Philip Kitcher Quotes
It's a very bad idea for scientific conclusions to be accepted because they fit with the political values of a group of researchers.
Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives.
I'm very suspicious of the idea of a "final theory" in natural science, and the thought of a complete system of ethical rules seems even more dubious.
It may be hyperbolic to declare that Shakespeare teaches us more about being human than all the natural scientists combined.
The "little theme" from Vinteuil, heard by Swann as emblematic of his love for Odette, remains a point of reference for him, as the character of that love changes and as the love eventually fades.
Science literacy consists in the ability and the desire to follow reports of new scientific advances, throughout your whole life.
The theory of evolution explains to us what our ancestry has been. It does not explain away our worth. Why should we be afraid to learn more about what we are?
In ethics, we don't make progress by discovering pre-existent truths; we do so by solving problems.
For a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language we actually use.
I'm very concerned about the increasing distortion of research by the intrusion of the market. Universities are beginning to see science as a means of attracting funds.
I didn't know that Mahler would come to play so large a role, nor that music and literature and philosophy can interinanimate one another in the way I've come to think they do in this case.
In my view, we ought to replace the notion of analytic philosophy by that of synthetic philosophy.
Ethical inquiry has always been motivated by the aim of improving human conduct. It doesn't follow from that that the goal is to produce a complete rule book that would be applicable to all cases.
The expert is a midwife. The expert is not someone who has the authority to pronounce the last word on the subject.
Any writer who could handle all these different voices would deserve high praise, but to do so without any sense of jarring or incoherence is an extraordinary accomplishment.
The more you read the novella, the more you should wonder, I think, which judgments are to be taken as bedrock.
I don't think readers of Mann have overlooked the fact that he was a great ironist, but they have tended to see the irony in particular parts of the novella, and to miss it in others.
Was Mann himself fully aware of all the facets of his irony? Probably not - any more than Shakespeare was fully aware of all the riches subsequent critics have found in his plays.
If the research agenda reflects "market forces", the problems of the poor are likely to be even more neglected than they already are.
There are many critics whose work I greatly admire. Even though I diverge from T.J. Reed in several important ways, I've learned greatly from his writings on Mann.
Mann's Death in Venice actually contains a snippet of philosophy about the second question, when Aschenbach, collapsed in the plaza, engages in his quasi-Socratic, anti-Socratic, ruminations.
So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and the film).
I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics.
Experiments work when, and only when, they call into action cognitive capacities that might reliably deliver the conclusions drawn.
After the success of Buddenbrooks, he married and fathered six children. Yet the surviving diaries tell us of recurrent sexual problems - and of Katia Mann's extremely sympathetic response to them
Most influential of all is the philosopher Stanley Cavell, and a younger generation of philosophers who have attempted to follow his pioneering work in thinking about literature philosophically.
One goal of ethical inquiry might be to uncover strategies available for use when values conflict or when rules are incomplete.
It's not at all a bad idea for scientific questions to be chosen because a democratic deliberation would identify them as important for people's lives.
Refined religion is aimed at realizing ethical values, including the fostering of human lives and human communities.
I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further ethical progress.
The point of philosophy, as I see it, is to change thinking, and thereby to change the conversation.
