Sidney Hook Quotes

You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.

He could dismiss several schools of philosophy by shifting slightly in his chair or toting his whisky glass.

Philosophy has its bugbears, as well as superstition.

Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science -- the dream is over.

In the case of Anathem, most of the research had to do with philosophy and metaphysics. Reading this sort of thing has never been my strong suit, so I actually had to be somewhat more "organized and results-driven" than is my habit. I just made up my mind that I was going to have to read some of these philosophy tomes, and I forced myself to read something like 10 pages a day until I had bashed my way through them.

See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, Mountains of Casuistry heap'd o'er her head! Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before, Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense! See Mystery to Mathematics fly!

Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.-Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy , taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

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.

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.

Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.

There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.

Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues.

Frege has the merit of ... finding a third assertion by recognising the world of logic which is neither mental nor physical.

Philosophy does not regard pedigree, she received Plato not as a noble, but she made him one.

God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer.

Philosophy may be defined as the art of asking the right question...awareness of the problem outlives all solutions. The answers are questions in disguise, every new answer giving rise to new questions.

In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

As there was never any question there was never any answer.