The Philosophical Subject Quotes & Sayings

These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development. — Marcel Proust

THE subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon to make itself recognized as the vital question of the future. It is so far from being new, that, in a certain sense, it has divided mankind, almost from the remotest ages, but in the stage of progress into which the more civilized portions of the species have now entered, it presents itself under new conditions, and requires a different and more fundamental treatment. — John Stuart Mill

The Mismeasure of Man treats one particular form of quantified claim about the ranking of human groups: the argument that intelligence can be meaningfully abstracted as a single number capable of ranking all people on a linear scale of intrinsic and unalterable mental worth. Fortunately - and I made my decision on purpose - this limited subject embodies the deepest (and most common) philosophical error, with the most fundamental and far-ranging social impact, for the entire troubling subject of nature and nurture, or the genetic contribution to human social organization. — Stephen Jay Gould

...philosophy does not, like exact or empirical science, bring us to know things of which we were simply ignorant, but brings us to know in a different way things which we already knew in some way; and indeed it follows from our own hypothesis; for if the species of a philosophical genus overlap, the distinction between the known and the unknown, which in a non-philosophical subject-matter involves a difference be-tween two mutually exclusive classes of truths, in a philosophical subject-matter im- plies that we may both know and not know the same thing; a paradox which disappears in the light of the notion of a scale of forms of knowledge, where coming to know means coming to know in a different and better way. — R.G. Collingwood

This is a subject I've given a lot of thought to, and I think I have the answer. I've tried to encompass in my theory all the sociological, mythological, religious, philosophical, muscular, economic, cultural, musical, physical, ethical, intellectual, metaphysical, anthropological, gynecological, historical, hormonal, environmental, judicial, legal, moral, ethnic, governmental, linguistic, psychological, schizophrenic, glottal, racial, poetic, dental [this was the logical link] artistic, military, and urinary considerations from prehistoric times to the present.I have been able to synthesize these considerations into one inescapable formulation: men can knock the shit out of women. — Fran Ross

Horse Frightened by a Lion depicts a majestic stallion in a very different situation. Stubbs painted this magnetic masterpiece to illustrate the nature of the sublime, which was one of his era's most popular philosophical concepts,and its relation to a timelessly riveting feeling: fear. The magnificent horse galloping through a vast wilderness encounters the bottom-up stimulus of a crouching predator and responds with a dramatic display of what psychologists mildly call "negative emotion." The equine superstar's arched neck, dilated eyes, and flared nostrils are in fact the very picture of overwhelming dread. The painting's subject matter reflects he philosopher Edmund Burke's widely circulated Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which asserts that because "terror" is unparalleled in commanding "astonishment," or total, single-pointed,
indeed, rapt
attention, it is "the ruling principle of the sublime. — Winifred Gallagher

If a philosophical writer cannot be followed, the difficulty of his subject can be placed only in mitigation of his offense, not in condonation of it. There are too many expert witnesses on the other side. — William Zinsser

The definition of deism is the philosophical idea of God as a first cause of the universe, who lays down the laws of nature and lets them run like clockwork, indifferent to the fate of the people subject to them. — Elizabeth S. Anderson

In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures. — John Szarkowski

In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature. — Martin Buber

Live. If you live, God will live with you. If you refuse to run his risks, he'll retreat to that distant heaven and be merely a subject for philosophical speculation. Everyone knows this, but no one takes the first step, perhaps for fear of being called insane. — Paulo Coelho

For if the Absolute has predicates, then there are predicates; but the proposition "there are predicates" is not one which the present theory can admit. We cannot escape by saying that the predicates merely qualify the Absolute; for the Absolute cannot be qualified by nothing, so that the proposition "there are predicates" is logically prior to the proposition "the Absolute has predicates". Thus the theory itself demands, as its logical prius, a proposition without a subject and a predicate; moreover this proposition involves diversity, for even if there be only one predicate, this must be different from the one subject. Again, since there is a predicate, the predicate is an entity, and its predicability of the Absolute is a relation between it and the Absolute. Thus the very proposition which was to be non-relational turns out to be, after all, relational, and to express a relation which current philosophical language would describe as purely external. — Bertrand Russell

