It is worth studying philosophical systems in order to dismiss them.
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Quotes tagged ‘Epistemology’
Order is often a very desirable good and can be indispensable to intelligence and understanding, but to reduce intelligence simply to order is to trivialize intelligence.
Something is always concealed. For no manifestation reveals everything, and interpretation, no matter how carefully formulated, can never be total in its verbal formulation.
To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.
The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.
Most of the time reality has already moved past where that vertical knowledge resides.
It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.
Oh, to be sure, there is much we do not understand. The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem … but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers chan…
Time and distance, they afford a certain clarity.
But a trial is not about a judge— who is an arbiter in matters of law. It’s about a jury— who are arbiters in matters of fact, but make decisions, like all human beings, based on emotion.
What we see in nature is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
One talks about a thing by talking about something else.
Your mind is not in your head. It is between you and other people.
As we study other peoples, past or present, we dissolve the totality of their existence into items we are able to handle and fail to note the other parts of their lives which remain unassimilable to ours as a whole.
One of the abiding problems of explanation is that it splits issues analytically in order to clarify them, and in the process often impoverishes or denatures the issues, depriving them of some of their full and essential depth.
Observing your own brain in a bowl, you would not say, "That object is me." We are the sum of the interactions taking place within the mechanism.
If human wisdom has little or no value, where do the dogmatic assertions about God and his wisdom stem from? Why should they be trusted?
We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day? You people are creating a world of ever-present daylight, and I think it will burn us al…
I saw an article about a guy who plays blues—a black guy who hangs out with the Ku Klux Klan. So I watched him, like, what is this guy doing? He made sense. He said, "Listen. If you just sit down and talk to a person and just listen to him, I guarantee you that you have something in common." And at…
What changes people is relationships. Somebody willing to walk through the shadow of the valley of adolescence with them.