Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Further, to enable me to cast this variety of subjects somewhat into the shade, and to express my judgment regarding them with greater freedom, without being necessitated to adopt or refute the opinions of the learned, I resolved to leave all the people here to their disputes, and to speak only of what would happen in a new world, if God were now to create somewhere in the imaginary spaces matter sufficient to compose one, and were to agitate variously and confusedly the different parts of this matter, so that there resulted a chaos as disordered as the poets ever feigned, and after that did nothing more than lend his ordinary concurrence to nature, and allow her to act in accordance with the laws which he had established.

The word 'postulate' is significant only relative to an act of inquiry; we apply the word to a set of statements just in so far as we happen, for the year or the argument, to be thinking of those statements which can be reached from them by some set of trasformations to which we have seen fit to direct our attention.

It may happen that you have a picture in mind with which the colour recognised is compared, but this is rare.

I do not mean that it has to have concepts corresponding to these categories, but rather, for example, that it has to be able to recognize that one object is over there in front of it and another one on the left (space), it has to recognize that its eating occurred in a temporal sequence (time), that it did something, as opposed to something just happening (agency), that some things it did, made other things happen (causation).

The first was to obey the laws and customs of my country, adhering firmly to the faith in which, by the grace of God, I had been educated from my childhood and regulating my conduct in every other matter according to the most moderate opinions, and the farthest removed from extremes, which should happen to be adopted in practice with general consent of the most judicious of those among whom I might be living.

It can easily happen that two expressions have the same extension but different intensions.

This will happen most obviously for context-dependent terms such as 'tall', for which tokens in different contexts will be associated with different inferential roles.

For example, it can happen that an identity statement (e.g. 'Bill Smith is William Smith') can be cognitively insignificant for one speaker (e.g. his wife, who uses the two names interchangeably) but not for another (e.g. a colleague who uses the names in quite different domains without knowing that they are coextensive).

If it happen, from a defect of the organ, that a man is not susceptible of any species of sensation, we always find that he is as little susceptible of the correspondent ideas.

This happens sometimes, and with regard to some objects: Why may it not happen always, and with regard to all objects?