History Of Philosophy Quotes

...It would hardly be a waste of time if sometimes even the most advanced students in the cognitive sciences were to pay a visit to their ancestors. It is frequently claimed in American philosophy departments that, in order to be a philosopher, it is not necessary to revisit the history of philosophy. It is like the claim that one can become a painter without having ever seen a single work by Raphael, or a writer without having ever read the classics. Such things are theoretically possible; but the 'primitive' artist, condemned to an ignorance of the past, is always recognizable as such and rightly labeled as naïf. It is only when we consider past projects revealed as utopian or as failures that we are apprised of the dangers and possibilities for failure for our allegedly new projects. The study of the deeds of our ancestors is thus more than an atiquarian pastime, it is an immunological precaution. ~ Umberto Eco

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method-more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records-of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason. ~ Nicholas Murray Butler

As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity. ~ Karl Jaspers

I do realise that talk of natural kinds dates back to Aristotle, but I'd better not say too much about ancient philosophers lest I be convicted of practicing history of philosophy without a license. ~ Hilary Kornblith

Examination of its own history and of the forms of thought given the name "philosophy" indicates that "philosophy" has itself borne many fundamentally different meanings through the years, and from one school or movement to another. ~ Gregory B. Sadler

The idea of writing the history of philosophy as philosophy began with Hegel's influence in Germany, and then it spread to France and England, and histories of philosophies began to appear everywhere in Europe and America. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy ... In finishing it I found ... such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim. ~ William James

Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture. ~ Tadao Ando

There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I was trained as a philosopher never to put philosophers and their ideas into historical contexts, since historical context has nothing to do with the validity of the philosopher's positions. I agree that assessing validity and contextualizing historically are two entirely distinct matters and not to be confused with one another. And yet that firm distinction doesn't lead me to endorse the usual way in which history of philosophy is presented. ... The philosophers talk across the centuries exclusively to one another, hermetically sealed from any influences derived from non-philosophical discourse. The subject is far more interesting than that.

... When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time, or why did this particular approach seem natural, then your questions concern the context of discovery. When you ask whether the argument the philosopher puts forth to answer that question is sound, or whether the evidence justifies the scientific theory proposed, then you've entered the context of justification. Considerations of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology are relevant to the context of discovery, but not to justification. You have to keep them straight.... ...(T)he assessment of those intuitions in terms of the argument's soundness isn't accomplished by work done in the context of discovery. And conversely, one doesn't diminish a philosopher's achievement, and doesn't undermine its soundness, by s ~ Rebecca Goldstein

The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever ~ Westminster Shorter Catechism

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter
if not a paragraph or proper noun
in the history of philosophy. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Oracle of Delphi:
In my deep mystery I breathe
your fragrance swirling in
your odourless soul
I return your mystery
revealing your destiny deep in
the seed of your God Self ~ Ramon Ravenswood

Every body has role to play in the history of the world. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I keep finding myself confronted with the question, "What is the aim of man's life?" and, no matter what result my reflections reach, no matter what I take to be life's source, I invariably arrive at the conclusion that the purpose of our human existence is to afford a maximum of help towards the universal development of everything that exists.

If I meditate as I contemplate nature, I perceive everything in nature to be in constant process of development, and each of nature's constituent portions to be unconsciously contributing towards the development of others. But man is, though a like portion of nature, a portion gifted with consciousness, and therefore bound, like the other portions, to make conscious use of his spiritual faculties in striving for the development of everything existent.

If I meditate as I contemplate history, I perceive the whole human race to be for ever aspiring towards the same end.

If I meditate on reason, if I pass in review man's spiritual faculties, I find the soul of every man to have in it the same unconscious aspiration, the same imperative demand of the spirit.

If I meditate with an eye upon the history of philosophy, I find everywhere, and always, men to have arrived at the conclusion that the aim of human life is the universal development of humanity.

