Quotes

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins–all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Bertrand Russell, The free man's worship, Independent review, vol. 1, 1903, pp. 415–424, pp. 415-424

What armies do very well is to kill people and smash things; what they are not is humanitarian organizations.

Dale Jamieson, Duties to the distant: Aid, assistance, and intervention in the developing world, The Journal of Ethics, vol. 9, no. 1, 2005, pp. 151–170, p. 163

The taboo on human nature has not just put blinkers on researchers but turned any discussion of it into a heresy that must be stamped out. Many writers are so desperate to discredit any suggestion of an innate human constitution that they have thrown logic and civility out the window. Elementary distinctions—“some” versus “all,” “probable” versus “always,” “is” versus “ought”—are eagerly flouted to paint human nature as an extremist doctrine and thereby steer readers away from it. The analysis of ideas is commonly replaced by political smears and personal attacks. This poisoning of the intellectual atmosphere has left us unequipped to analyze pressing issues about human nature just as new scientific discoveries are making them acute.

Steven Pinker, The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature, New York, 2002, p. x

It is a good idea, and often necessary, if you are saying you have got hold of the truth, to have an explanation of why a lot of other people disagree.

Ted Honderich, How free are you? the determinism problem, Oxford ; New York, 1993, p. 105

The invisibility of exploitative force in capitalism results from the fact that, in capitalism, overt force is supplanted by force built into the very structure of the system of ownership and the classes defined by that system.

Jeffrey H. Reiman, Exploitation, force, and the moral assessment of capitalism: Thoughts on Roemer and Cohen, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 16, no. 1, 1987, pp. 3–41, p. 12

The deductive method in Archimedes probably originated in the same remarkable sociological phenomenon which also caused the poor state of physics in antiquity. Ancient civilization was based on slave labor and, in general, their patrons and representatives did not have occupations, but lived on their rents. In ancient opinion, therefore, logical deduction and mathematics were worthy of free-born men, whereas experimentation, as requiring manual work, was considered to be a slavish occupation.

Edgar Zilsel, The genesis of the concept of physical law, Philosophical review, vol. 51, no. 3, 1942, pp. 245–279, p. 254

What interests me most are the metaphysical questions whose answers can affect our emotions, and have rational and moral significance. Why does the Universe exist? What makes us the same person throughout our lives? Do we have free will? Is time’s passage an illusion?

Derek Parfit, Philosophers, Manchester, 1993

Until the 1970s, utilitarianism held a dominant position in the practical moral philosophy of the English-speaking world. Since that time, it has had a serious rival in contractualism, a, ethical theory that was relaunched into modern thinking in 1971 by John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. There were even reports of utilitarianism’s imminent death. But utilitarianism is now in a vigorous and healthy state. It is responding to familiar objections. It is facing up to new problems such as the ethics of population. It has revitalized its foundation with new arguments. It has radically changed its conception of human wellbeing. It remains a credible moral theory.

John Broome, Modern utilitarianism, in Peter Newman (ed.) The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, London, 2002, pp. 1309–1314, p. 656

An initial reaction is: how many closed problems are there in philosophy? But of course philosophy is so tolerant of dissent that even if a philosophical problem is solved, an ingenious philosopher can always challenge an assumption of the solution and still be counted as doing philosophy. Thus, as Austin noted, philosophical progress tends to be constituted by the creation of new disciplines, such as logic and formal semantics, less tolerant of philosophical dissent. I suspect that this gradual hiving off of bits of philosophy once philosophers have brought them under sufficient theoretical control will continue.

Timothy Williamson, Timothy Williamson, in Vincent F. Hendricks (ed.) Formal philosophy, S.l., 2005, pp. 209–222

Keynes was not an innovator and champion of new methods of managing economic affairs. His contribution consisted rather in providing an apparent justification for the policies which were popular with those in power in spite of the fact that all economists viewed them as disastrous. His achievement was a rationalization of the policies already practiced. He was not a “Revolutionary,” as some of his adepts called him. The “Keynesian revolution” took place long before Keynes approved of it and fabricated a pseudo-scientific justification for it. What he really did was to write an apology for the prevailing policies of governments.

Planning for Freedom, and other essays and addresses, Illinois, 1952, p. 69

[T]he antioevolutionary forces of creationists have all along argued loudly that biology has nothing whatever to teach us about humanity. They put their money where their mouths are, fighting a relentless and often successful political battle to cast a shadow over evolutionary fact in the name of theological politics. Their ranks in the fight against science have been joined, ironically, by some scholars in the social sciences and humanities who consider scientific theories to be just social constructions of reality, rather than descriptions of reality itself. They reject the idea of a human nature for altogether different reasons than creationists do, feeling that science may be just a political tool of white male scientists. These scholars tend to be horrified by people like me, who look for intersections of biology and culture, and often find them. Since the most important questions in the human sciences arise from these intersection points, I find the anti-biological approach, whether outright creationist or clothed in the intellectual garb of science-is-just-another-culture, to be appallingly shallow and intellectually nihilist.

