Philosophy on Simposeum

130 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 · They pay the penalty (dikê) and retribution (tisis) to each other for their injustice (adikia) according to the order of time.
• Elizabeth Anscombe — 1919-2001 · It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy.
• Anselm of Canterbury — 1033-1109 · Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.
• 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 · Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.
• Marcus Aurelius — 121-180 CE · The universe is transformation: life is opinion.
• 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 · In all the adversities of fortune, the most unhappy kind of misfortune is to have known happiness.
• Nick Bostrom — 1973-present · Superintelligence may be the last invention humans 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 could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.
• Nicholas of Cusa — 1401-1464 · The more he knows that he is unknowing, the more learned he will be.
• 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 · An idea—Darwin's idea—bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view.
• Jacques Derrida — 1930-2004 · Deconstruction is justice.
• René Descartes — 1596-1650 · I think, therefore I am.
• John Dewey — 1859-1952 · Democracy is freedom.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky — 1821-1881 · The mystery of man's being is not only in living, but in what one lives 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 · Value is one big thing.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson — 1803-1882 · Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
• Empedocles — c. 495 - c. 435 BCE · There is no growth of any of all mortal things nor any end in destructive death, but only mixture and interchange of what is mixed exist, and growth is the name given to them by men.
• Friedrich Engels — 1820-1895 · The state is not abolished. It withers away.
• Epictetus — c. 50/60 - c. 135 CE · Of things some are in our power, and others are not.
• Epicurus — 341-271 BCE · Get used to believing that death is nothing to us.
• Ludwig Feuerbach — 1804-1872 · The secret of theology is anthropology.
• Philippa Foot — 1920-2010 · I want to show moral evil as 'a kind of natural defect'.
• Michel Foucault — 1926-1984 · Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
• Gottlob Frege — 1848-1925 · Never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition.
• 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 · Despite their remoteness from sense experience, we do have something like a perception also of the objects of set theory, as is seen from the fact that the axioms force themselves upon us as being true.
• Gorgias — c. 483 - c. 376 BCE · Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works.
• H. P. Grice — 1913-1988 · Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
• Jürgen Habermas — 1929-present · Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech.
• H.L.A. Hart — 1907-1992 · Few questions concerning human society have been asked with such persistence and answered by serious thinkers in so many diverse, strange, and even paradoxical ways as the question 'What is law?'
• G.W.F. Hegel — 1770-1831 · What experience and history teach is this – that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
• Martin Heidegger — 1889-1976 · Language is the house of Being.
• Heraclitus — c. 540 - c. 480 BCE · We step and we do not step into the same rivers, we are and we are not.
• 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 · The word intentionality signifies nothing else than this universal fundamental property of consciousness: to be 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 then at once to learn how to live and to know how to die.
• Immanuel Kant — 1724-1804 · Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.
• 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 · Let's call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object, a nonrigid or accidental designator if that is not the case.
• Peter Kropotkin — 1842-1921 · Well-being for all is not a dream.
• Thomas Kuhn — 1922-1996 · Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
• François de La Rochefoucauld — 1613-1680 · Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.
• 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 Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao.
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — 1646-1716 · This supreme wisdom, united to a goodness that is no less infinite, cannot but have chosen the best.
• 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 · The first word of the face is the 'Thou shalt not kill.'
• David Lewis — 1941-2001 · There are ever so many 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.
• Lucretius — c. 99 - c. 55 BC · Such evil deeds could religion prompt.
• Niccolò Machiavelli — 1469-1527 · It is much safer to be feared than loved, if one has to lack one of the two.
• 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, in various ways; the point is to change it.
• Mencius (Mengzi) — c. 372 - c. 289 BCE · All men have a mind which cannot bear to see the sufferings of others.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — 1908-1961 · True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew.
• 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 · This question, how 'good' is to be defined, is the most fundamental question in all Ethics.
• Nāgārjuna — c. 150-250 CE · Dependent Origination is that which we call Voidness. It is a mere designation based on something, and it is 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 · If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.
• Nishida Kitarō — 1870-1945 · It is not that experience exists because there is an individual, but that an individual exists because there is 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 · Personal identity is not what matters.
• Parmenides — c. 515 - c. 450 BCE · The same thing is for conceiving as is for being.
• Blaise Pascal — 1623-1662 · Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.
• Alvin Plantinga — 1932-present · A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all.
• Plato — 428/427-348/347 BCE · The unexamined life is not worth living for men.
• Plotinus — 204/5-270 CE · Our concern is not merely to be sinless but to be God.
• Plutarch — c. 46 - c. 120 CE · For the mind requires not like an earthen vessel to be filled up; convenient fuel and aliment only will inflame it with a desire of knowledge and ardent love of truth.
• Karl Popper — 1902-1994 · We do not know, we 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 · Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.
• Bertrand Russell — 1872-1970 · The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
• Gilbert Ryle — 1900-1976 · I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine'.
• Jean-Paul Sartre — 1905-1980 · Man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
• F.W.J. Schelling — 1775-1854 · Philosophy, accordingly, is nothing other than a natural history of our mind.
• Friedrich Schiller — 1759-1805 · Beauty is thus nothing less than freedom in appearance.
• Arthur Schopenhauer — 1788-1860 · The world is my representation.
• 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 good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other.
• Oswald Spengler — 1880-1936 · Optimism is cowardice.
• Baruch Spinoza — 1632-1677 · I shall consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.
• Max Stirner — 1806-1856 · Nothing is more to me than myself.
• Sun Tzu — c. 544 - c. 496 BCE · To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
• Alan Turing — 1912-1954 · I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
• Voltaire — 1694-1778 · We must cultivate our garden.
• 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 · In ethics, reflection can destroy knowledge.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein — 1889-1951 · The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
• Mary Wollstonecraft — 1759-1797 · I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.
• Xenophanes — c. 570 - c. 478 BCE · The gods have not indicated all things to mortals from the beginning, but in time, by searching, they find something more that is better.
• Xenophon — c. 430 - c. 354 BCE · I have often wondered by what arguments those who indicted Socrates could have persuaded the Athenians that his life was justly forfeit to the state.
• Zhuangzi — ca. 369-286 BCE · I too will wag my tail in the mud.
• Slavoj Žižek — 1949-present · Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our 'reality' itself.