If I meditate with an eye upon theology, I find almost every nation to be cognizant of a perfect existence towards which it is the aim of ~ Leo Tolstoy

History shapes the lives of all men, women and children ... sometimes unraveling humanity into an undesired mess. ~ Lynda I Fisher

The history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral, social and political philosophy, is there to prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched. The intellectual historian can help us to appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made at different times between different possible worlds. This awareness can help to liberate us from the grip of any one hegemonal account of those values and how they should be interpreted and understood. Equipped with a broader sense of possibility, we can stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of enquiry what we should think of them. ~ Quentin Skinner

With subjectivism in philosophy, anarchism in politics goes hand in hand.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bertrand... ~ Bertrand Russell

French philosopher whom professional philosophers generally accord highest honors is Descartes. Montaigne and Pascal, Voltaire and Rousseau, Bergson and Sartre do not enjoy their greatest vogue among philosophers, and of these only Rousseau has had any considerable influence on the history of philosophy (through Kant and Hegel). ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Socrates (770-399 B.C.[E.]) is possibly the most enigmatic figure in the entire history of philosophy. He never wrote a single line. Yet he is one of the philosophers who has had the greatest influence on European thought, not least because of the dramatic manner of his death. ~ Jostein Gaarder

Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is - or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal nature to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live. ~ Jostein Gaarder

The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy. ~ Bryan Magee

Today they think my ideas are hysterical . Tomorrow they will consider them historical. ~ Amy Fernandes

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding. ~ Karl Jaspers

History is a condensation of all of our greatest triumphs and all of our worst mistakes. Perhaps,by studying,it we can better ourselves as a species. ~ Albert Ong

Producing and distributing premium TV entertainment content is more 'global' now than at any point in the history of the business. World Screen does an excellent job in following the news, trends and key players. It's a must-read for those in the business of global TV and brings us that much closer to prospective buyers and distributors of our premium content. ~ Chris Albrecht

One who flaunts his half baked knowledge is the worker with no wages of light. ~ Kunal Narayan Uniyal

A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. ~ Walter Benjamin

The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.) ~ Carl Sagan

Are you aware that humanity is just a blip? Not even a blip. Just a fraction of a fraction of what the universe has been and will become? Talk about perspective. I figure I can't feel so entirely stupid about saying what I said because, first of all, it's true. And second of all, there will be no remnant of me or my stupidity. No fossil or geographical shift that can document, really, even the most important historical human beings, let alone my paltry admissions. ~ Meg Mullins

Most of his face had been hidden by long, greasy bangs, and he mumbled in a low voice that made him difficult to understand. From what little Kyosuke had been able to make out, Usami had killed one person, but he mostly spent his time at the podium reciting strange names that Kyousuke didn't recognize like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein... Maybe they're actors? ~ Mizuki Mizushiro

Origins and History of Consciousness
III.
It's simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,
dress, go out, drink coffee,
enter a life again. It isn't simple
to wake from sleep into the neighborhood
of one neither strange nor familiar
whom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,
we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves
downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered
over the unsearched ... . We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light.
I want to call this, life.
But I can't call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall
where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner. ~ Adrienne Rich

The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. ~ Walter Benjamin

You can't understand this yet, but that's most of life: breaking your own promises to yourself. ~ Katherine Center

Portentous change when History can appear
As the cool Advocate of foul device;
Reckless audacity extol, and jeer
At consciences perplexed with scruples nice!
They who bewail not, must abhor, the sneer
Born of Conceit, Power's blind Idolater;
Or haply sprung from vaunting Cowardice
Betrayed by mockery of holy fear.
Hath it not long been said the wrath of Man
Works not the righteousness of God? Oh bend, 10
Bend, ye Perverse! to judgments from on High,
Laws that lay under Heaven's perpetual ban
All principles of action that transcend
The sacred limits of humanity. ~ William Wordsworth

After a person learns from God's books how to recognize the acceptable time, he becomes a strategist of his own life and a strategic person in human history. ~ Sunday Adelaja

