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Quote by Allen W. Wood

“Until I was a junior in high school, I was a "boy scientist" type and expected to go into chemistry. Then I discovered the humanities. I read the plays of Shakespeare voraciously, some novels, such as Pasternack's Dr. Zhivago and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and I got into philosophy by reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.”

Quote by Allen W. Wood

Author

Allen W. Wood, born in 1942, is a renowned professor in the field of philosophy. He has made significant contributions to ethics and political philosophy, with a rich academic career that spans several decades. Wood's research has influenced scholars worldwide, and his works have provided new insights into moral and political theories. more

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“In the mid-1960s, as hard to believe as it may be now, choosing to go into academic philosophy was not an imprudent career choice. There were lots of academic jobs in philosophy then.”

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“Teaching and writing about philosophy is about the only thing I've ever been really good at.”

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“I am a one-trick pony. But I have worked hard at something I would have liked to do even if I weren't paid a penny for it, and made a good living at it. You can't be luckier than that in this life, no matter who you are or what you do.”

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“It's hard to transfer one person's type of comic timing or approach to another person's. It's something you innately hear like a rhythm in your ear.”

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“In my view, there was a long period in which analytical philosophy had little to say about ethics. I think their intellectual tools did not do well with it, and analytical philosophy was above all about revolutionizing the philosophical tool box. It was more or less assumed that the Truth about ethics was some form of utilitarianism (perhaps because some consequentialist calculus looked to them like a respectable tool). Kantian ethics was then interpreted as a particularly odious version of the False - "deontology" - and treated with contempt.”

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“It is often difficult to know about one's own era which philosophers in it will be remembered as the most important ones, but I think it is already clear that John Rawls is the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century.”

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“I think the term "Kantian constructivism" as an oxymoron. Kant was a constructivist about mathematics, but not about ethics.”

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“It is probably not a good idea to ask someone to expound a position they do not accept and do not feel they even fully understand.”

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“As I understand it, Kantian constructivism is partly a position in normative ethics and partly a position in metaethics. In metaethics, it is the position that ethical claims have truth values, but their truth conditions consist not in a set of objective facts to which they correspond, but instead in the outcome of some procedure of deliberation resulting in decisions about what to do.”

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“For the utilitarian, there is a fact of the matter about the good (the general happiness, or whatever conception of the good the utilitarian adopts) and about which actions or moral rules would contribute to maximizing the good. For the rational intuitionist, there are truths about which actions should be done and not done.”

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