Craig B. Stanford, Significant others: the ape-human continuum and the quest for human nature, New York, 2001, p. xiv

Hegel n’a pas de problèmes à poser. Il n’a que la dialectique. M. Proudhon n’a de la dialectique de Hegel que le langage. Son mouvement dialectique, à lui, c’est la distinction dogmatique du bon et du mauvais. […] Ce qui constitue le mouvement dialectique, c’est la coexistence des deux côtés contradictoires, leur lutte et leur fusion en une catégorie nouvelle. Rien qu’à se poser le problème d’éliminer le mauvais côté, on coupe court au mouvement dialectique.

Karl Marx, Misère de la philosophie: Réponse à la Philosophie de la misère de M. Proudhon, Paris, 1847, p. 2

T]he intellectual left is likely to be the prime beneficiary if the social sciences and the humanities can be rescued from residual Marxism and obscurantist postmodernism.

Peter Grosvenor, Evolutionary Psychology and the Intellectual Left, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 45, no. 3, 2002, pp. 446, p. 446

It is, of course, understandable that people are squeamish about acknowledging the violence of pre-state societies. For centuries the stereotype of the savage savage was used as a pretext to wipe out indigenous peoples and steal their lands. But surely it is unnecessary to paint a false picture of people as peaceable and ecologically conscientious in order to condemn the great crimes against them, as if genocide were wrong only when the victims are nice guys.

Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works, London, 1998, pp. 57-58

Marx’s doctrine was bad enough, but the developments which it underwent under Lenin and Stalin made it much worse. Marx had taught that there would be a revolutionary transitional period following the victory of the proletariat in a civil war and that during this period the proletariat, in accordance with the usual practice after a civil war, would deprive its vanquished enemies of political power. This period was to be that of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It should not be forgotten that in Marx’s prophetic vision the victory of the proletariat was to come after it had grown to be the vast majority of the population. The dictatorship of the proletariat therefore as conceived by Marx was not essentially anti-democratic. In the Russia of 1917, however, the proletariat was a small percentage of the population, the great majority being peasants. It was decreed that the Bolshevik party was the class-conscious part of the proletariat, and that a small committee of its leaders was the class-conscious part of the Bolshevik party. The dictatorship of the proletariat thus came to be the dictatorship of a small committee, and ultimately of a one man-Stalin. As the sole class-conscious proletarian, Stalin condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation and millions of others to forced labour in concentration camps. He even went so far as to decree that the laws of heredity are henceforth to be different from what they used to be, and that the germ-plasm is to obey Soviet decrees but not that reactionary priest Mendel. I am completely at loss to understand how it came about that some people who are both humane and intelligent could find something to admire in the vast slave camp produced by Stalin.

Bertrand Russell, The basic writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959, London, 1961, pp. 479-480

I’m very suspicious of the professional ethical scene, which I think has to concentrate on issues of often obsessive importance to certain kinds of middle-class Americans. For example, you find probably 10 articles in the ethical journals on the rights and wrongs of abortions for one article you find on the distribution of resources to healthcare, for example, between the poor and the rich, which seems to me a far more important problem: the fact that the rich command all the health resources available. So, if I were to become a first-order moralist, on these matters, I’d become a first-order political theorist. It seems to me that actually the fundamental moral problem faced in the world is the distribution of wealth. It has nothing to do with whether women should have control over their bodies, or if we should be allowed to red pornography, or whatever might be. These things are side shows. The real ethical issues are the different life-expectancies in different countries, and the different access to the necessities in life [for different] people.

Simon Blackburn, Being good: a short introduction to ethics, Oxford, 2002, p. 114

In science there are no “depths”; there is surface everywhere[.]

Otto Neurath, Marie Neurath, and R. S. Cohen, Empiricism and sociology, Dordrecht, 1973, p. 306

An important element of the intellectual trend called “postmodernism” is the repudiation of global models of social analysis and global solutions, and their replacement with a focus on local and group differences and the ways in which ordinary individuals adapt to and help reshape their environments. Its proponents often present themselves as populists, hostile to the elitism of modernists, who, on the basis of “essentialist” and “totalizing” theories, suggest that ordinary people are being manipulated and victimized on an unlevel playing field. […] In an academic context, the focus on individual responses and micro-issues of language, text interpretation, and ethnic and gender identity is politically safe and holds forth the possibility of endless deconstructions of small points in a growing framework of technical jargon. The process has been a long-standing one in economics, where mathematics opened up wonderful opportunities for building complex gothic structures on the foundation of very unrealistic assumptions. These models have slight application to reality, but conveniently tend to reaffirm the marvels of the free market, given their simple assumptions of perfect competition, etc. […] It is good to see that the active audience intellectuals are as useful in serving the cause of the “free flow” of information as the mainstream economists are in helping along “free trade.”

Edward Herman, Postmodernism Triumphs, Z Magazine, 1996

While Westerners usually equate the marketplace with freedom of opinion, the hidden hand of the market an be almost as potent an instrument of control as the iron fist of the state.

Benjamin Ginsberg, The captive public: how mass opinion promotes state power, New York, N.Y, 1986, p. 89

Normative concepts form a fundamental category-like, say, temporal or logical concepts. We should not expect to explain time, or logic, in non-temporal or non-logical terms. Similarly, normative truths are of a distinctive kind, which we should not expect to be like ordinary, empirical truths. Nor should we expect our knowledge of such truths, if we have ay, to be like our knowledge of the world around us.

Derek Parfit, Reasons and motivation, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, vol. 71, no. 1, 1997, pp. 99–130, pp. vol