Simon Blackburn Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there.

Simon Blackburn
A signpost doesn't in and of itself represent the way to the village. We have to learn how to take it.

Simon Blackburn
But it is logically impossible that there could exist an 'unowned' dent, a dent without a surface that is dented.

Simon Blackburn
There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.

Simon Blackburn
In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual.

Simon Blackburn
Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction.

Simon Blackburn
According to Confucianism, the ideal life contains a large dose of respect for traditional ways. All these ideals can be fleshed out and painted in more or less attractive colours. Yet there is something uncomfortable about them, if only because there is little reason to suppose that there is any such thing as the ideal life. Since different people have different tastes and interests, and different cultures encourage different concerns, it seems unlikely that any 'ideal life' will be heavily contextualized: ideal for this person in these circumstances, perhaps, but not much more.

Simon Blackburn
What underlies our assignment of probabilities in the real world?

Simon Blackburn
The word "philosophy" carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, unworldly, weird.

Simon Blackburn
The scientific world is to be less threatening than was feared. It is to be made safe for human beings. And the way to make it safe is to reflect on the foundation of knowledge.

Simon Blackburn
But if nothing does as well as something about which nothing can be said, it vanishes.

Simon Blackburn
We think about what to do, and muster considerations and arguments in favor of one course or another. How are we to think about that?

Simon Blackburn
The absolutist takes himself to speak to the ages, with the tongue of angels, but the relativist hears only one version among others, the subjectivity of the here and now.

Simon Blackburn
The absolutist lays down the law, but the relativist hears only roaring and bawling. Or, when the relativist voice, as it is heard from philosophers such as Nietzsche or James, itself starts to grate and sounds shrill, as it often does, and when the relativist then offers concessions, the absolutist hears only insincerity. The war of words can often turn into a dialogue of the deaf, and this too if part of its power to arouse outrage and fury.

Simon Blackburn
The absolutist parades his good solid grounding in observation, reason, objectivity, truth and fact; the relativist sees only fetishes.

Simon Blackburn
The absolutist trumpets his plain vision; the relativist sees only someone who is unaware of his own spectacles.

Simon Blackburn
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
Since there is no telling in advance where it may lead, reflection can be seen as dangerous.

Simon Blackburn
It can seem an amazing fact that laws of nature keep on holding, that the frame of nature does not fall apart.

Simon Blackburn
A god that created the world and then walked off the site leaving it to its own devices is not a fit object of worship, nor a source of moral authority.

Simon Blackburn
In the end, it is ideas for which people kill each other.

Simon Blackburn
Perhaps to restore human freedom we should deny determinism?

Simon Blackburn
Induction is the process of taking things within our experience to be representative of the world outside our experience. It is a process of projection or extrapolation.

Simon Blackburn
Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?

Simon Blackburn
Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility.

Simon Blackburn