Quotes & Sayings About Famous Philosopher

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher. — Moses Mendelssohn

Space is infinite. To the mind that means freedom, liberation.' So wrote Arisko, our greatest turkle philosopher, in his most famous work, 'Thoughts In A Bathtub'," said Dottia, dreamily, in an inspired state. — Philip Dodd

For example, it is said that someone at a party once asked the famous philosopher Ly Tin Weedle "Why are you here?" and the reply took three years. — Terry Pratchett

Similarly, Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French political philosopher and sociologist, in his classic Democracy in America, written after a lengthy visit in the 1830s, saw equality, not majority rule, as the outstanding characteristic of America. "In America," he wrote, the aristocratic element has always been feeble from its birth; and if at the present day it is not actually destroyed, it is at any rate so completely disabled, that we can scarcely assign to it any degree of influence on the course of affairs. The — Milton Friedman

In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It has been said by a distinguished philosopher that England is "usually the last to enter into the general movement of the European mind." The author of the remark probably meant to assert that a man or a system may have become famous on the continent, while we are almost ignorant of the name of the man and the claims of his system. Perhaps, however, a wider range might be given to the assertion. An exploded theory or a disadvantageous practice, like a rebel or a patriot in distress, seeks refuge on our shores to spend its last days in comfort if not in splendour. — Isaac Todhunter

Perhaps the most important Stoic legacy to the history of moral thought was the concept of universal humanity. In his famous Elements of Ethics, the second-century Stoic philosopher Hierocles imagines every individual as standing at the centre of a series of concentric circles. The first circle is the individual, next comes the immediate family, followed by the extended family, the local community, the country, and finally the entire human race. To be virtuous, Hierocles suggested, is to draw these circles together, constantly to transfer people from the outer circles to the inner circles, to treat strangers as cousins and cousins as brothers and sisters, making all human beings part of our concern. The Stoics called this process of drawing the circles together oikeiosis, a word that is almost untranslatable but means something like the process by which everything is made into your home. — Kenan Malik

But Adam Smith was a philosopher as well as well as an economist, famous in his time as much for his Theory of Moral Sentiments as for The Wealth of Nations. And as he understood so well, society is more than the sum of its individual parts. — Paul Ormerod

My laps-meter, the first caliper of the soul and the first hope of bridging the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house. — Walker Percy

The idea of mind separate from body goes far back in time. The most famous expression of this is the idea of the Platonic image discussed in the Socratic Dialogues (circa 350 BC). Socrates and Plato expressed the opinion that the real world was but a shadow of reality, and that reality existed on a higher, purer plane reachable only through and preserved in the mind. The mind was considered immortal and survived the crumbling corpus in which it dwelt. But only enlightened minds, such as theirs, could see true reality. As such, they believed people like themselves ought to be elevated to the position of philosopher kings and rule the world with purity of vision. (A similarly wacky idea was expressed by the fictional air force General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick's classic dark satire Dr. Strangelove. General Ripper postulated that purity of essence was the most important thing in life.) — James Luce

When I was a young philosopher, I asked a senior colleague, Pat Suppes (then and now a famous philosopher of science and an astute student of human nature), what the secret of happiness was. Instead of giving me advice, he made a rather droll observation about what a lot of people who were happy with themselves seem to have done, namely:
1. Take a careful inventory of their shortcomings and flaws
2. Adopt a code of values that treats these things as virtues
3. Admire themselves for living up to it
Brutal people admire themselves for being manly; compulsive pedants admire themselves for their attention to detail; naturally selfish and mean people admire themselves for their dedication to helping the market reward talent and punish failure, and so on. — John R. Perry

The philosopher Descartes believed he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind. — Eckhart Tolle

Robert Nozick [a Havard philosopher, famous for his book "Anarchy, State and Utopia"] defined revenge as delivering the message that you know what someone has done, and it doesn't involve hurting them or doing anything to them beyond that. It's just delivering the message that their crime has been noted not just by its victims, because the victim might be dead, but by another who has a different moral view and will challenge the perpetrator's view. — Errol Morris

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! — Stephen Hawking

Two of the most famous Baghdadi scholars, the philosopher Al-Kindi and the mathematician Al-Khawarizmi, were certainly the most influential in transmitting Hindu numerals to the Muslim world. Both wrote books on the subject during al-Ma'mun's reign, and it was their work that was translated into Latin and transmitted to the West, thus introducing Europeans to the decimal system, which was known in the Middle Ages only as Arabic numerals. But it would be many centuries before it was widely accepted in Europe. One reason for this was sociological: decimal numbers were considered for a long time as symbols of the evil Muslim foe. — Jim Al-Khalili

Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.) — Charles Stross

To quote a famous philosopher revered in my time 'But this is no different from regular life. When have you ever known what's going to happen in the future?' Wait a minute, Jonah thought. I said that. Back at Westminster, with Katherine. Does that mean I'm going to be a famous philosopher in the future? Does that mean I'm going to be revered? There wasn't time to ask. — Margaret Peterson Haddix

A famous philosopher (either Aristotle or Judith Krantz, I forget who) once said about being a woman in Los Angeles: If you're blonde and beautiful, you're interchangeable. If you're not, you're invisible. — Laura Levine