Quotes & Sayings About Presuppositions

In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he must accept upon faith and belief. — Georg Simmel

There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people. People are unique in the inner life of the mind
what they are in their thought-world determines how they act. This is true of their value systems and it is true of their creativity. It is true of their corporate actions, such as political decisions, and it is true of their personal lives. The results of their thought-world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world. — Francis A. Schaeffer

When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded word, we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don't quite fit our preferences and presuppositions. In an attempt to simplify, we force the Bible's cacophony of voices into a single tone and turn a complicated, beautiful, and diverse holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says. — Rachel Held Evans

The Christian mind ... is not a mind which is thinking specifically about Christian or even religious topics, but a mind which is thinking about everything, however apparently 'secular', and doing so 'Christianly' or within a Christian frame of reference. It is not a mind stuffed full with pat answers to every question, all neatly filed as in the memory bank of a computer; it is rather a mind which has absorbed biblical truth and Christian presuppositions so thoroughly that it is able to view every issue from a Christian perspective and so reach a Christian judgment about it. — John R.W. Stott

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundations on which we live and more and have our being. — James W. Sire

Racial reasoning conceals these presuppositions behind a deceptive cloak of racial consensus - yet racial reasoning is seductive because it invokes an undeniable history of racial abuse and racial struggle. — Cornel West

Fear and other emotions are based on assumptions, presuppositions, and expectations; they are constructed in the brain from nonemotional ingredients. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Modernist discourse [ ... ] incorporates semantic devices - such as the labeling of theism as 'religion' and naturalism as 'science' - that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open. — Phillip E. Johnson

Classical apologetics operates with a very modern notion of reason; "presuppositional" apologetics, on the other hand, is postmodern (and Augustinian!) insofar as it recognizes the role of presuppositions in both what counts as truth and what is recognized as true. — James K.A. Smith

[W]hen the empirical investigator glories in his refusal to go beyond the specialized observation dictated by the traditions of his discipline, be they ever so inclusive, he is making a virtue out of a defense mechanism which insures him against questioning his presuppositions. — Karl Mannheim

The dualistic presuppositions of the revisionist position are fully on display in the frequent references by Macedo and others to sexual organs as "equipment." 60 Neither sperm nor eggs, neither penises nor vaginas, are properly discussed in ethical discourse in such terms. Nor are reproductive and other bodily organs "used" by persons considered as somehow standing over and apart from these and other aspects of their personal reality. In fact, where a person treats his body as mere equipment, a mere means to extrinsic ends, the existential sundering of the bodily and conscious dimensions of the self that he effects by his choices and actions brings with it a certain self-alienation, a damaging of the good of personal self-integration. — Jean Bethke Elshtain

I agree with you that it is important to examine our presuppositions, throughly and once for all, in order to establish something solid. For I hold that it is only when we can prove all that we bring forward that we perfectly understand the thing under consideration. I know that the common herd takes little pleasure in these researches, but I know also that the common herd take little pains thoroughly to understand things. — Gottfried Leibniz

It has become increasingly necessary to abandon the use of biblical historiography as a viable source for our own historical writing .. We must be ready to radically alter and consciously distance ourselves from all presuppositions that have been imposed on us by the biblical account. — Frank Charles Thompson

Critical to the fight against global terrorism is an ability to move beyond presuppositions and stereotypes in our attitudes and policies and to form partnerships that transcend an "us" and "them" view of the world. (p. 135) — John L. Esposito

The discussions of every age are filled with the issues on which its leading schools of thought differ. But the general intellectual atmosphere of the time is always determined by the views on which the opposing schools agree. They become the unspoken presuppositions of all thought, and common and unquestioningly accepted foundations on which all discussion proceeds. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

Anyone who has worked within biblical scholarship knows, or ought to know, that we biblical scholars come to the text with just as many interpretative strategies and expectations as anyone else, and that integrity consists not of having no presuppositions but of being aware of what one's presuppositions are and of the obligation to listen to and interact with those who have different ones. — N. T. Wright

My mother taught me a lot of things, but they had big presuppositions built in - like her expectation that I'd be a missionary nurse in a religious order. — Faye Wattleton

An audience that is unwilling to suspend its own presuppositions and biases while considering an opposed (or even unopposed) viewpoint not only frustrates the function of extended argument but effectively denies its own beliefs a rational basis. — Vincent E. Barry

Our presuppositions shape our perspective, our perspective shapes our priorities, and our priorities shape our practice. — Kenneth Boa

So long as the spectator has to figure out the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and purposes, he cannot become completely absorbed in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters or feel breathless pity and fear. — Friedrich Nietzsche

But that changed propositional knowledge is thoroughly enmeshed with other forms of understanding - feeling, somatic experience, skills and competencies, presuppositions and common sense. Thinking about the always socially situated work of striving to create the conditions for complex flourishing requires a thick understanding of these aspects of our experience. — Alexis Shotwell

If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going. — Herman E. Daly

As followers of Christ, we are to be careful not to remain victims of the many cultural presuppositions of who he is, and what he teaches, insofar as taking for granted our own caricatures of him. Let it boil in both mind and heart the question, 'If Jesus were to appear today, how many of us would actually recognize him and his teachings (or would it simply be a recount of his first visit)? — Criss Jami

