Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Its worth is solely that of the things which it will buy; the desires for other things than itself, which it is a means of gratifying.

Whereas now the thoughts of men go no further than to pronounce such things the secrets and mighty works of nature, things as it were causeless, and exceptions to general rules.

But there will be no success at all if we reject their existence by merely noting that we can explain things without them, by the simple method of confining ourselves to physical things and their behaviour.

For even they who lay down the law on all things so confidently, do still in their more sober moods fall to complaints of the subtlety of nature, the obscurity of things, and the weakness of the human mind.

And contrary to Fodor’s claim that nothing in the evolutionary worldview ‘even suggests’ that the function of cognition is something other than believing true things, here are five things that suggest exactly that.

They do not by any means deny that all sorts of things MAY go on in our minds: they only say that such things, if they occur, are not susceptible of scientific observation, and do not therefore concern psychology as a science.

But everything, according to this view, is relative, not to one or two other things, but to all other things, so that from one bit of truth the whole can be inferred.

CXIX There will be met with also in my history and experiments many things which are trivial and commonly known; many which are mean and low; many, lastly, which are too subtle and merely speculative, and that seem to be of no use; which kind of things may possibly avert and alienate men's interest.

Besides, independently of that delight and vanity which I have described, it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives; whereas it ought properly to hold itself indifferently disposed toward both alike. Indeed, in the establishment of any true axiom, the negative instance is the more forcible of the two. XLVII The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.

Other instances will give us this fourth species: that things which are chiefly imprinted when the mind is clear and not occupied with anything else either before or after, as what is learned in childhood, or what we think of before going to sleep, also things that happen for the first time, dwell longest in the memory.