Philosophy Quotes - Page 181

Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.

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.

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

There is no philosophy that is not to some extent also theology.

My philosophy is pretty simple – any day nobody’s trying to kill me is a good day in my book.

It is somewhat perplexing that fellow Republicans would attack a popular conservative governor of a very conservative state whose overwhelming re-election proved a conservative philosophy can erase the gender gap and attract a record number of minority voters while remaining true to conservative principles.

I did not have any philosophy at all when I wrote the first novel. I was just wanting to capture experiences that I thought would be inspiring for Indians who are trying to break free from the very high-pressured family environments and do their own thing.

I am inspired by the reality that actions we take in the real world, no matter how seemingly small, can have impact on people's lives in a positive way. I have always been motivated by the desire to improve the world for women, in particular in the media - because the media is the "face" of the collective philosophy; watching media tells you what we think of ourselves and our "ideal" images and states of being.

If your divines are not philosophers, your philosophy will neither be divine, nor able to divine.

It was Schopenhauer who made me a philosopher. Real philosophy, I told my appalled colleagues at Auckland, is about sex, death, and boredom. Since then I have expanded my horizons, but I have always retained an affection for the sage of Frankfurt.

I drifted into a career in academic philosophy because I couldn't see anything outside the academy that looked to be anything other than drudgery. But I wouldn't say I 'became a philosopher' until an early mid-life crisis forced me to confront the fact that, while 'philosophy' means 'love of wisdom', and 'wisdom' is the knowledge of how to live well, the analytic philosophy in which I had been trained seemed to have nothing to do with life.

My philosophy is always, "Let's get the spirit of the character." If people believe in it and the spirit of it, then it will work.

Will our Philosophy to later Life Seem but a crudeness of the planet's youth, Our Wisdom but a parasite of Truth?

If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately.

Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.

The border between the natural and the supernatural, religion and philosophy, may not always be clear. But there are lines and we should know and accept which side of it we are on.

Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.

I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere.

I'm not one of these people who is sour about academia. I'm very lucky not to be in academia, but I am an absolute parasite. While I was writing my book on comparative philosophy I was drawing on some fantastic scholars - university based people. The academy is absolutely necessary, but there should also be a role for those bringing it together. It's such a frustration sometimes.

I am very Aristotelian in approach - not in detail - so I always find I'm saying things that get people frustrated like 'It's a matter of balance and judgement'. To a lot of philosophers these are terrible words because they're admitting of vagueness and uncertainty. The more I've done philosophy, the more I've become convinced that that is the way it is.

Some of my understanding of what philosophy and ethics is has changed very slowly. One thing that has changed is this for quite a long time I bought-into the idea that philosophy is basically about arguments. I'm increasingly of the view that it isn't. The most interesting things in philosophy aren't arguments. The thing that I think is underestimated is what I call a form of attending. I think that philosophy is at least as much about carefully attending to things as it is about the structure of arguments.

Talking about creating truth tends to alarm people, because truth is meant to be 'just out there'. It doesn't take much thinking to appreciate that we sometimes change truths on the ground - sometimes just by words. A new law will change what is possible. I think - perhaps because the paradigm we follow tends to be scientific, and all about discovery - the creative element of truth is one upon which we don't focus so much attention. This is particularly so in anglophone philosophy, perhaps because we associate it too much with those 'pernicious' continental trends.

To a certain extent all philosophers have been involved in a systematic questioning that undermines confidence and certainty. Philosophy as a whole unleashed skeptical forces which, outside of the tightly controlled environment of a rigorous philosophical debate, led a lot of people to throw their hands up in despair and think 'what's the point?'. A lot of the public perception of philosophy is that it leaves you with no answers, and more confused than you were at the beginning.

I don't think there is ever a direct connection between the philosophical community and the wider populus. I'm very aware of this because I've been working on a book on ideas in global philosophy and you always find some kind of relation between the dominant philosophies in a culture and the folk philosophy but it's not a straight-down dissemination. It's partly bottom-up. Thinkers are the products of the cultures they grew-up in. They aspire to thinking purely objectively and universally, but they are often reflecting ways of thought that are embedded in a culture.

There have been a number of philosophers who have reveled in the dismantling of truth. I think they did so with good ethical motives, and for good philosophical reasons. I can see the sense in what they were talking about; the idea that truth is often claimed by elites in order to further certain agendas. They crowd-out alternative perspectives - particularly those of the powerless. But the undermining of truth contributed - in the weird, indirect way that philosophy contributes to the culture - to a rejection of the idea of truth as having any kind of proper meaning at all.