Simon Blackburn Quotes

The scientific world is to be less threatening than was feared. It is to be made safe for human beings. And the way to make it safe is to reflect on the foundation of knowledge.

In the end, it is ideas for which people kill each other.

We can grieve over lost powers and memories, or rejoice over gained knowledge and maturity, according to taste.

Perhaps to restore human freedom we should deny determinism?

Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility.

Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there.

Induction is the process of taking things within our experience to be representative of the world outside our experience. It is a process of projection or extrapolation.

There was content, but no container.

It can seem an amazing fact that laws of nature keep on holding, that the frame of nature does not fall apart.

In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual.

But it is logically impossible that there could exist an 'unowned' dent, a dent without a surface that is dented.

According to Confucianism, the ideal life contains a large dose of respect for traditional ways. All these ideals can be fleshed out and painted in more or less attractive colours. Yet there is something uncomfortable about them, if only because there is little reason to suppose that there is any such thing as the ideal life. Since different people have different tastes and interests, and different cultures encourage different concerns, it seems unlikely that any 'ideal life' will be heavily contextualized: ideal for this person in these circumstances, perhaps, but not much more.

What underlies our assignment of probabilities in the real world?

The word "philosophy" carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, unworldly, weird.

We think about what to do, and muster considerations and arguments in favor of one course or another. How are we to think about that?