P Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with P. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Philosophical arguments are either valid or invalid. They aren’t true – or false for that matter. Only the premises (and the conclusion), which are factual claims about the world, can be true or false. Confusingly perhaps, a philosophical argument can be valid even if its premises are false. Philosophers call such arguments valid but “unsound.” Informal, everyday arguments tend to mix up premises and conclusions, and often in the process the distinction between true facts based on evidence and not necessarily true opinions (conclusions) based on reasoning gets lost.”
Source: Critical Thinking Skills for Dummies
“Philosophical confusions of the sort Wittgenstein is talking about here are not due to the mere transgression of some grammatical rule. Rather, they are due to the tacit hovering between different forms of use - uses that by themselves are perfectly all right. Now in order to treat such confusions, grammatical rules can be quite useful, despite - or even precisely because of - their circular character. For the use of these rules in such cases is not to prescribe particular uses and proscribe others. Indeed, such attempts at prescription and proscription would be counterproductive: for the problem is not that there are correct and incorrect ways of using the relevant words. Rather, the trouble is that two different uses are being conflated - so what we need is to get clear about the differences between them. What we need rules for is to capture the relevant patterns of use, describe them, and thereby make it clear that the confusion is due to an attempt to play two different games at the same time. This requires entering precisely into the sort of dialogue that Hacker's conception of grammatical rules seems to prevent, or at least make unnecessary - a dialogue that does not presuppose that the relevant 'pieces' and 'games' have already been identified but is genuinely open to the possibility of using language in a multitude of meaningful ways.”
Source: The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
“Philosophical discussions habitually make men happy and joyful not frowning and sad.”
Source: The Essays of Michel de Montaigne
“Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts ; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.”
Source: Immanuel Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason
“Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday”
Source: Philosophical Investigations
“Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.”
Source: Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951
“Philosophical progress changes what we take to be "intuitively" obvious, and this change covers up the tracks of the laborious arguments that preceded the changes. We don't see these changes, because we see with them.”
“Philosophical questions and modes of thought just seem natural to me. They mesh with the way my mind works.”
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
“Philosophical reflection could not leave the relation of mind and spirit in the obscurity which had satisfied the needs of the naive consciousness.”
Source: Principles of Physiological Psychology
“Philosophical studies are beset by one peril, a person easily brings himself to think that he thinks; and a smattering of science encourages conceit. He is above his companions. A hieroglyphic is a spell. The gnostic dogma is cuneiform writing to the million. Moreover, the vain man is generally a doubter. It is Newton who sees himself in a child on the sea shore, and his discoveries in the colored shells.”
“Philosophical systems are wholly true for their founders only.”
Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
“Philosophical systems? Even the most impressive of them are uncomfortably seated on a throne of rock bottom stupidity, that self-inflicted narrow-mindness which renders a mind capable of believing that it, a part of the immense world, could absolute”
“Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.”
Source: The Renaissance
“Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.”
Source: Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away
“Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.”
Source: The Annotated Emerson
“Philosophically, I am a logical empiricist and materialist, and I am a veteran of over 400 radio and TV interviews and debates. I am a Christ-myth advocate and am pursuing research into how Christianity could have begun without a historical Jesus of Nazareth. I am married with one daughter and three grandchildren.”
“Philosophically literate anthropomorphism is exactly what one would expect of any worldview which affirms that human beings are made in the image of God.
(from The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers)”
“Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them.”
Source: Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality
“Philosophically, I feel that India will progress only if we work as teams.”
“Philosophically, mathematics is not a part of science. Mathematics studies patterns, science studies nature”
“Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me ... I should like to find a genuine loophole.”
“Philosophically, what I have learned is to thy own self be true. That is the biggest lesson of all. Relax; music is fun. To many people take it to seriously because of the money involved.”
“Philosophies by mankind and the ideology of the so-called intellectuals are the perfect cause to address humans as an idiot, if a Dualistic God existed.”
Source: Enter Heaven
“Philosophies change by the day while God never changes, simply because, being perfect, He does not have to change!”
“Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow on another like the withered leaves of Autumn.”
Source: Essays and Lectures
“Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us,—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.”
Source: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
“Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.”
“Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.”
“Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.”
Source: An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays
“philosophy”
“Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.”
“Philosophy - reduced, as we have seen, to philosophical discourse - develops from this point on in a different atmosphere and environment from that of ancient philosophy. In modern university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a way of life, or a form of life - unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy.”
“Philosophy ... bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.”
Source: Novalis: Philosophical Writings
“Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.”
Source: Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays
“Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.”
Source: Essays on Music
“Philosophy ... should not pretend to increase our present stock, but make us economists of what we are possessed of.”
Source: Enquiry into the present state of polite learning. The citizen of the world
“Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.”
“Philosophy abounds more than philosophers, and learning more than learned men.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections: A Miscellany of Thought and Opinion
“Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.”
“Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.”
Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
“Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.”
Source: Tractatus Logico-philosophicus: The German Text of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung
“Philosophy alone can boast (and perhaps it is no more than the boast of philosophy), that her gentle hand is able to eradicate from the human mind the latent and deadly principle of fanaticism.”
Source: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
“Philosophy alone makes the mind invincible, and places us out of the reach of fortune, so that all her arrows fall short of us.”
“Philosophy always buries its undertakers.”
“Philosophy always requires something more, requires the eternal, the true, in contrast to which even the fullest existence as such is but a happy moment.”
“Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination.”
Source: The Principles of Success in Literature
“Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?”
Source: Rites of Passage
“Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering.”
Source: The Knowledge of the Holy
“Philosophy and the arts are but a manifestation of the intelligible ideas that move the public mind; and thus they become visible images of the nations whence they emanate.”