Clearly, we have entered a world very different from the world of modernity as previously described. The subject/object distinction has broken down. In this world, foundationalism is a washout;49 the old distinction between fact and opinion is disappearing from view. The quest for certainty, precision, and ahistorical knowledge of objective truth is judged impossible. "Truth" is not an objective entity; the classic dikes between fact and opinion are springing leaks. Of course, not all the tenets of modernity have been sacrificed. Irrationally, philosophical naturalism (for most advocates of this radical hermeneutics), still holds sway; moreover, I must still say something about the place of science in this new model. But some variation of what once held the status of a minority report advanced only by a few intellectuals is now adopted almost everywhere. — D. A. Carson

Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years. — Thomas Frank

I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence? — James Thomson

The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment appear the only result of ourmost accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy. — David Hume

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it. — Shashi Tharoor

The danger is that is Christians do not consciously develop a biblical approach to a subject, then we will unconsciously absorb some other philosophical approach. — Nancy Pearcey

The experimentalists think that we can only get at our concepts by way of empirical investigation, while the armchair philosophers think that we can skip the experiments and figure things out from our armchairs. What they have in common, however, is regarding our concepts as the targets of philosophical theorising, and I just don't think that, in the vast majority of cases, the subject matter of philosophy has our concepts as its target. — Hilary Kornblith

A man who examines each subject from a philosophical standpoint cannot neglect them: he has to omit nothing, and state the truth about each topic. — Aristotle.

'Ape House' is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be. — Jane Smiley

A philosophical thought is not supposed to be impervious to all criticism; this is the error Whitehead describes of turning philosophy into geometry, and it is useful primarily as a way of gaining short-term triumphs in personal arguments that no one else cares (or even knows) about anyway. A good philosophical thought will always be subject to criticisms (as Heidegger's or Whitehead's best insights all are) but they are of such elegance and depth that they change the terms of debate, and function as a sort of "obligatory passage point" (Latour's term) in the discussions that follow.
Or in other words, the reason Being and Time is still such a classic, with hundreds of thousands or millions of readers almost a century later, is not because Heidegger made "fewer mistakes" than others of his generation. Mistakes need to be cleaned up, but that is not the primary engine of personal or collective intellectual progress. — Graham Harman

Some philosophers are drawn to the subject [of philosophy] via their interest in the nature and structure of the world external to us. Others are drawn to it by an interest in the capacities that make humans distinctive in the world. I am a philosopher of the latter sort. My work thus far has been clustered around the nexus of knowledge, communication, and human action. — Jason Stanley

The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

the illusion is encouraged that philosophy is an irrelevant, abstract subject - part of the decoration of a cultured life perhaps, but unnecessary in and even distracting from the activities of the practical world. The truth is, however, that all nontrivial activity presupposed some philosophical point of view and that not to recognize this is to make oneself the ready victim of bad or at the very least inadequate philosophy. — Michael Macintyre

If there is a widely shared concept of intentional action ... a philosophical analysis of intentional action that is wholly unconstrained by that concept runs the risk of having nothing more than a philosophical fiction as its subject matter. — Alfred Mele

This other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men's fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end. — Cormac McCarthy

The history of human knowledge has so uninterruptedly shown that to collateral, or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and most valuable discoveries, that it has at length become necessary, in any prospective view of improvement, to make not only large, but the largest allowances for inventions that shall arise by chance, and quite out of the range of ordinary expectation. It is no longer philosophical to base, upon what has been, a vision of what is to be. Accident is admitted as a portion of the substructure. We make chance a matter of absolute calculation. We subject the unlooked for and unimagined, to the mathematical formulae of the schools. — Edgar Allan Poe

Modern science was born through the Scientific Revolution in the 11th/17th century at a time when, as we saw earlier, European philosophy had itself rebelled against revelation and the religious world view. The background of modern science is a particular philosophical outlook which sees the parameters of the physical world, that is, space, time, matter and energy to be realities that are independent of higher orders of being and cut off from the power of God, at least during the unfolding of the history of the cosmos. It views the physical world as being primarily the subject of mathematicization and quatification and, in a sense, absolutizes the mathematical study of nature relegating the non-quantifiable aspects of physical existence to irrelevance. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

But let not little men triumph upon knowing that Johnson was an HYPOCHONDRIACK, was subject to what the learned, philosophical, and pious Dr. Cheyne has so well treated under the title of 'The English Malady. — Samuel Johnson