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Quote by Carmine Savastano

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Carmine Savastano

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“Eine zentrale ethische Idee ist die Forderung, möglichst viele unserer eigenen Thesen, Entscheidungen und Handlungen zu begründen und auch von unseren Mitmenschen Begründungen für deren Thesen, Entscheidungen und Handlungen einzufordern. Wir sollen in das Spiel des Gebens und Forderns von Gründen eintreten. Beispielsweise sollen wir nicht einfach je nach unseren unmittelbaren Präferenzen, Leidenschaften und Wünschen durch unser Leben trudeln, sondern uns Konzepte eines für uns guten Lebens machen, die wir vor uns selbst und vor anderen begründen können. Wenn wir uns fragen, welche Art von Person wir sein und welche Art von Leben wir führen wollen, dann muss die Antwort konsistent (= widerspruchsfrei) sein und argumentativ gut gestützt werden; denn sie sollte einer gründlichen Kritik standhalten können. Das ist der sokratische Standpunkt.”

“Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanisms of neural binding. In summary, reason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.”

“Reason is not "universal" in the transcendent sense; that is, it is not part of the structure of the universe. It is universal, however, in that it is a capacity shared universally by all human beings. What allows it to be shared are the commonalities that exist in the way our minds are embodied.”

“There is in human nature a distinct drive to know, a distinguishable theoretical impulse or urge to understand. It is at work at every level of cognition, from the simplest impersonal judgment, like ‘it is hot’, to the most comprehensive mathematical or metaphysical system. But like other fundamental drives, the moral, for example, and the aesthetic, what it is seeking - what will ultimately satisfy it - is far from apparent at its lower levels and is defined only gradually in the course of a long advance. But that advance is not simply a matter of blind trial and error. Its direction is set by its end, which works as an immanent ideal within the process of thought. The pressure exerted by this ideal increases as intelligence rises in the scale. … As thought matures and realizes in fuller measure the end it is seeking, that end lays its movement under increasingly firm constraint. … The higher our altitude on the long ascent of intelligence, the better is our position to discern what lies at the summit. To be sure we never see this clearly. In no human activity do we ever fully know what we are about. We are aware of the end, or we could do nothing but wander aimlessly. We never see it clearly, so we are condemned to much groping.”