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Method Quotes

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Method Quotes

“As Enlightenment philosophers and scholars consciously adopted the methods of science to establish such abstract concepts as rights, liberty, and justice, successive generations have become schooled in thinking of these abstractions as applied to others in matrices-like mental rotations.”

Thinking Justice Liberty Rights Generations Enlightenment Concepts Method Philosopher Abstract Scholar Abstraction Adopted Schooled Liberty And Justice Rotation

Author:Michael Shermer

“There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another. The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.”

Way Should Two Moving Born Died Method Philosopher Gods Will Two Ways Extending

Author:Georg C. Lichtenberg

“The denial of any distinction between foreseen and intended consequences, as far as responsibility is concerned, was not made by Sidgwick in developing any one 'method of ethics'; he made this important move on behalf of everybody and just on its own account; and I think it plausible to suggest that this move on the part of Sidgwick explains the difference between old-fashioned Utilitarianism and the consequentialism, as I name it, which marks him and every English academic moral philosopher since him.”

Source: Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe

“Philosophers of science constantly discuss theories and representation of reality, but say almost nothing about experiment, technology, or the use of knowledge to alter the world. This is odd, because 'experimental method' used to be just another name for scientific method.... I hope [to] initiate a Back-to-Bacon movement, in which we attend more seriously to experimental science. Experimentation has a life of its own.”

Source: Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science

“17th century philosophers were not in a position to understand the mind as well as we can today, since the advent of experimental methods in psychology. It shows no disrespect for the brilliance of Descartes or Kant to acknowledge that the psychology which they worked with was primitive by comparison with what is available today in the cognitive sciences, any more than it shows disrespect for the brilliance of Aristotle to acknowledge that the physics he worked with does not compare with that of Newton or Einstein.”

“Methodological naturalism gives advice to scientists about what they should include in their theories. There is a second type of methodological naturalism that gives advice to philosophers, which I call "methodological naturalismp." It says that the methods that philosophers should use in assessing philosophical theories are limited to the methods that scientists ought to use in assessing scientific theories.”

Giving Should Use Advice Theory Type Ought Scientist Philosophical Method Philosopher Call Me Naturalism Scientific Theory Assessing

Author:Elliott Sober

“I have tried to read philosophers of all ages and have found many illuminating ideas but no steady progress toward deeper knowledge and understanding. Science, however, gives me the feeling of steady progress: I am convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics.”

“The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical enquiry. And this is by no means so difficult a task as the history of philosophy would lead one to suppose. For if there are any questions which science leaves it to philosophy to answer, a straightforward process of elimination must lead to their discovery.”

“I would welcome the passing of the idea of philosophy as defined by a method of conceptual analysis. But that is not the passing of philosophy, and it leaves the philosopher with the task of grasping natures or essences (among other things).”

Ideas Philosophy Tasks Essence Philosophical Method Philosopher Passing Passings Welcome Defined Analysis Grasping

Author:Robert Adams

“The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.”

Poet Method Philosopher Unconscious Scientific Method

Author:Sigmund Freud

“A few modern philosopher's assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism.... With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.”

Individual Memories Attention Practice Modern Judgment Training Increase Intelligent Method Philosopher Manage Fixed Protest Pessimism Quantity Brutal Our Memories

Author:Alfred Binet