Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

But after the knowledge of God and of the soul has rendered us certain of this rule, we can easily understand that the truth of the thoughts we experience when awake, ought not in the slightest degree to be called in question on account of the illusions of our dreams.

Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind.

Epistemologically these are myths on the same footing with physical objects and gods, neither better nor worse except for differences in the degree to which they expedite our dealings with sense experiences.

But I have been urging that this difference is only one of degree, and that it turns upon our vaguely pragmatic inclination to adjust one strand of the fabric of science rather than another in accommodating some particular recalcitrant experience.

Again, compare a proof that an algebraic equation of nth degree has n roots, in connection with which there is a method of approximation, with a proof for which no such method exists.

We cannot say that two bangs two seconds apart differ only in degree from those an hour apart, for we have no feeling of rhythm if the interval is an hour long.

In saying these all give pleasure we speak as if the pleasure differed in degree rather than that the pleasures were of a different sort.

Pain and pleasure do not belong on one scale, any more than the scale from boiling hot to ice cold is one of degree.

This enormous expressive power clearly meshes with two of the other zoologically unusual features of Homo sapiens: a reliance on acquired know-how and a high degree of cooperation among non-kin (Pinker, 1997; Tooby

Hence it is that I cannot in any degree approve of those restless and busy meddlers who, called neither by birth nor fortune to take part in the management of public affairs, are yet always projecting reforms; and if I thought that this tract contained aught which might justify the suspicion that I was a victim of such folly, I would by no means permit its publication.