Random quotes
April 27th 2007 03:58
Prepared some posters for Russoc and Orientation Week in March. My idea was to give a selection of some of my fave discussion-starting quotes. Thought I might as well stick them here.
"Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked. When we have realized the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we shall be well launched on the study of philosophy -- for philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after exploring all that makes such questions puzzling and after realizing all the vagueness and confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas." -- Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
"A villager from Daxiang said, 'How grand is Confucius! He is broad in his learning, and yet he is not renowned in any particular area.' The Master on hearing of this, said to his disciples, 'What should I specialize in? Perhaps charioteering? Or maybe archery? No, I think I'll take charioteering.'" -- The Analects (c. 479–221 BCE)
"[M]en are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are conditioned. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions... What the will is, and how it moves the body, they none of them know; those who boast of such knowledge, and feign dwellings and habitations for the soul, are wont to provoke either laughter or disgust." -- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)
"The definition of the number two, 'That is called "two"' -- pointing to two nuts -- is perfectly exact. -- But how can two be defined like that? The person one gives the definition to doesn't know what one wants to call 'two'; he will suppose that 'two' is the name given to this group of nuts! ---- He may suppose this; but perhaps he does not. He might make the opposite mistake; when I want to assign a name to this group of nuts, he might understand it as a numeral. And he might equally well take the name of a person, of which I give an ostensive definition, as that of a colour, of a race, or even of a point of the compass." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1945)
"The belief that mere membership of our species, irrespective of other characteristics, makes a great difference to the wrongness of killing a being is a legacy of religious doctrines… My suggestion, then, is that we accord the life of a fetus no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc. Since no fetus is a person, no fetus has the same claim to life as a person" -- Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (1993)
"[M]odern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or view matter for solace and pleasure… The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms… A postmodern artist or writer… the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories… Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer… are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and text have the characters of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their author." -- Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Answering the question: what is postmodernism?" (1984)
"... it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement… Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements, which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics". -- Willard Van Orman Quine, "Two dogmas of empiricism" (1951)
"Haven't you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly, 'I'm looking for God! I'm looking for God!' Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter. Has he been lost, then? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another... The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. 'Where is God?' he cried; 'I'll tell you! We have killed him -- you and I! We are all his murderers... Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down?... Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us?" -- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882)
"[S]uppose a distribution favored by one of these non-entitlement conceptions... Let us suppose it is your favorite one and let us call this distribution D1; perhaps everyone has an equal share, perhaps shares vary in accordance with some dimension you treasure. Now suppose that Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams... He signs the following sort of contract... In each home game, twenty-five cents from the price of each ticket of admission goes to him... The season starts, and people cheerfully attend his team's games... Let us suppose that... Wilt Chamberlain winds up with $250,000, a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than anyone else has. Is he entitled to this income? Is this new distribution D2, unjust?" -- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
"What was this treasure? As they themselves understood it, it seems to have consisted... of two interconnected parts: they had discovered that he who 'joined the Resistance, found himself', that he ceased to be 'in quest of [himself]… [and] that he no longer suspected himself of 'insincerity'… In this nakedness, stripped of all masks -- of those which society assigns its members as well as those which the individual fabricates for himself… they had been visited for the first time in their lives by an apparition of freedom". -- Hannah Arendt, Between past and future (1954)
"Question: But if one is to create oneself without recourse to knowledge or universal rules, how does your view differ from Sartrean existentialism?
Michel Foucault: I think that from the theoretical point of view, Sartre avoids the idea of the self as something that is given to us, but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves -- to be truly our true self. I think that the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity -- and not that of authenticity. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art."
-- "On the genealogy of ethics" (1983)
"If we examine... the production of effects from their causes, we shall find, that all our faculties can never carry us farther in our knowledge of this relation, than barely to observe, that particular objects are constantly conjoined together, and that the mind is carried, by a customary transition, from the appearance of one to the belief of the other. But... men still entertain a strong propensity to believe, that they penetrate farther into the powers of nature, and perceive something like a necessary connexion between the cause and the effect. When again they turn their reflections towards the operations of their own minds, and feel no such connexion of the motive and the action; they are thence apt to suppose, that there is a difference between the effects, which result from material force, and those which arise from thought and intelligence." -- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
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"A villager from Daxiang said, 'How grand is Confucius! He is broad in his learning, and yet he is not renowned in any particular area.' The Master on hearing of this, said to his disciples, 'What should I specialize in? Perhaps charioteering? Or maybe archery? No, I think I'll take charioteering.'" -- The Analects (c. 479–221 BCE)
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Michel Foucault: I think that from the theoretical point of view, Sartre avoids the idea of the self as something that is given to us, but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves -- to be truly our true self. I think that the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity -- and not that of authenticity. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art."
-- "On the genealogy of ethics" (1983)
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Comment by Damo
I can't say that I agree with all of them, but who can?
Is there going to be a 'Quotes of Adrian' post?
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Thanks very much for reading Damo!
Comment by Nickoftime's Sanity Corner
good collection of quotes...! Well put together as well..
Take care,
Nick
Comment by JoshZ
A newspaper once asked a bunch of philosophers, including GK Chesterton what they thought was wrong with the world. His reply.
My dear Sir,
I am.
Yours sincerely,
GK Chesterton.
JZ
Comment by postmoderncritic
Postmodern Critic
Relativity Watch
Padsoc
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your quotes, especially the ones by Lyotard, Wittgenstein, Quine and Foucault! I look forward to discussing some of these in detail in the future perhaps... Maybe we can even initiate a second debate using one of them! ^^
Take care for now,
Epiphanie
Comment by Uula Limanski
Thinking The World
the Foucault one is a really good one, but the one of Spinoza...i quite disagree with the guy, hehe, i'm more to the Kant side of freedom, determinism, causes and effects...
seeya. Uula
PS: and i don't agree with Foucault either! But it's still quite poetic
Comment by Anonymous