Philosophy on Simposeum

126 thinkers, each answering from their own writing with a citation to the page.

• Adam Smith — 1723-1790 · It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
• Theodor W. Adorno — 1903-1969 · Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
• Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī — 1058-1111 · The search after truth being the aim which I propose to myself, I ought in the first place to ascertain what are the bases of certitude.
• Anaximander — c. 610 - c. 546 BCE · Things give justice and reparation to one another according to the assessment of Time.
• Elizabeth Anscombe — 1919-2001 · It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy.
• Anselm of Canterbury — 1033-1109 · Credo ut intelligam — I believe in order that I may understand.
• Thomas Aquinas — 1225-1274 · Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.
• Hannah Arendt — 1906-1975 · Men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.
• Aristotle — 384-322 BCE · All men by nature desire to know.
• Augustine of Hippo — 354-430 · Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.
• Marcus Aurelius — 121-180 CE · What we do now echoes in eternity.
• J.L. Austin — 1911-1960 · We are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena.
• A.J. Ayer — 1910-1989 · No moral system can rest solely on authority.
• Jean Baudrillard — 1929-2007 · We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
• Jeremy Bentham — 1748-1832 · Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.
• Henri Bergson — 1859-1941 · Time is invention, or it is nothing at all.
• George Berkeley — 1685-1753 · We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
• Boethius — 477-524 · If there is a God, whence evil? If there is not, whence good?
• Nick Bostrom — 1973-present · Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.
• Albert Camus — 1913-1960 · Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
• Rudolf Carnap — 1891-1970 · In logic, there are no morals.
• David Chalmers — 1966-present · Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind.
• William Kingdon Clifford — 1845-1879 · It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
• G. A. Cohen — 1941-2009 · If you're an egalitarian, how come you're so rich?
• Confucius — 551-479 BCE · At seventy I followed my heart's desire without crossing the line.
• Nicholas of Cusa — 1401-1464 · He is most learned who knows the ignorance distinctively his.
• Arthur C. Danto — 1924-2013 · Art has come to an end.
• Donald Davidson — 1917-2003 · All understanding of the speech of another involves radical interpretation.
• Gilles Deleuze — 1925-1995 · A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through.
• Democritus — c. 460 - c. 370 BCE · By convention sweet, by convention bitter; but in reality atoms and void.
• Daniel Dennett — 1942-2024 · Darwin's idea is a universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept.
• Jacques Derrida — 1930-2004 · Deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place.
• René Descartes — 1596-1650 · I think, therefore I am.
• John Dewey — 1859-1952 · Democracy is freedom.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky — 1821-1881 · The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.
• W.E.B. Du Bois — 1868-1963 · The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
• Ronald Dworkin — 1931-2013 · Two great values, dignity and equal concern, anchor the rest.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson — 1803-1882 · Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
• Empedocles — c. 495 - c. 435 BCE · There is no birth of any of all mortal things, nor any end in baneful death; only mixing and separation of what was mixed.
• Friedrich Engels — 1820-1895 · The state is not abolished. It withers away.
• Epictetus — c. 50/60 - c. 135 CE · Some things are in our power; others are not.
• Epicurus — 341-271 BCE · Don't fear god; don't worry about death; what is good is easy to get; what is terrible is easy to endure.
• Ludwig Feuerbach — 1804-1872 · The secret of theology is anthropology.
• Philippa Foot — 1920-2010 · Morality just cannot be subjective in the way that different attitudes are subjective.
• Michel Foucault — 1926-1984 · Man is a recent invention.
• Gottlob Frege — 1848-1925 · We must ask for the meaning of a word only in the context of a sentence, never in isolation.
• René Girard — 1923-2015 · Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.
• Kurt Gödel — 1906-1978 · Mathematics is reality.
• Gorgias — c. 483 - c. 376 BCE · Speech is a great potentate, who with the smallest and most invisible body achieves the most divine deeds.
• H. P. Grice — 1913-1988 · It might be held that the *ultimate* subject of all philosophy is ourselves.
• Jürgen Habermas — 1929-present · Modernity is an unfinished project.
• H.L.A. Hart — 1907-1992 · The existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit another.
• G.W.F. Hegel — 1770-1831 · What experience and history teach us is this: that people and governments have never learned anything from history.
• Martin Heidegger — 1889-1976 · Only a god can save us.
• Heraclitus — c. 540 - c. 480 BCE · Nature loves to hide.
• Thomas Hobbes — 1588-1679 · The condition of man... is a condition of war of every one against every one.
• David Hume — 1711-1776 · Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.
• Edmund Husserl — 1859-1938 · All consciousness is consciousness of something.
• Ibn Khaldun — 1332-1406 · Dynasties have a natural life-span like individuals.
• William James — 1842-1910 · Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
• Karl Jaspers — 1883-1969 · To philosophize is at the same time to learn how to live and to learn how to die.
• Immanuel Kant — 1724-1804 · Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
• John Maynard Keynes — 1883-1946 · Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
• Søren Kierkegaard — 1813-1855 · Faith is the highest passion in a human being.
