Philosophy 2

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Consider this table in front of us. It is not what it seems. Leibniz tells us it is a community of souls. Bishop Berkeley tells us it is an idea in the mind of God. Sober science, scarcely less wonderful, tells us it is a vast collection of electric charges in violent motion.

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Bertrand Russell

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When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas.

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George Berkeley

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The was a young man who said, "God Must t hunk it exceedingly odd; If he finds that his tree; Continues to be; When there's no one about in the Quad."

Reply: "Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd: I am always about in the Quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be Since observed by -Yours faithfully;
-God

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Anonymous

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The table I write on i say exists, that is, i see and feel it; and if i were out of my study i should say it existed -- meaning thereby that if i was in my study i might perceived it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. There was an odor, that is, it was smelt; there was a sound, that is, it was heard; a color or figure, and it was perceived by sight or touch. This is all that I can understand by these and the like expressions. For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their ease is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.

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George Berkeley

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Many of the things he (Berkeley) writes I find correct and in agreement with my own position. But he expresses himself too paradoxically. There is no need for us to say that matter is nothing; it is enough to say that it is a phenomenon like a rainbow; not that it is a substance, but that it is a result of substances.

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz

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After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeleye's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. i observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. i never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, 'I refute it thus.'

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James Boswell

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Now the philosophy by which AMericans live, in contrast to the pinlosophies which they profess, is naturalistic. In profession they may be fundamentalists, catholics, or idealists, because american opinion is largely pre-american; but in their hearts and lives they are all pragmatists, and they prove it even by the spirit in which they maintain those other traditional allegiances, not out of rapt speculative sympathy, but because such allegiance seems an insurance against moral dissolution, guaranteeing social cohesion and practical success. Their real philosophy is the philosophy of enterprise.

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George Santayana

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…Dewey's procedure is morem revealing than his words. Experience and Nature is not unique, but typical;: again and again on every major philosophic issue he first displays the dualisms, the wrenchings apart, the messy confusions of modern thought, only to turn to the Greeks in admiration for their clarity of perception. It is their ideas he deems fruitful material for further critical development. And in contrast to the whole of modern philosophy, save where it in turn has most powerfully felt Greek influence, Dewey himself seems to be working primarily with the conceptions of Aristotle.

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John Herman Randall, Jr.

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Experience is a form of existence, a part of the natural history of existence. Experience is, as such, a part of a wider field of existence. The pragmatist willingly acknowledges this dualism within the world which the epistemological dualist mistakes usually for a dualism of mind and nature as independent substances.

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Donald A Piatt

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Dewey thinks that the mind-body question is a pseudo-roblem. But that problem of (the) join-ings of direct experience and the external world takes the place of the pseudo-problem. There is a double connection: perspectives are joined to to physical things (as the physicist describes them) and attitudes are joined to the human organism (as the physiologist describes it). The problem has shifted: it should be solved and not shelved."

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William Savery

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I have just finished reading Morris Cohen's book Reason and Nature… The title suggests a sort of challenge to John Dewey's Experience and Nature to which it is much superior as a piece of writing… But although Dewey's Experience and Nature to which it is much superior as a piece of writing… But although Dewey's book is incredibly ill written, it seemed to me after several rereadings to have a feeling of intimacy with the inside of the cosmos that i found unequaled. So methought God would have spoken had he been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was.
'

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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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The term experience… in professor Dewey's thought is equally applicable to everything that is an object of consideration. I cannot therefore see that it servers any definite intellectual function beyond carrying the faint aroma of praise… and put to new uses, confusion is bound to result. For the meaning we attach to words is based on habits which arbitrary resolutions cannot readily change, and we invariably drag the old meaning into the new context.

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Morris Cohen

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As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use.

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William James

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Einstein once remarked that with the arrival of the atomic age everything had changed, except our thinking. Our western Dreams of domination , mastery, and certainty are over.

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Einstein

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no mater how much debate occurs the truth is not necessarily reached.

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James Gould

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Letter from Monticello: "God forbid, we should ever by twenty years without such a rebellion." Elsewhere he elaborated: "What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms… The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

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Thomas Jefferson

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Let the child believe that he is always in control, though it is always you the teacher, who really controls. there is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom, for in that way on captures volition itself

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

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Gustave Flaubert

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Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

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George Santayana

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Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues, tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.

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Walter Lippmann

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All substance appears to signify that which his individual.

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Aristotle

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In trying to distinguish appearance from reality and lay bare the fundamental structure of the universe, science has had to transcend the 'rabble of the sense.'

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Lincoln Barnett

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For nowhere in the call of Being is the cry of the victim to be heard, nowhere the please for mercy, the summons for help. The silent peal of Being is deaf to the appeal of suffering.

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John D. Caputo

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To affirm the priority of Being over existents is to already decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent, (the ethical relation_ to a relation with the Being of existents, which impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of existents (a relationship of knowing), subordinates justice to freedom.

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Emmanuel Levinas

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There is reality behind the world as it appears to us, possibly a many-layered reality, of which the appearances are the outermost layers. What the great scientist does is boldly to guess, daringly to conjecture, what these inner realities are like. This is akin to myth making… The boldness can be gauged by the distance between the world of appearance and the conjectured reality, the explanatory hypotheses.

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Karl Popper

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It certainly seems that i can believe that reality extends beyond the reach of possible human though, since this would be closely analogous to something which is not only possibly but actually the case. There are plenty of ordinary human beings who constitutionally lack the capacity to conceive of some of the things that others know about.

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Ernest Nagel

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I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality which i have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God,or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulation of propositions, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or and ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as the ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained. and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do no commonly use this precaution, i shall presume-no.

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David Hume.

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I experience frees ill when i wrestle between duty and desire.

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C. A. Campbell

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We are a great deal more certain that our will is free than that everything that happened is bound to have a cause. This being the case, could we not for once in a way reverse the argument, and say: our ideas of cause and effect must be very inaccurate, for were they right, our will could not be free?

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Georg Lichtenberg

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The hypothesis that man his not free is essential to the application of scientific method to the study of human behavior.

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B.F. Skinner

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Man has free choice, or otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, ,rewards and punishments would bee in vain.

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St Thomas Aquinas

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Everyone is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.

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Fyodor Dostoyevski

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I ought, hence I can.

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Immanuel Kant

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Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age.

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Oscar Wilde

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There is nothing that the relativist, qua relativist, can say either for or against tolerance from a moral point of view. The moment he does this, he ceases to be an observer of morality and becomes a user of a moral system…. There is no such thing as am oral judgement made from a morally neutral or 'extra moral' position.

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Geoffrey Harrison

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The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or dual… In reality, then, there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the conditions of human existence.

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Emile Durkheim