There were two ways of looking at life;or two extremes of viewpoint, anyway, with a continuum between them. One proposed that every human action necessarily carried with it the obliteration of every other action which might have been performed instead; life therefore consisted of a succession of small and large choices, expressions of free will, so that the individual was like the captain of some paddle steamer chugging down the mighty Mississipi of life. The other proposed that it was all inevitability, that pre-history ruled, that a human life was no more than a bump on a log which was itself being propelled down the mighty Mississipi, tugged and bullied, smacked and weedled, by currents and eddies and hazards over which no control was possible. Paul thought it did not have to be one or the other. He thought a life – his own, of course – could be lived first under the dispensation of inevitability, and later under the dispensation of free will. But he also realized that retrospective reorderings of life are always likely to be self-serving. ~ Julian Barnes

And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach the soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs
at least dogs of Mr. Bones' caliber
would have it in them to feel a similar aesthetic impulse? Would they not, in other words, be able to appreciate art? As far as Willy knew, no one had ever thought of this before. Did that make him the first man in recorded history to believe such a thing was possible? No matter. It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil paintings and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn't respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it? ~ Paul Auster

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources. ~ Thomas Mallon

[...] and I think (like you, by the way) that theory cannot be fabricated out of the results of observation, but that it can only be invented.
[Letter to Karl Popper; 11 Sep 1939] ~ Albert Einstein

Leisure can be one of the Mothers of Philosophy. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Kinship among nations is not determined in such measurements as proximity of size and age. Rather we should turn to those inner things - call them what you will - I mean those intangibles that are the real treasures free men possess. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

The retirement of Athanasius, which ended only with the life of Constantius, was spent, for the most part, in the society of the monks, who faithfully served him as guards, as secretaries, and as messengers; but the importance of maintaining a more intimate connection with the catholic party tempted him, whenever the diligence of the pursuit was abated, to emerge from the desert, to introduce himself into Alexandria, and to trust his person to the discretion of his friends and adherents. ~ Edward Gibbon

History is littered with examples of men who would become gods, but only one example of God becoming Man. ~ Albert Einstein

Hope keeps us alive.
Love gives us joy.
Perception of inner joy open the door toward the happiness. ~ Debasish Mridha

Beside her, Rich had gone very still. It was like he'd fallen into himself and was poised under the surface, waiting to come back. The part of Lou that read interactions like this - knew these things the way she knew how an engine worked - felt the urge to push, but this time she held back. She wanted to hear his untainted answer. ~ Danika Stone

I look myself in the mirror and see what I am inside. In a glimpse, I find the perfection in the imperfect evidence of the former existence.
Katia M. S. ~ Katia M. S.

But history does repeat itself; that is the comedy and the crime of history. Men learn nothing. Times change. Scenes change. Names change. But passions are the same. ~ Carlos Fuentes

History - a vast Mississippi of falsehoods ~ Matthew Arnold

Winners are the favourites of heaven. ~ Tom Holland

Tie everyone you meet today with your garland of love and kindness. ~ Debasish Mridha

Make for yourself a world you can believe in.
It sounds simple, I know. But it's not. Listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. Everyone you know has a completely different one - the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. Sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. Some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. They convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds' creations or continuations. Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. But you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. A theater for your life, if I could put it like that. Don't live an accident. Don't call a knife a knife. Live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. Make accidents on purpose. Call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. Now I'm not a very smart man, but I'm not a d ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Think as though the beauty of your life depends on your thoughts. Live as though your life is the portrait of your thoughts. ~ Debasish Mridha

This word "Absurd" has had an unhappy history and I confess that now it rather annoys me. When I analyzed the feeling of the Absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus, I was looking for a method and not a doctrine. I was practicing methodical doubt. I was trying to make a "tabula rasa," on the basis of which it would then be possible to construct something. If we assume that nothing has any meaning, then we must conclude that the world is absurd. But does nothing have any meaning? I have never believed we could remain at this point. ~ Albert Camus

Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

It's easy to hate and point out everything that is wrong with the world; it is the hardest and most important work in one's life to free oneself from the bonds of fear and attachment. ~ Noah Levine

