Topic: Philosophy

Quotes

Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett, & Bennett Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008)

Impurity is always with us, if only because our categories can never in themselves fully encompass the world. #
There is no foundation, there are no overarching sets of guidelines, laws, or principles. There are only actions, and it is up to humans to ritualize some of those actions and thereby set up an ordered world.#

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907)

Valuation as a real psychological occurrence is part of the natural world; but what we mean by valuation, its conceptual meaning, is something independent of this world; is not part of it, but is rather the whole world viewed from a particular vantage point. . . . Our whole life, from the point of view of consciousness, consists in experiencing and judging values, and it acquires meaning and significance only from the fact that the mechanically unfolding elements of reality possess an infinite variety of values beyond their objective substance. . . . Even objective perception can arise only from valuation – we live in a world of values which arranges the contents of reality in an autonomous order.#
The value of things—ethical as well as eudæmonistic, religious as well as aesthetic—hovers, like the Platonic ideas, above the world; a realm that is governed by its own alien and intangible inner norms, but that lends relief and colour to reality.#
It makes no difference how one expresses it: either that there is an absolute but it can be grasped only by an infinite process, or that there are only relations but that they can only replace the absolute in an infinite process.#
We dignify with the name of ‘truth’ those representations that, active within us as real forces or motions, incite us to useful behaviour.#
The qualities that could be asserted validly about the interrelationship of the parts would lead to contradictions if asserted about the whole.#
If we were to assume that there is only a single line in the whole world, it would not have any specific length since it lacks any relation to others. It is impossible to measure the world as a whole, because there is nothing outside the world in relation to which it could have a specific size.#
Value does not originate from the unbroken unity of the moment of enjoyment, but from the separation between the subject and the content of enjoyment as an object that stands opposed to the subject as something desired and only to be attained by the conquest of distance, obstacles and difficulties. #

Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (1951)

The fact that Christians have found kinship between Christ and the prophets of the Hebrews, the moral philosophers of Greece, the Roman Stoics, Spinoza and Kant, humanitarian reformers and eastern mystics, may be less indicative of Christian instability than of a certain stability in human wisdom.#

Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines (2014)

Classical philosophy was defined against nonphilosophic life and the realm of commonsense “opinion” out of which it emerged. Modern philosophy, by contrast, is defined against an existing false philosophy, against scholasticism, and so has a far more academic and historically contingent character.#

Arjo Klamer, “Towards the Native’s Point of View: The Difficulty of Changing the Conversation” (1990)

Explanatory techniques are a hindrance to an understanding of the ‘deep meaning’ of a text—its existential significance—only if we allow ourselves to believe that they are an adequate substitute for interpretation.#

Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology (1969)

If the entrance of evil in man’s heart be explained by the fact of man’s finitude, this is nothing less than to agree with the contention of the Greeks that evil must be as original as the good.#

Arthur Melzer, “Rousseau and the Modern Cult of Sincerity” (1995)

What piety is for St. Augustine, what contemplation is for Plato, sincerity is for Rousseau. It is the unique means through which we draw closer to Being and make ourselves most real.#

Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

We cannot justify our language by pointing to its reflection of extralinguistic reality, because it is only in and through language that we can do such pointing.#
The analytic/synthetic distinction itself presupposes a separability of concept from application that cannot be sustained.#
No “analytic” use of a concept is intelligible unless it is embedded in a network of “synthetic” uses of that same concept.#

Gottlob Frege, Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893)

If being true is thus independent of being recognized as true by anyone, then the laws of truth are not psychological laws, but boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow but not dislodge.#Quoted in Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)

Posts

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Political Philosophy Is About Norms, Not Freedom
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The Extended Order as Moral First Principle: The Moral Philosophy of The Constitution of Liberty
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The Meta Level Doesn't Justify Itself
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Against Opinion
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Natural Law's Burden of Proof
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