simon Blackburn

Science can only deal with what is, and can say nothing about what ought to be, which is the concern of ethics; science can tell us about means to ends, but not about what the ends should be.

Leonard Hodgson

And common sense today assumes that it is the outer world that is real and permanent, while the inner experience we call consciousness, or subjectivity, or our own or our self, is a fleeting unreality to which it somehow gives birth from time to time.

Let us, my dear contemporaries, arise above such narrow prejudices. If wisdom be desirable on its own account, if virtue, to deserve the name, must be founded on knowledge, let us endeavour to strengthen our minds by reflection till our heads become a balance for our hearts...

Mary Wollstonecraft

If a work of art is placed before me, I believe I can enjoy it; but I do not overlook the fact, that Art is one thing, another thing Amusement; and that people do like amusements, and will run after it.

George Henry Lewes

This swallowing up of life in nothingness, this obliteration of life by nothingness is what the emotion of malice ultimately desires. The eternal conflict between love and malice is the eternal contest between life and death. And this contest is what the complex vision reveals, as it moves from darkness to darkness.

John Cowper Powys

Science is never static, never stagnant, never content with the boundary it has reached. It is always dynamic, always breaking bounds...Science... abhors a limitation...

All government is a trust. Every branch of government is a trust, and immemorially acknowledged to be so.

For the institutions of the European Union are at present incomplete. A European Senate is badly needed to complete them. By creating an upper chamber in the European parliament, a new bridge could be built between national political classes, which retain democratic legitimacy, and the decision-making process in Brussels. Such a Senate should be recruited by indirect election from exisiting national parliaments.

Larry Siedentop

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

Stephen R. L. Clark

All knowledge, we admit, is in the last resort "empirical," in the sense that it arises out of facts, that is, out of experiences which we cannot altogether fashion as we please to suit our own convenience, or our own sense of what is fitting or desirable, but have largely to accept as they come to us.

Alfred Edward Taylor

The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and... all forms of rationalism... was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method... was considerable and perhaps crucial.

Thinking in words, consciousness is behavior, experiment is measurement.

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.

John Alexander Smith

We are passengers, comprehended and displaced by metaphor.

A game may be as integral to a culture, as true an object of human aesthetic appreciation, as admirable a product of creativity as a folk art or a style of music; and, as such, it is quite as worthy of study.

Michael Dummett

The failure to take organization seriously is perhaps but another consequence of the rapid development of physics and chemistry as compared to other sciences, and the consequent dazzling effect this had on biological vision.

Joseph Henry Woodger

Historians of ideas soon learn — to their dismay — that their subject appears to be mathematically dense: between any two people who wrote on the matter there appears to be another.

Surely death acquires a new and deeper significance when we regard it no longer as a single and unexplained break in an unending life, but as a part of the continuously recurring rhythm of progress-as inevitable, as natural and benevolent as sleep.

J. M. E. McTaggart

The social conditions that nourished and made use of this ideology can still revive; perhaps - who knows? - the virus is dormant, waiting for the next opportunity. Dreams about the perfect society belong to the enduring stock of civilization.

Leszek Kołakowski

What is best about our lives -the moments when we are, as we would put it, at our happiest- is both pleasant and deeply unpleasant. Happiness is not a feeling; it is a way of being. If we focus on the feelings, we will miss the point.

Economics is not an attempt to generalize human desires or human behavior; but to generalize the phenomena of price.

Michael Oakeshott

Scientific medicine is one of the greatest triumphs of humankind.

The theory of evolution explains to us what our ancestry has been. It does not explain away our worth. Why should we be afraid to learn more about what we are?