Top 15 Simon Blackburn Quotes

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.

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?

Motion however will not help unless we have things moving.

Paradigms can be asked to show their worth, an some of them do not stand up.

Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction.

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.

What underlies our assignment of probabilities in the real world?

Myself, I have never seen a bumper sticker saying "Hate if you Love Jesus", but I sometimes wonder why not. It would be a good slogan for the religious Right.

Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?

But if nothing does as well as something about which nothing can be said, it vanishes.

Nobody ever inferred from the multiple infirmities of Windows that Bill Gates was infinitely benevolent, omniscient, and able to fix everything.

A god that created the world and then walked off the site leaving it to its own devices is not a fit object of worship, nor a source of moral authority.

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

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

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