Simon Blackburn Quotes

#1. To process thoughts well is a matter of being able to avoid confusion, detect ambiguities, keep things in mind one at a time, make reliable arguments, become aware of alternatives, and so on.

Simon Blackburn

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

Simon Blackburn

#3. When the hoary old question of nature versus nurture comes around, sides form quickly.

Simon Blackburn

#4. 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.

Simon Blackburn

#5. How you think about what you are doing affects how you do it, or whether you do it at all.

Simon Blackburn

#6. People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.

Simon Blackburn

#7. Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?

Simon Blackburn

#8. 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.

Simon Blackburn

#9. 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.

Simon Blackburn

#10. We must inspect each part, and we have to do so while relying on other parts. But the result of that inspection may, if we are coherent and imaginative, be perfectly seaworthy.

Simon Blackburn

#11. 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.

Simon Blackburn

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

Simon Blackburn

#13. So the middle-ground answer reminds us that reflection is continuous with practice, and our practice can go worse or better according to the value of our reflections.

Simon Blackburn

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

Simon Blackburn

#15. The fantasist in whom the reality barrier has broken down is unreliable, believing things when he should not, and telling things as true when they are not.

Simon Blackburn

#16. Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.

Simon Blackburn

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

Simon Blackburn

#18. Perhaps to restore human freedom we should deny determinism ?

Simon Blackburn

#19. The absolutist trumpets his plain vision; the relativist sees only someone who is unaware of his own spectacles.

Simon Blackburn

#20. 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.

Simon Blackburn

#21. The absolutist takes himself to speak to the ages, with the tongue of angels, but the relativist hears only one version among others, the subjectivity of the here and now.

Simon Blackburn

#22. The absolutist takes himself to read nature in her very own language, but the relativist insists that nature does not speak, and we hear only what we have elected to hear.

Simon Blackburn

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

Simon Blackburn

#24. An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat shop or the concentration camp and the death march.

Simon Blackburn

#25. Our concepts or ideas form the mental housing in which we live. We may end up proud of the structures we have built. Or we may believe that they need dismantling and starting afresh. But first, we have to know what they are.

Simon Blackburn

#26. Reflection enables us to step back, to see our perspective on a situation as perhaps distorted or blind, at the very least to see if there is argument for preferring our ways, or whether it is just subjective.

Simon Blackburn

#27. There are always people telling us what we want, how they will provide it, and what we should believe. Convictions are infectious, and people can make others convinced of almost anything.

Simon Blackburn

#28. Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction.

Simon Blackburn

#29. If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma , are sometimes consoling.

Simon Blackburn

#30. The absolutist parades his good solid grounding in observation, reason, objectivity, truth and fact; the relativist sees only fetishes.

Simon Blackburn

#31. Wittgenstein imagined that the philosopher was like a therapist whose task was to put problems finally to rest, and to cure us ofbeing bewitched by them. So we are told to stop, to shut off lines of inquiry, not to find things puzzling nor to seek explanations. This is intellectual suicide.

Simon Blackburn

#32. Since there is no telling in advance where it may lead, reflection can be seen as dangerous .

Simon Blackburn

#33. what Russell called a 'logical construction out of aggregates of facts. (This does not mean that all statements about the average are sensible or useful: as has been said, the average person has one testicle and one breast.)

Simon Blackburn

#34. Chance is as relentless as necessity.

Simon Blackburn

#35. Leibniz thought that if we had a sufficiently logical notation, dispute and confusion would cease, and men would sit together and resolve their disputes by calculation.

Simon Blackburn

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

Simon Blackburn

#37. Respect, of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way to garden.

Simon Blackburn

#38. Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility.

Simon Blackburn

#39. getting clear about the right categories with which to understand human motivation, is an important practical task.

Simon Blackburn