Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Those who have a propensity to philosophy, will still continue their researches; because they reflect, that, besides the immediate pleasure attending such an occupation, philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodized and corrected.

But they will never be tempted to go beyond common life, so long as they consider the imperfection of those faculties which they employ, their narrow reach, and their inaccurate operations.

All deliberations in life regard the former; as also all disquisitions in history, chronology, geography, and astronomy.

In some cases at least, these built-in structures will degenerate unless appropriate stimulation takes place at an early stage in life, but although such experience is necessary to permit the innate mechanisms to function, there is no reason to believe that it has more than a marginal effect on determining how they function to organise experience.

For the present, it seems that most complex organisms have highly specific forms of sensory and perceptual organisation that are associated with the Umwelt and the manner of life of the organism.

The death of one rule is the life of another.

To illustrate the sort of conceptual analysis that might do this, Jackson invites us to "suppose that the right account of the semantics of 'water' is that it is a rigidified definite description meaning roughly 'stuff which actually falls from the sky, fills the oceans, is odourless and colourless, is essential for life, is called "water" by experts,.

Consider how the explanatory gap was closed in the case of life.

Famously, it was once thought that the explanation of life required appeal to some kind of vital force.

One might try to analyze life a priori in terms of reproduction, locomotion, digestion, excretion, respiration and the like, and then give further analyses of these terms, eventually grounding the functions in microphysical terms.