Philosophy
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Which Intellectual Values, Principles or Precepts
Would Help the Cause of Liberal Education?
A thing cannot be true in theory and yet false in practice. Practice is the empirical check on theory, and if practice confutes theory, theory must be revised.
The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.
Miikka Ryökäs
All explanations come to an end somewhere.
Thomas Nagel
It is not every question that deserves an answer. For example: How do we know that other people aren’t zombies?
All knowledge must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs, and if these are rejected, nothing is left.
I do not think it is possible to get anywhere if we start from scepticism. We must start from a broad acceptance of whatever seems to be knowledge and is not rejected for some specific reason.
Bertrand Russell
All science requires faith in the inner harmony of the world.
He who wishes to learn must believe.
Aristotle
Being fair to the philosophical opposition means conceding that honest, intelligent, well informed people can be found in the opposing camp.
George Orwell (from The Prevention of Literature, 1946)
One can’t be right until one has first conceived the possibility of being wrong.
Diana Kuhn
Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.
Bernard Baruch
All who accept reason as the criterion to distinguish between true and false beliefs are entitled to describe themselves as “rationalists” in contrast to “fideists” who consciously or unconsciously assume that they are entitled in an argument to appeal to their personal intuitions about the nature of ultimate reality.
Arnold Lunn
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
Bertrand Russell
PARAPHRASE: Everything is complicated and subtle to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it simple and straightforward.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Carl Sagan
Fred
Fundamental scepticism, where it is fully believed, is a pathological condition and calls for intervention and help of the psychiatric kind.
Christopher Derrick
The arguments of the sceptic are, says Hume, valid. But only theoretically. Having conceded their validity as arguments he drives home the point that it is impossible for anyone actually to live as a sceptic.
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
John Stuart Mill
The more knowledge we possess of the opposite point of view, the less puzzling it is to know what to do [or say].
Winston Churchill
It’s irrational to beg the question, i.e., to assume what it is one’s business to prove.
In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.”
Stephen Jay Gould
One thing we are sure of, and that is the reality and substantiality of the luminiferous ether.
Lord Kelvin
C. S. Lewis
It is notoriously impossible to prove that the external world exists.
Bryan Magee
Just because we can’t define something as a truth doesn’t mean we can’t feel it as a fact.
G. K. Chesterton
No useful discussion is possible unless both parties to the discussion start from the same premise.
Mediæval Maxim
No argument can establish the truth of its premises, since if it tried to do so it would be circular; and therefore no argument can establish the truth of its conclusions.
Bryan Magee
Not every word can be defined.
Samuel Johnson
Objectivity means that we can separate facts from our thoughts and feelings about those facts.
Arnold Lunn
The attempt to establish the truth of any particular philosophy by purely intellectual processes is absolutely hopeless—and for purely intellectual reasons.
Philosophical argument, strictly speaking, consists mainly of an endeavour to cause the hearer to perceive what has been perceived by the speaker. The argument, in short, is not of the nature of proof, but of exhortation: Look, can’t you see what I see!
Bertrand Russell
Religious (or simple) fundamentalism is the inability to see that words can’t do what we thought they could do, namely, establish truth with authority and without ambiguity. Philosophical (or sophisticated) fundamentalism is the inability to see that arguments can’t do what we thought they could do, namely, establish truth authoritatively and unambiguously.
The analogy is a particularly tricky form of rhetoric when it becomes the basis of an argument rather than merely a figure of speech.
Northrop Frye
A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be sceptical.
Bertrand Russell (arguing against immortality)
The closest we can get to impartiality is admitting we are partial.
G. K. Chesterton
Arguments that don’t satisfy us emotionally usually don’t satisfy us intellectually.
When you say that the earth is round, do you mean it? No, you don’t mean it. But it’s true. In fact, most of the sentences we regard as true reflect facts and opinions that are much more complicated than the explicit meaning of the sentence.
The simple realization that there are other points of view is the beginning of wisdom. Knowing what they are is a big step. The final achievement is understanding why they are held.
Virginia Woolf
There is such a thing as irrational scepticism just as there is such a thing as irrational belief. They are just opposite sides of the same logical coin.
Christopher Derrick
To [John] Hick it has at once to be conceded: that it is one thing to say that a belief is unfounded or well-founded; and quite another to say that it is irrational or rational for some particular person, in his particular time and circumstances, and with his particular experience and lack of experience, to hold or to reject that belief.
Anthony Flew
In the Summa Theologica Thomas Aquinas poses the question of whether heretics can be endured, tolerated. And his answer is that heretics can not be tolerated. If it was just to condemn counterfeiters to death, then surely it was necessary to put to death those who had committed the far worse crime of counterfeiting the faith.
True science is never philosophically partisan. It is open to any new knowledge or understanding whatever the metaphysical implications.
T. H. Huxley
Without sympathy there can be no effective criticism.
Arnold Lunn
You cannot win a man from his belief, political or religious, unless you can see why it attracts him and can almost imagine holding it yourself.
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