Science Philosophy Ias Quotes

[...] throughout the whole history of science most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely teh desire to satisfy their curiosity ~ Abraham Flexner

The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance. ~ Muriel Spark

So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field's real problems. ~ Vladimir L. Voeikov

Indeed neither life nor science bothers about "essences"-they leave "essences" to metaphysics, which is neither life nor science. ~ Alfred Korzybski

God is a synergetic experience. Science can never reveal it, philosophy can never come to it - only a poetic approach, a very passive, very loving approach, can. ~ Rajneesh

Science and knowledge, especially that of philosophy, came from the Arabs into the West. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy. ~ Jurgen Habermas

You encounter, at its core, a subjective Reality, one based on meaning and value reflective of your own Self, not an objective universe, cold, particle-based and indifferent as science projects. ~ Thomas Daniel Nehrer

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind. ~ George Lakoff

It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule. ~ John Rogers Searle

This book explores an unrecognized but mighty taboo - our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East - in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. ~ Alan W. Watts

However, just as earlier, when Christianity was introduced it didn't eliminate pagan conceptualizations, but layered new beliefs on top of them, so science simply added to the western mindset. It didn't fully displace religion, luck, fate, etc. Science just heaped other definitions onto the average person's already conglomerated psychic truckload. ~ Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Progress means progress of all humans from all walks of life, not just the progress in science, progress in technology or progress in philosophy. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The future is just a projection of the past. ~ Vivake Pathak

My studies in Speculative philosophy, metaphysics, and science are all summed up in the image of a mouse called man running in and out of every hole in the Cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese. ~ Benjamin De Casseres

Currently spirituality is at an ebb in the more advanced technological societies. This in part because memes that validate spiritual order tend to lose their credibility with time, and need to be recast in new forms again and again. At present we are living in an era when many of the basic tenents of Christianity, which has supported Western spiritual values for almost two thousand yearsm have come into conflict with the conclusions of science and philosophy. While religions have lost much of their power, science and technology have not been able to generate convincing value systems to replace them. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Politics is the art of promising heaven and delivering purgatory, and claiming hero status for saving your country from hell. ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

The physical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts there is no higher knowledge than the empirical knowledge of scientific phenomena. The mathematical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts that some higher knowledge is needed to explain scientific facts, and that higher knowledge is mathematics. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

Any polis which is truly so called, and is not merely one in name, must devote itself to the end of encouraging goodness. Otherwise, political association sinks into a mere alliance. ~ Aristotle

All those formal systems, in mathematics and physics and the philosophy of science, which claim to give foundations for certain truth are surely mistaken. I am tempted to say that we do not look for truth, but for knowledge. But I dislike this form of words, for two reasons. First of all, we do look for truth, however we define it, it is what we find that is knowledge. And second, what we fail to find is not truth, but certainty; the nature of truth is exactly the knowledge that we do find. ~ Jacob Bronowski

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers. ~ Hans Reichenbach

The conflicts between science and religion still remain in this day and age, because though most people understand what science means, they do not have a clue what religion means – and they do not even have a clue that they do not have a clue. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing. ~ Sheila Heti

Steve's throat swelled with tension as the intimacy of the moment became more tangible. He moved his eyes from the dark, reflective river, to the dark, reflective pupils in Diane's eyes. They seemed to quiver with tenderness - but then they would grow distant. He found himself continually surprised at the "aliveness" of the person standing just a foot away from him now. She wasn't inanimate: she would flinch if he pinched her, and answer if he asked her. And she was beautiful."
From "The Grand Unified Story"
a short story in Zack Love's Stories and Scripts: an Anthology ~ Zack Love

Government is the servant, not the master. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Myths grew from the ancient tradition of passing on knowledge orally, the only means of doing so before writing.
They're narratives of human existence. They helped our ancestors interpret reality, solve problems, and guided social behavior. They structured natural and social information into patterns using symbols, and embedded fact into story form. This increased their impact, making information meaningful and personally involving - not just cold, detached facts. ~ Alan Joshua

The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

What some politicians really mean when they say

this country: me, my party, my ethnic group
international justice is biased: they want to arrest me
terrorists: opposition
illegal immigrants: refugees
elections: remaining in power
peace: eliminating the opposition
international community: the rich countries
the people: sympathisers of my party ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

with its graceful language and poetic conceit, and even more because it expressed his own philosophy of science. To wit: As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited logic - that all observed effects may have been wrought by Him in any one of an infinite number of omnipotent ways, and these must ever evade mortal comprehension. ~ Dava Sobel

The church and the scientific community are fighting at times a common enemy: the truth religion cannot deny and the positivist materialist scientist is unable to explain. ~ Paul Greene

Is it not evident, in these last hundred years (when the Study of Philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendome) that almost a new Nature has been revealed to us? that more errours of the School have been detected, more useful Experiments in Philosophy have been made, more Noble Secrets in Opticks, Medicine, Anatomy, Astronomy, discover'd, than in all those credulous and doting Ages from Aristotle to us? So true it is that nothing spreads more fast than Science, when rightly and generally cultivated. ~ John Dryden

But concerning vision alone is a separate science formed among philosophers, namely, optics, and not concerning any other sense ... It is possible that some other science may be more useful, but no other science has so much sweetness and beauty of utility. Therefore it is the flower of the whole of philosophy and through it, and not without it, can the other sciences be known. ~ Roger Bacon

There was no conflict between science and religion ever. The conflicts were actually between two different systems of human understanding – one was science, which was based on rigorous observations and examinations, and the other was fundamentalism, that's based on undisputed belief on the scriptures. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The objective and merit of Einstein's theory is to identify those physical magnitudes which are absolute, i.e. common for all Inertial Frames, distinguishing them from those which are a mere perspective, only shared by those observers in repose within a given Inertial Frame. ~ Felix Alba-Juez

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em. ~ Ray Bradbury

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science. ~ George Eliot

The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

That everything in nature has "the appearance" of design is not exactly evidence against design. According to Dawkins, though, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is almost certainly something else. ~ Paul Greene

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.
And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear conclusion, whereas in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The senses give both us and the animals access to the natural world, but we humans have superimposed a second world by internalizing a poem, thereby making the two worlds seem equally inescapable. Outside of the natural sciences, reason works within the second world, following paths that the imagination has cleared. But inside those sciences, nature itself shows the way, ~ Richard M. Rorty

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy. ~ Jonathan Swift

Science is the most influential tool of progress in the world, not one among many, but most, yet no scientist had tried to use it as a primary tool for harmony. And I desired to accomplish precisely that. I didn't want to popularize science, for there were and are already tons of scientists doing it. I wanted to use science in a way that would have direct humanitarian consequences in interhuman relationships. ~ Abhijit Naskar