Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The truth of this is sufficiently manifest from the single circumstance, that the philosophers of the schools accept as a maxim that there is nothing in the understanding which was not previously in the senses, in which however it is certain that the ideas of God and of the soul have never been; and it appears to me that they who make use of their imagination to comprehend these ideas do exactly the some thing as if, in order to hear sounds or smell odors, they strove to avail themselves of their eyes; unless indeed that there is this difference, that the sense of sight does not afford us an inferior assurance to those of smell or hearing; in place of which, neither our imagination nor our senses can give us assurance of anything unless our understanding intervene.

That meanings and other linguistic abstracta issue from oppositions does not contradict the fact that the oppositions do not manifest themselves in language as perfectly sharp and clear-cut, that the boundary between, e.g., truth and falsity is notoriously fuzzy.

And further, I continued to exercise myself in the method I had prescribed; for, besides taking care in general to conduct all my thoughts according to its rules, I reserved some hours from time to time which I expressly devoted to the employment of the method in the solution of mathematical difficulties, or even in the solution likewise of some questions belonging to other sciences, but which, by my having detached them from such principles of these sciences as were of inadequate certainty, were rendered almost mathematical: the truth of this will be manifest from the numerous examples contained in this volume.

For reasons which will manifest themselves in the course of my argument, I am highly dubious of this conception.

They had sought a methodology which would remedy this situation by generating hypotheses which were intersubjectively confirmable, and the content of which was formulated in such a manner that the nature and locus of its explanatory power would be manifest.

While it is conceivable that something other than H2O should manifest the superficial macro properties of water, as Kripke suggests, it is not conceivable, I contend, that H2O should fail to manifest these properties (assuming of course that we keep the rest of chemistry constant)" (Levine, 1993 128).

Let us grant (without looking too hard at what this means) that states of belief and judgment are essentially conceptual - states and acts that require the capacity to deploy concepts, and that manifest the exercise of this capacity.

At first it may seem to us that a determinate quite concrete picture becomes manifest in us, but just when we are concerned with a person with whom we are in constant contact, we shall find that the ekphored picture has something so to speak generalized.

For it is manifest that the tie, moderately straightened, while adequate to hinder the blood already in the arm from returning towards the heart by the veins, cannot on that account prevent new blood from coming forward through the arteries, because these are situated below the veins, and their coverings, from their greater consistency, are more difficult to compress; and also that the blood which comes from the heart tends to pass through them to the hand with greater force than it does to return from the hand to the heart through the veins.

It is also very worthy of remark, that, though there are many animals which manifest more industry than we in certain of their actions, the same animals are yet observed to show none at all in many others: so that the circumstance that they do better than we does not prove that they are endowed with mind, for it would thence follow that they possessed greater reason than any of us, and could surpass us in all things; on the contrary, it rather proves that they are destitute of reason, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs: thus it is seen, that a clock composed only of wheels and weights can number the hours and measure time more exactly than we with all our skin.