Conceptual Analysis Quotes

Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.

One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term 'duty.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

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.

A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.

There has been much talk referencing what I consider conceptual reports like the Landscape of Choice and documents created as a result of the Great Valley Center.

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.

Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.

We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.

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

In philosophy, the principles are more interesting than the examples. In literature, the examples are more interesting than the principles.

A philosophy can and must be worked out with the greatest rigour and discipline in the details, but can ultimately be founded on nothing but faith: and this is the reason, I suspect, why the novelties in philosophy are only in elaboration, and never in fundamentals.

Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations among objects; they are indifferent to the replacement of objects by others as long the relations don't change. Matter is not important, only form interests them.

It should now be clear why the method of Philosophy is so different from that of the natural sciences. Experiments are not made, because they would be utterly useless.

Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems.

Philosophy itself cannot but benefit from our disputes, for if our conceptions prove true, new achievements will be made; if false, their refutation will further confirm the original doctrines.

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.

Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist?

Next, 'real' is what we may call a trouser-word. It is usually thought, and I dare say usually rightly thought, that what one might call the affirmative use of a term is basic--that, to understand 'x,' we need to know what it is to be x, or to be an x, and that knowing this apprises us of what it is not to be x, not to be an x. But with 'real' (as we briefly noted earlier) it is the negative use that wears the trousers.

The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

Mathematics deals exclusively with the relations of concepts to each other without consideration of their relation to experience.

...(I)ndividual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.