Julian Baggini Quotes

As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.

I want to read philosophers.

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.

Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.

As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.

What I always liked about Socrates was his insistence on questioning things for the sake of reaching some sort of clarity - even if it is only clarity about the gaps in our knowledge.

It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.

In praising science, it does not follow that we must adopt the very poor philosophies which scientific men have constructed. In philosophy they have much more to learn than to teach.

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

I'd love to go back to school for philosophy. I love philosophy, so I'm always reading philosophy books, annoying my girlfriend with that type of stuff.

The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.

The history of philosophy is not, like the history of the sciences, to be studied with the intellect alone. That which is receptive in us and that which impinges upon us from history is the reality of man's being, unfolding itself in thought.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

As a philosopher, I'm not obliged to explore every unknown wilderness.

Simon Critchley's 'The Book of Dead Philosophers' - it's a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages.

A 'philosophical dictionary' is not a dictionary of philosophy that you use to look up obscure thinkers or recondite terms. It is a collection of brief and pithy essays on diverse topics, informed by one vision, and usually arranged in alphabetical order.

A home is a place in time. And no place stays the same after you finally grow up and leave it. No place can ever change as much as the person who grows up there.

I see the beard and cloak, but I don't yet see a philosopher. -Video barbam et pallium; philosophum nondum video

When lost in a forest go always down hill. When lost in a philosophy or doctrine go upward.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.

To be a philosopher... is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.

One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.