If the logic of God's truth pulls in one direction and the logic of unbelief pulls in the opposite direction, unbelief will never face the full logic of either. Both destinations would be unthinkable, though for entirely different reasons, as both would mean the end of unbelief. The logic of God's truth would lead to God, and the logic of unbelief would lead to disaster. Unbelief therefore lives in tension between the two worlds. As Francis Schaeffer pointed out (and his whole apologetics turned on this point), "The more logical a non-Christian is to his own presuppositions, the further he is from the real world; and the nearer he is to the real world, the more illogical he is to his presuppositions."41 — Os Guinness

Autodidacts tend to be cranks, obtuse and self-enclosed. A professor's most important role is to make you think with rigor: precisely, patiently, responsibly, remorselessly, and not only about your "deepest ingrained presuppositions," as my own mentor, Karl Kroeber, once wrote, but also about your "most exhilarating new insights, most of which turn out to be fallacious. — William Deresiewicz

To admit one's own presuppositions and to point out the presuppositions of others is therefore to maintain that all reasoning is, in the nature of the case, circular reasoning. The starting-point, the method, and the conclusion are always involved in one another. — Cornelius Van Til

The human authors and editors of the Old Testament brought their own experiences and presuppositions to the task of writing. We don't often think about this when we read the Bible. — Adam Hamilton

Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society, the way that a child catches the measles. But people with understanding realize that their presuppositions should be *chosen* after a careful consideration of which worldview is true. — Francis A. Schaeffer

Philosophy is a necessary activity because we, all of us, take a great number of things for granted, and many of these assumptions are of a philosophical character; we act on them in private life, in politics, in our work, and in every other sphere of our lives
but while some of these assumptions are no doubt true, it is likely, that more are false and some are harmful. So the critical examination of our presuppositions
which is a philosophical activity
is morally as well as intellectually important. — Karl Popper

Countries which have a different base, for example, a Christian one (or at least one with the memory of a Christian foundation) may indeed act most inconsistently and horribly. But when a state with a materialistic base acts arbitrarily and gives no dignity to man, internally or externally, it is being consistent to its basic presuppositions and principles. — Francis A. Schaeffer

My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: "By their fruits shall ye know them." I wouldn't judge a man by the presuppositions of his life, but only by the fruits of his life. And the fruits - the relevant fruits - are, I'd say, a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice. And whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends. — Reinhold Niebuhr

The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability. — Allan Sekula

We see that science also rests on faith; there is simply no science "without presuppositions — Friedrich Nietzsche

Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. — Gregory Bateson

But it seems to me that what is essential to "creative" or "inventive" thinking is a combination of intense interest in some problem )and thus a readiness to try again and again) with highly critical thinking; with a readiness to attack even those presuppositions which for less critical thought determine the limits of the range from which trials (conjectures) are selected; with an imaginative freedom that allows us to see so far u nsuspected sources of error: possible prejudices in need of critical examination. — Karl Popper

One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules - for there only lead to stalemate or disaster; one must cease to regard all patients as replicas, and honor each one with individual reactions and propensities; and, in this way, with the patient as one's equal, one's co-explorer, not one's puppet, one may find therapeutic ways which are better than other ways, tactics which can be modified as occasion requires. — Oliver Sacks

People have presuppositions ... By 'presuppositions' we mean the basic way that an individual looks at life- his worldview. The grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. A person's presuppositions provide the basis for their values- and therefore the basis for their decisions. — Francis A. Schaeffer

'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents. — William Barrett

Biased people are seen as prejudicial and unfair, arrogant and overly confident of their position. Nobody wants to be identified as someone who is biased or opinionated. But make no mistake about it, all of us have a point of view; all of us hold opinions and ideas that color the way we see the world. Anyone who tells you that he (or she) is completely objective and devoid of presuppositions has another more important problem: that person is either astonishingly naive or a liar. — J. Warner Wallace

If philosophy had the power to establish incontrovertible truths, immune to doubt, and if philosophers were as a rule wholly disinterested practitioners of their art, then it might be possible to speak of progress in philosophy. In fact, however, the philosophical tendencies and presuppositions of any age are, to a very great degree, determined by the prevailing cultural mood or by the ideological premises generally approved of my the educated classes. As often as not, the history of philosophy has been a history of prejudices masquerading as principles, and so merely a history of fashion. It is as possible today to be an intellectually scrupulous Platonist as it was more than two thousand years ago; it is simply not in vogue. — David Bentley Hart

When we smuggle our conclusions into our investigation by beginning with them as an initial premise, we are likely to beg the question and end up with conclusions that match our presuppositions rather than reflect the truth of the matter. — J. Warner Wallace

Sometimes the very presence of God is barred by our presuppositions and our intense and constant desire for triumph. — Ravi Zacharias

The practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different: we speak different tongues, and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same - that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist. Nor could anything we would like to call social life. Translation is another name for the human condition. — David Bellos

We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion. — James K.A. Smith

Eschatology is one of the great and fundamental options of the human spirit. It is a profoundly explicit no to the profoundly implicit yes by which we usually accept life's normalcies, culture's presuppositions, and civilization's discontents. It is a basic and unusual world-negation or rejection as opposed to an equally basic but more usual world-affirmation or acceptance. For myself, left to myself, I would prefer to bury the term eschatological and use instead a term such as world-negation. But I presume that eschatological is here to stay, so I continue to use it. — John Dominic Crossan