T. M. Scanlon Quotes

United States, Philosopher
June 28, 1940

Thomas Michael "Tim" Scanlon (born 1940), usually cited as T. M. Scanlon, is an American philosopher. He was the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in Harvard University's Department of Philosophy until his retirement at the end of the 2015–2016 academic year. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.

History must judge John F. Kennedy not only by what he was able to accomplish in a thousand days, but also by what he inspired all of us to volunteer to do for our country.

T. M. Scanlon
- Country
- History
- Judge
I take facts about reasons to be fundamental in two ways. First, I believe that facts about reasons are not reducible to or analyzable in terms of facts of other kind, such as facts about the natural world. Second, I believe that reasons are the fundamental elements of the normative domain, and other normative notions, such as goodness and moral right and wrong can be explained in terms of reasons.

T. M. Scanlon
- Believe
- Ways
- Resons

I agree that science is the best way of understanding the natural world, and therefore that we have reason to believe what the best science tells us about the objects in that world and the relations between them. But this does not mean that the natural world is the only thing we can have true beliefs about. The status of material objects as things that are "real" is a matter of their having physical properties, such as weight, solidity, and spatio-temporal location. In order to be real, such things need not have, in addition to these properties, some further kind of metaphysical existence.

T. M. Scanlon