British Philosopher Quotes

How far our position is a minority one will differ from person to person here. If we are against factory farms, we are morally condemning widespread and perfectly legal practices involving perhaps the majority of the human community. If we are vegetarians, we hold a position which is very much a minority one. If we are pretty radical anti-vivisectionists, we also hold what seems to be a minority position, involving as it does a radical criticism of the law and the establishment of this country.

Timothy Sprigge

You can only solve a problem which you recognize to be a problem.

R. G. Collingwood

God does not measure everything by numbers or dimensions. He has another scale of values, according to which-asJesus Himself told us-one human soul is worth more than the entire universe.

The art of dharma practice requires commitment, technical accomplishment, and imagination. As with all arts, we will fail to realize its full potential if any of these three are lacking. The raw material of dharma practice is ourself and our world, which are to be understood and transformed according to the vision and values of the dharma itself. This is not a process of self- or world- transcendence, but one of self- and world- creation.

Stephen Batchelor (author)

First it must be known that only a spoken word or a conventional sign is an equivocal or univocal term; therefore a mental contentor concept is, strictly speaking, neither equivocal nor univocal.

William of Ockham

When the epistemologists' concept of consciousness first became popular, it seems to have been in part a transformed application of the Protestant notion of conscience."Consciousness" was imported to play in the mental world the role played by light in the mechanical world.

There are here two assumptions about 'evaluations ', which I will call assumption (1) and assumption (2). Assumption (1) is that some individual may, without logical error, base his beliefs about matters of value entirely on premises which no one else would recognise as giving any evidence at all. Assumption (2) is that, given the kind of statement which other people regard as evidence for an evaluative conclusion, he may refuse to draw the conclusion because this does not count as evidence for him.

There is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook that offers insight, consolation, inspiration and meaning, which has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with the best, most generous, most sympathetic understanding of human reality.

The cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century, provoking technocratic-corporatist (i.e. fascist / 'social democratic') political cultures in allergic reaction.

For Kant, the predisposition to good (like Calvin's 'seed of goodness') is in one way more fundamental to us than the overlying propensity to evil, and in one way it is less fundamental. The predisposition to good is more fundamental because it is essential to us; we cannot lose it without ceasing to be human. The propensity to evil is in that way less fundamental, because we can lose it, and indeed we should lose it, without ceasing to be human. On the other hand, the propensity to evil is in a different way more fundamental. It is our root maxim when we are born.

Metaphysical knowledge... may be possible theoretically, and even actual, if you please, to a certain degree; but, for all that, it is practically no knowledge worth the name.

Science is knowledge certain and evident in itself, or by the principles from which it is deducted, or with which it is certainly connected. It is subjective, as existing in the mind; objective, as embodied in truths; speculative, as leading to do something, as in practical science.

William Fleming

Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.

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?