Philosophical Quotes
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Bernard Williams has been a distinctive presence on the intellectual scene for more than three decades. . . . His writings do not offer the dubious exhilaration of grand philosophical theory, in which messy reality is tamed and caged, but the thrill of seeing pretension punctured by a kind of high-voltage common sense (backed up by impressive erudition). . . . There is no one in philosophy quite like him.
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I can be a bit of a science geek. I tend more towards reading about brain science, neuroscience. I was an English major, so I love discussing possibilities and alternate theories. Aside from the science aspect of it, the philosophical possibilities are so interesting.
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A great cause of the night is lack of the sun.
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All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows.
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The philosophical underpinnings of my approach to acting are that there are universal human qualities, and that every character is actually available within each one of us, that if we tap down into that universal humanness, we can find whatever character it is that we need to play already there within ourselves, and it's just a matter of peeling apart the onion that is you and finding that character within you, because of this universal human quality.
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The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.
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The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.
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I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.
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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
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The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.
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The data on which philosophical theorizing is based are rather the intuited contents themselves, concerning the various thought experiments. At least that is so outside the epistemology of the a priori.
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I want to discover a truth for myself that is really true. Whether it's a piece of scientific knowledge, or a philosophical truth.
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The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the objects (viz., words) and on the main terms connecting them. Words, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes communicate at their best. The strategy is one of ascending to a common part of two fundamentally disparate conceptual schemes, the better to discuss the disparate foundations. No wonder it helps in philosophy.
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
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When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
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One influential philosophical position about the use of probability in science holds that probabilities are objective only if they are based on micro-physics; all other probabilities should be interpreted subjectively, as merely revealing our ignorance about physical details. I have argued against this position, contending that the objectivity of micro-physical probabilities entails the objectivity of macro-probabilities.
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They gutted the book, making an action movie for 15-25 year olds. Tolkien became...devoured by his popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of the time. The gap widened between the beauty, the seriousness of the work, and what it has become is beyond me. This level of marketing reduces to nothing the aesthetic and philosophical significance of this work.
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The future. Space travel, or cosmology. Alternate universes. Time travel. Robots. Marvelous inventions. Immortality. Catastrophes. Aliens. Superman. Other dimensions. Inner space, or the psyche. These are the ideas that are essential to science fiction. The phenomena change, the basic ideas do not. These ideas are the same philosophical concepts that have intrigued mankind throughout history.
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Who is it that can tell me who I am?
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If you thought you were trying to find out more about it because you're gonna get an answer to some deep philosophical question...you may be wrong! It may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature. But my interest in science is to simply find out about the world.
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Things change all the time, so why do people make such a philosophical to-do that things are constantly in transition?
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I'm a natural piano player. So all the practicing I do at this point is in my head. If I don't play for a year, my chops aren't going to get any worse. I've spent my time playing scales, and I don't necessarily want to play any faster than I play. So everything I do at this point is more philosophical.
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The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.
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A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language, which breaks out again at every moment, no matter how cautious we may be.
