Metaphysics Quotes

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The above interpretation has been introduced, not on account of its immediate value in the present system, but as an illustration of a significant fact in the philosophy of the intellectual powers, viz., that what has commonly been regarded as the fundamental axiom of metaphysics is but the consequence of a law of thought, mathematical in its form.

Human beings are religious. We don't all have to be, any more than we all have to be musical, or athletic, or humorous; but as long as there are human beings, there will be religion to offer warmth to those who can believe its stories and its metaphysics, while those who can't will be left with a paler, colder flame.

John Derbyshire

Only geometry can hand us the thread [which will lead us through] the labyrinth of the continuum's composition, the maximum and the minimum, the infinitesimal and the infinite; and no one will arrive at a truly solid metaphysics except he who has passed through this [labyrinth].

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Learn just enough of the subject [metaphysics] to enable your mind to get rid of it.

Benjamin Jowett

For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.

The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking?

The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

Throughout the nineteenth century, apart from the division in theoretical sciences and arts, classifiers attempted to divide the sciences into two groups. Already they had before them the examples of Francis Bacon (speculative and descriptive) and Hobbes (quantitative and qualitative). For Coleridge, the sciences were either pure (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Metaphysics) or mixed. Arthur Schopenhauer's similar groups were called pure and empirical, Wilhelm Wundt in 1887 called them formal and empirical, Globot mathematical and theoretical, and the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences (1904) normative and physical. Karl Pearson made similar division of the sciences into abstract and concrete

Brian Campbell Vickery

The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more literary and political. As the children grew up, they exaggerated the literary and the political interests. They joined in the dinner-table discussions and from childhood the boys were accustomed to hear, almost every day, table-talk as good as they were ever likely to hear again. The eldest child, Louisa, was one of the most sparkling creatures her brother met in a long and varied experience of bright women.

The great question in life is the suffering we cause, and the most ingenious metaphysics do not justify the man who has broken the heart that loved him.

Benjamin Constant

Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.

Jacques Maritain

I believe that communities which lack the feminine influence are apt to fall into abstraction and the madness of systems which, being false, require violence to put into practice. We have, alas, seen too many examples of this. A masculine civilization like that of ancient Greece perishes through politics, metaphysics, and vanity. Women alone can give these doctrinary drones a sense of the real and simple values of the hive. No true civilization is possible without the collaboration of the two sexes, but there can be no real collaboration unless the differences between the sexes are accepted and a mutual respect established.

He, however, who begins with Metaphysics, will not only become confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity.

Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics.

Psychology, speaking for emotion and instinct, has reduced intellect to impotence over life. Metaphysics has subordinated it to will. Bergson and his followers have charged it with falsehood and issued a general warning against its misrepresentations; while with pragmatists and instrumentalists it has sunk so low that it is dressed in livery and sent to live in the servant's quarters. It is against this last indignity in particular that I wish to speak a word of protest, to the end that the intellect may be accorded full rights within the community of human activities and interests.

Ralph Barton Perry

To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.

Martin Heidegger

According to this view, the sentences of metaphysics are pseudo-sentences which on logical analysis are proved to be either empty phrases or phrases which violate the rules of syntax. Of the so-called philosophical problems, the only questions which have any meaning are those of the logic of science. To share this view is to substitute logical syntax for philosophy.

The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.

I put it like this: you can't make a science-fiction film pretending that 2001 [A Space Odyssey] doesn't exist. But I think 2001's relationship with humanity is more philosophical, more abstract. I wanted to embrace the metaphysics, but relate it to something more obviously human, like love.

Christopher Nolan

The ability of a scientific theory to be refuted is the key criterion that distinguishes science from metaphysics. If a theory cannot be refuted, if there is no observation that will disprove it, then nothing can prove it - it cannot predict anything, it is a worthless myth.

Logic and metaphysics make use of more tools than all the rest of the sciences put together, and do the least work.

Charles Caleb Colton

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.

George Santayana

Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.

One has to recognize that science is not metaphysics, and certainly not mysticism; it can never bring us the illumination and the satisfaction experienced by one enraptured in ecstasy. Science is sobriety and clarity of conception, not intoxicated vision.

Ludwig von Mises

Metaphysics is the clearing house for all fundamental philosophical problems.

Joseph Alexander Leighton