Quotes
The middle ground, roughly halfway between poetry and mathematics, is where philosophers can make their best contributions, I believe, yielding genuine clarifications of deeply puzzling problems.
The utility of a thought experiment is inversely proportional to the size of its departures from reality.
A philosopher is someone who says, "We know it's possible in practice; we're trying to work out if it's possible in principle!"
Philosophy — in every field of inquiry — is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.
Experience teaches...that there is no such thing as a thought experiment so clearly presented that no philosopher can misinterpret it...
Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about — about what the issues really are — and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
p. 350
Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.
The boundaries of the species, whereby men sort them, are made by men.
The integral approach is committed to the full spectrum of consciousness as it manifests in all its extraordinary diversity. This allows the integral approach to recognize and honor the Great Holarchy of Being first elucidated by the perennial philosophy and the great wisdom traditions in general. … The integral vision embodies an attempt to take the best of both worlds, ancient and modern. But that demands a critical stance willing to reject unflinchingly the worst of both as well.
There is intersubjectivity woven into the very fabric of the Kosmos at all levels.
Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.