Each day of your life, as soon as you open your eyes in the morning, you can square away for a happy and successful day. It's the mood and the purpose at the inception of each day that are the important facts in charting your course for the day. We can always square away for a fresh start, no matter what the past has been. It's today that is the paramount problem always. Yesterday is but history. ~ George Matthew Adams

the graven image, the idol of the title, was a God who always acted the way we thought he should. Or more to the point - he was a God who supported our plans, how we thought the world and history should go. That is a God of our own creation, a counterfeit god. Such a god is really just a projection of our own wisdom, of our own self. In that way of operating, God is our "accomplice," someone to whom we relate as long as he is doing what we want. If he does something else, we want to "fire" him, or "unfriend him," as we would any personal assistant or acquaintance who was insubordinate or incompetent. ~ Timothy J. Keller

When you're persistently deleted from history, media, and any other channel to access information – or that information is distorted – it's far worse than physically killing someone. It, instead, induces a form of psychological death. How can you truly be alive, how can you genuinely breathe, when everyone around you believes that you either don't exist or are dead? ~ M.B. Dallocchio

Suppose... that you acquit me... Suppose that, in view of this, you said to me 'Socrates, on this occasion we shall disregard Anytus and acquit you, but only on one condition, that you give up spending your time on this quest and stop philosophizing. If we catch you going on in the same way, you shall be put to death.' Well, supposing, as I said, that you should offer to acquit me on these terms, I should reply 'Gentlemen, I am your very grateful and devoted servant, but I owe a greater obedience to God than to you; and so long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practicing philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet. I shall go on saying, in my usual way, "My very good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?" And if any of you disputes this and professes to care about these things, I shall not at once let him go or leave him; no, I shall question him and examine him and test him; and if it appears that in spite of his profession he has made no real progress towards goodness, I shall reprove him for neglecting what is of supreme importance, and giving his attention to trivialities. I shall do this to everyone t ~ Socrates

You know, the immortality of the soul, free will and all that
it's all very amusing to talk about up to the age of twenty-two, but not after that. Then one ought to be giving one's mind to having fun without catching the pox, arranging one's life as comfortably as possible, having a few decent drawings on the wall, and above all writing well. That's the important thing: well-made sentences ... and then a few metaphors. Yes, a few metaphors. They embellish a man's existence. ~ Theophile Gautier

To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity. ~ Brian Christian

Simplicity, not cleverness, can be the source of happiness. ~ Debasish Mridha

I wanted a monument to myself in granite. I wanted my face in seven different colours. I wanted I LOVE YOU in giant red letters on top of the Museum of Modern Art. I wanted a new bridge across the Hudson in my name. I wanted a three-volume history of the Greeks dedicated to my memory. I wanted a filmed version of my life in Ektachrome Commercial. I wanted the Mercedes-Benz no longer to be for Mercedes.

But I have small breasts. ~ Carol Emshwiller

In the time periods ​where we tend to know of peoples' lives, two things are required. One is that it is a literate society.

One of the unfairnesses that history imposes upon the present day, in terms of historians and others who are interested in the past, is a huge prejudice in favour of the cultures that wrote things down. The other is that within that literate society, you need to be of a class or social level where things are being written about you. Which is why most writing about history has tended to be about the upper class. There's more material. But it's the unrecorded lives, or the less-often recorded lives, that tend to interest me at least as much as the ones where we have easy access to a lot of information. ~ Guy Gavriel Kay

It was the world of Southern, rural, black growing up, of folks sitting on porches day and night, of folks calling your mama, 'cause you walked by and didn't speak, and of the switch waiting when you got home so that you could be taught some manners. It was a world of single black older women schoolteachers, dedicated, tough; they had taught your mama, her sisters, and her friends. They knew your people in ways that you never would and shared their insight, keeping us in touch with generations. It was a world where we had a history. ~ Bell Hooks

Over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And LIBERTARIANS had more of it. Because what I really believe is, let's spend a little more time leaving everybody alone. ~ Clint Eastwood

Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters. ~ Louis Kronenberger