Best philosophy & language Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.”

Philosophy Science Language Equal Speech Philosophical Analysis Poetic Making Love Lending Sign Language

Book:Seeing Voices

Source: Seeing Voices

“Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience - a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth.”

“Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.”

Way May Ends Philosophy Use Language Interfere Use Of Language

Book:Philosophical Investigations

Source: Philosophical Investigations

“Rumors and reports of man's relation with animals are the world's oldest news stories, headlined in the stars of the zodiac, posted on the walls of prehistoric caves, inscribed in the languages of Egyptian myth, Greek philosophy, Hindu religion, Christian art, our own DNA. Belonging within the circle of mankind's intimate acquaintance ... constant albeit speechless companions, they supplied energies fit to be harnessed or roasted.”

“Language was not given to man: he seized it.”

Men Art Philosophy Language Given History

Author:Louis Aragon

“Language is our body and our breath, our world and our thought, our perception and even out unconscious.”

World Art Philosophy Body Language History Perception Breaths Unconscious Our World Our Thoughts

Author:Philippe Sollers

“Punctuation has its own philosophy, just as style does, although not as language does. Style is a good understanding of language, punctuation is a good understanding of style.”

Doe Philosophy Language Understanding Style Punctuation Good Understanding

Author:George Sand

“The Kassideans or Assideans...arose either during the Captivity or soon after the restoration...The Essenians were, however, undoubtedly connected with the Temple (of Solomon), as their origin is derived by the learned Scalier, with every appearance of truth, from the Kassideans, a fraternity of Jewish devotees, who, in the language of Laurie, had associated together as 'Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem.'...From the Essenians Pythagoras derived much, if not all, of the knowledge and the ceremonies with which he clothed the esoteric school of his philosophy.”

Ifs Philosophy School Together Language Jew Appearance Connected Temples Ceremony Knights Restoration Jerusalem Fraternity Esoteric Captivity Solomon Devotee

Author:Albert Mackey

“The word right should be excluded from political language, as the word cause from the language of philosophy.”

Should Philosophy Political Language Causes Excluded Political Language

Book:A General View of Positivism

Source: A General View of Positivism

“All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.”

Needs Real Philosophy Form Language Philosophical Logical Propositions Critique Real Ones

Book:Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“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.”

“Certain issues in philosophy of science (having to do with observation and the definition of a theory's empirical import) had beenmisconstrued as issues in philosophy of logic and of language. With respect to modality, I hold the exact opposite: important philosophical problems concerning language have been misconstrued as relating to the content of science and the nature of the world. This is not at all new, but is the traditional nominalist line.”

World Important Philosophy Problem Science Language Nature Logic Philosophical Observation Philosophy Of Science

Author:Bas van Fraassen

“The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments. But he has to speak about his results also to non-physicists who will not be satisfied unless some explanation is given in plain language. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be the criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.”

“The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch.”

Source: The Major Prose of Thomas Henry Huxley

“In one of the most brilliant papers in the English language Hume made it clear that what we speak of as 'causality' is nothing more than the phenomenon of repetition. When we mix sulphur with saltpeter and charcoal we always get gunpowder. This is true of every event subsumed by a causal law in other words, everything which can be called scientific knowledge. "It is custom which rules ," Hume said, and in that one sentence undermined both science and philosophy .”

“Language corresponds only to itself. Intellectuals suffer from that. And once you begin to question language, you cannot stop at studying linguistics. Analytical philosophy becomes insufficient, artificial grammar becomes insufficient.”

Philosophy Suffering Language Study Artificial Grammar Linguistics Insufficient

Author:Martin Walser

“But the idols of the Market Place are the most troublesome of all: idols which have crept into the understanding through their alliances with words and names. For men believe that their reason governs words. But words turn and twist the understanding. This it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences inactive. Words are mostly cut to the common fashion and draw the distinctions which are most obvious to the common understanding. Whenever an understanding of greater acuteness or more diligent observation would alter those lines to suit the true distinctions of nature, words complain.”

“Language is virtually always pathological; hence the solution is to move as fast and far as possible from language to experience, from linguistic to experimental or psychological philosophy. In order to know that we are not in the linguistic maze, we need to determine, according to Berkeley, whether the things we are talking about exist; hence we need to look for the relevant perceptions. For him, this usually means retiring into himself and trying to imagine whether x exists, having formed the best definition possible of x.”

Knows Needs Trying Looks Mean Philosophy Moving Order Language Talking Imagine Perception Solutions Definitions Determine Psychological Retiring Relevant Mazes Berkeley

Author:David Berman

“Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is the Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships of philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships.”

Source: Power: A New Social Analysis

“Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system.”

Trying Philosophy Reality Seems Form Literature Language Subjects Mathematics Connected Physics Department Woe

Author:Jules Michelet

“The doctrine (of) maintaining that the language of daily life, with words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy . . . I find myself totally unable to accept . . . . Because it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation amongst philosophers of the muddle-headedness they have taken over from common sense.”

Philosophy Used Language Common Accepting Taken Ordinary Philosopher Doctrine Common Sense Inevitable Daily Life Maintaining Muddle

Author:Bertrand Russell

“Greek is a musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.”

Giving Soul Philosophy Body Language Objects Musical Greek Abstraction

Book:The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Source: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

“Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land all were in dynamic balance and not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed, poetry may have been at its climax, dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy. There's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today and it was under the boundary dissolving influence of psilocybin.”

“I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.”

People Writing Mind Philosophy Whole Language Bits Psychology Obsessed Journal English Language Intrigued

Author:Lara Pulver

“There is almost no evidence that diagnoses such as 'schizophrenia' and 'bipolar disorder' correspond to discrete entities ('natural kinds' in the language of philosophy).”

Kind Philosophy Language Natural Evidence Disorder Entity Diagnosis Bipolar Schizophrenia Bipolar Disorder Discrete

Author:Richard Bentall

“I have said my philosophy - I'm a backyard philosopher, I guess - is that the dirtiest word in the English language is "retirement."”

Said Philosophy Language Philosopher Retirement English Language Backyards

Author:Frank Sinatra, Jr.

“Epistemology now flourishes with various complementary approaches. This includes formal epistemology, experimental philosophy, cognitive science and psychology, including relevant brain science, and other philosophical subfields, such as metaphysics, action theory, language, and mind. It is not as though all questions of armchair, traditional epistemology are already settled conclusively, with unanimity or even consensus. We still need to reason our way together to a better view of those issues.”

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