Canadian Philosopher Quotes

Marshall McLuhan

Charles Taylor (philosopher)

Ian Hacking

Jean Vanier

Patricia Churchland

Leonard Peikoff

George Grant

All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.

The philosophical spirit is not satisfied to simply accept what it is told, no matter how much prestige the teller seems to have. This is true even if the teller is a god.

The full analysis of the notions of saying something and understanding what one said inevitably involves a concept which, as I will show in detail, essentially corresponds to the Cartesian idea of thought.

A scientist should not cheat or falsify data or quote out of context or do any other thing that is intellectually dishonest. Of course, as always, some individuals fail; but science as a whole disapproves of such action. Indeed, when transgressors are detected, they are usually expelled from the community.

Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding,

Bernard Lonergan

There is a pressing need to understand our technological destiny from principles more comprehensive than its own. This need lifts us up to ask about the great western experiment in a more than piecemeal way. It pushes us to try to understand its meaning in terms of some openness to the whole which is not simply sustenance for the further realisation of that experiment. But the exigency of our need for understanding must not blind us to the tightening circle in which we find ourselves. We are called to understand technological civilisation just when its very realisation has radically put in question the possibility that there could be any such understanding.

Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was the software, not the hardware, increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind.

Patricia Churchland

A poem might begin for me from a rhythmical phrase without words but with an an emotional / tonal pitch or colour which will announce itself.Other times I' ll just become obsessed by something..hoping that eventually it will speak to me in English.

There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else's life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.

Charles Taylor (philosopher)

What one needs to know in order to appraise a man morally is not: what did his mother say or do when he was three? The proper question is: what does he say and do now?

Leonard Peikoff

The bad player is the one who tries to calculate and play with the odds, as if his game, his life, were one of a large number of games. To do so is at best to succumb to another necessity, the necessity of large numbers. The good player does not fool himself, and accepts that there is exactly one chance, which produces by chance the necessity and even the purpose that he experiences.

The curiosity of Man, and the cunning of his reason, have revealed much of what Nature held hidden.

Paul Churchland

[A computer program for Task A qua an explanatory model and how a human cognizer actually carries out Task A are equivalent in the strong sense when it can be shown that]... the model and the organism are carrying out the same process.

How much freedom I have depends on the number and nature of my options. And that, in turn, depends both on the rules of the game and on the assetts of the players: it is a very important and widely neglected truth that it does not depend on the rules of the game alone.

The evolution of science is not a movement in an intellectual vacuum; rather it is both an expression and a driving force of the historical process.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way.

People may come to our communities because they want to serve the poor; they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are poor.

To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.

Marshall McLuhan