• Saul Kripke — 1940-2022 · Names are rigid designators: in every possible world they designate the same object.
• Peter Kropotkin — 1842-1921 · Well-being for all is not a dream.
• Thomas Kuhn — 1922-1996 · Normal science... is low on innovation and high on dogma.
• François de La Rochefoucauld — 1613-1680 · Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise.
• Imre Lakatos — 1922-1974 · Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
• Laozi (Lao Tzu) — c. 571 - c. 471 BCE · The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — 1646-1716 · This is the best of all possible worlds — for God, being supremely wise and good, could have chosen no other.
• Aldo Leopold — 1887-1948 · A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
• Emmanuel Levinas — 1906-1995 · I am responsible for the Other, even for the responsibility of the Other.
• David Lewis — 1941-2001 · There are many other ways that a world might be; and one of these many ways is the way that this world is.
• John Locke — 1632-1704 · The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.
• Niccolò Machiavelli — 1469-1527 · It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.
• Alasdair MacIntyre — 1929-present · This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.
• J. L. Mackie — 1917-1981 · There are no objective values.
• Herbert Marcuse — 1898-1979 · A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.
• Karl Marx — 1818-1883 · The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.
• Mencius (Mengzi) — c. 372 - c. 289 BCE · All humans have the heart that cannot bear to see the suffering of others.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — 1908-1961 · True philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world.
• John Stuart Mill — 1806-1873 · The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.
• Michel de Montaigne — 1533-1592 · Que sais-je? — What do I know?
• G.E. Moore — 1873-1958 · The question of what is good is the most fundamental question in all of ethics.
• Nāgārjuna — c. 150-250 CE · Whatever is dependently arisen, that we call emptiness; this is dependent designation, and it is itself the middle way.
• Thomas Nagel — 1937-present · If the mental is not itself merely physical, it cannot be fully explained by physical science.
• Friedrich Nietzsche — 1844-1900 · He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
• Nishida Kitarō — 1870-1945 · It is not that I have experience because I exist; I exist because I have experience.
• Robert Nozick — 1938-2002 · Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.
• William Paley — 1743-1805 · There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance without a contriver.
• Derek Parfit — 1942-2017 · What am I more than elaborate sentience?
• Parmenides — c. 515 - c. 450 BCE · It is the same thing to think and to be.
• Blaise Pascal — 1623-1662 · Between us and hell or heaven there is only life, the most fragile thing in the world.
• Alvin Plantinga — 1932-present · Of all the antitheistic arguments only the argument from evil deserves to be taken really seriously.
• Plato — 428/427-348/347 BCE · The unexamined life is not worth living.
• Plotinus — 204/5-270 CE · Our concern is not to be free of sin, but to be god.
• Karl Popper — 1902-1994 · We can never know; we can only guess.
• W.V.O. Quine — 1908-2000 · To be is to be the value of a variable.
• James Rachels — 1941-2003 · There is a deep difference between having a life and merely being alive.
• John Rawls — 1921-2002 · Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.
• Richard Rorty — 1931-2007 · I have spent 40 years looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — 1712-1778 · Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
• Bertrand Russell — 1872-1970 · I do not think that there is any evidence at all that there is a God.
• Gilbert Ryle — 1900-1976 · In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted.
• Jean-Paul Sartre — 1905-1980 · Man is condemned to be free, and from the moment he is thrown into the world he is responsible for everything he does.
• F.W.J. Schelling — 1775-1854 · Philosophy is nothing but a doctrine of the nature of our mind.
• Friedrich Schiller — 1759-1805 · Beauty is freedom in appearance.
• Arthur Schopenhauer — 1788-1860 · Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
• John Searle — 1932-present · Syntax is not the same as, nor is it by itself sufficient for, semantics.
• Wilfrid Sellars — 1912-1989 · The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.
• Seneca — c. 4 BCE - 65 CE · We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
• Henry Sidgwick — 1838-1900 · The Cosmos of Duty is thus really reduced to a Chaos.
• Oswald Spengler — 1880-1936 · There is no people that remains majestic through the centuries.
• Baruch Spinoza — 1632-1677 · I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
• Max Stirner — 1806-1856 · Nothing is more to me than myself.
• Sun Tzu — c. 544 - c. 496 BCE · The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
• Alan Turing — 1912-1954 · A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.
• Voltaire — 1694-1778 · If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
• Simone Weil — 1909-1943 · Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.
• Alfred North Whitehead — 1861-1947 · The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
• Bernard Williams — 1929-2003 · There is no reason to expect that ethical life can be adequately represented by any system.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein — 1889-1951 · The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
• Xenophanes — c. 570 - c. 478 BCE · If oxen had hands, they would draw their gods like oxen.
• Zhuangzi — ca. 369-286 BCE · I'd rather enjoy myself wallowing in the filth than let myself be controlled by some head of state.
• Slavoj Žižek — 1949-present · The truth has the structure of a fiction.