Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

And the examples of many men of the highest genius, who had, in former times, engaged in this inquiry, but, as appeared to me, without success, led me to imagine it to be a work of so much difficulty, that I would not perhaps have ventured on it so soon had I not heard it currently rumored that I had already completed the inquiry.

The word "book" might not lack anything, except to a person who had never heard elliptic sentences, in which case he would need a table with the ellipses on one side and sentences on the other.

The sentence is composed of meaningful elements and those meaningful elements together with their rules of combination enable us to generate new sentences and to figure out the meanings of sentences and utterances that we have never heard before.

First, speech and sound are phenomenologically different: under certain conditions, a given sound can be perceived simultaneously as part of a syllable and as a non-speechlike chirp (Liberman

Abduction really is a terrible problem for cognitive science, one that is unlikely to be solved by any kind of theory we have heard of so far’ (p. 41).

What never was seen, or heard of, may yet be conceived; nor is any thing beyond the power of thought, except what implies an absolute contradiction.

You have yourself heard many such marvellous relations started, which, being treated with scorn by all the wise and judicious, have at last been abandoned even by the vulgar.

Nothing else ought ever to be heard of in the school, or in the closet.

Here again we find rationalistic smoke which only the empiricist (regulist) can turn into illuminating fire. A useful test of one's thought in this connection is to ask oneself what happens when a person who has been blind from birth gains vision and, never having heard color words used, develops his own language about color experiences.

Suppose O'Leary thinks this: "That animal sure looks striped, but who ever heard of a striped horse.