Philosophical Debates Quotes

Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.

Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

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.

When I was 16 I started keeping a diary in which I recorded my disagreements with the famous philosophers. I didn't insist that they were wrong, that I was right and I had to prevail. I just agreed and disagreed with them. I thought there was a high degree of probability that I was right and some other thinkers were wrong. But I wasn't positive about it.

Philosophy has its bugbears, as well as superstition.

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

Why are people so concerned with relativism? If you look back in history, millions of people were killed because of someone's dogmatic views, but I do not remember anybody being killed due to the tolerance of difference, to relativism; ethically relativism does not seem to be such an awful thing, really.

I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.

Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.

It's progress I think, that science has joined philosophy, metaphysics & religion as subjects drunk people argue about in bars.

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one's temper and disturb one's quiet.

The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being.

In-depth studies have an influence on general ideas, whereas theories, in turn, in order to maintain themselves, push their spectators to search for new evidence. The mind's activity that is maintained by the debates about these works, is probably the source of the greatest joys given to man to experience on Earth.

Science, it is said, no doubt has ameliorated the material conditions of human life, but is powerless to solve those moral and philosophical questions that interest cultured people so deeply.

Quite often in history action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events. The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers in the second half of the nineteenth.

All large political doctrines are rich in difficult problems - problems that are quite above the average citizen's reach. And that is not strange, since they are also above the reach of the ablest minds in the country; after all the fuss and all the talk, not one of those doctrines has been conclusively proven to be the right one and the best.

It might be plausibly maintained, that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied.

Do not commit spiritual suicide through a passion for discussing metaphysical subtleties.

Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.

I feel friendship towards philosophers, but towards sophists, teachers of literature, or any other such kind of godforsaken people, I neither feel friendship now, nor may I ever do so in the future.

The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.

I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.

I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.

The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora's box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom.