Quotes by Women Philosophers

God may have written just a few laws and grown tired. We do not know whether we are in a tidy universe or an untidy one.

Nancy Lynn Delaney Cartwright

Now suppose that the clue experiences that can correct the illusion become for some reason increasingly scarce – perhaps because the dominant story itself brings about their elimination! Then the illusion might go on for a very long time, might have to result in real catastrophe, before anyone realizes anything is wrong.

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.

What sort of god would deliberately create a world in which his creatures must eat one another to live?

What is it about separation, in any or all of its many forms and degrees, that makes it so basic and so sinister, so exciting and so repellent?

The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism

As for life, I suspect that, twenty years hence, biologists may be concerning themselves with 'the question of life' just as vigorously as the rest of us now are with problems about consciousness.

Even as the cell is the unit of the organic body, so the family is the unit of society.

Ruth Nanda Anshen

I believe that a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society.... if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless.

We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion what is and what is not their 'proper sphere.' The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to.

Harriet Taylor Mill

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.

Rebecca Goldstein

For truly in nature there are many operations that are far more than mechanical. Nature is not simply an organic body like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or a mechanical motion.

Anne Conway (philosopher)

We cannot embrace the New Mind by just sitting around and talking about it. It demands that we alter not just our thinking, but our way of living down to the smallest details.