Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.
Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.
Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.
Where ideas are real and reality is shadow.
We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.
Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.
The proving power of the intellect or the senses was questioned by the skeptics more than two thousand years ago; but they were browbeaten into confusion by the glory of Newtonian physics.
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?
A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable
We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.
Just becauseWe cannot see,We are not entitled to doubt.
The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is only preparatory. This second aspect is the one which from Kant, until the present time, has formed the deeper problem of thought.
Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.
If truth doesn't exist, then it would be true that truth doesn't exist, and once again we arrive at truth. There is no alternative; truth must exist.
We have millions of questions that need answers because there are so many things that the reasoning mind cannot explain. It is not important if the answer is correct; just the answer itself makes us feel safe.
God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer.
I'm more of an empiricist. I'm focused on right or wrong, as opposed to left or right.
Because of their very nature, science and logical thinking can never decide what is possible or impossible. Their only function is to explain what has been ascertained by experience and observation.
Philosophy is a goddess, whose head indeed is in heaven, but whose feet are upon earth; she attempts more than she accomplishes, and promises more than she performs.
If I do not know reality, the unknown, how can I search for it? Surely it must come but I cannot go after it. If I go after it I am going after something which is the known, projected by me; by my own mind.
The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.
I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.
All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge.
At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.
