A Quote by Bertrand Russell

Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.

Bertrand Russell

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Bad Certain Good Influence May Never

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Bertrand Russell
British - Celebrity
May 18, 1872 - February 2, 1970

I think one reason is that philosophers are more insecure to speak accessibly because non-philosophers are skeptical that philosophers have any special expertise. After all, all people - not just philosophers - have attitudes and points of view on various philosophical questions, and they rather resent being told that there are professionals who can think about these things better.

Rebecca Goldstein

A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.

T. S. Eliot

Many philosophers say it's impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that's not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It's just that they haven't explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about.

Alison Gopnik

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

George Santayana

Simon Critchley's 'The Book of Dead Philosophers' - it's a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages.

David Benioff

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.

Walter Lippmann

Confronted with such a variety most philosophers try to establish one approach to the exclusion of all others. As far as they are concerned there can only be one true way- and they want to find it. Thus normative philosophers argue that knowledge is a result of the application of certain rules, they propose rules which in their opinion constitute knowledge and reject what clashes with them.

Paul Feyerabend

States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.

Plato

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

Henry David Thoreau

And tell him it's quite true that the best of the philosophers are of no use to their fellows; but that he should blame, not the philosophers, but those who fail to make use of them.

Plato

The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.

Robert Nozick

The philosophers likewise assume that in Nature there is nothing in vain, so that everything that is not the product of human industry serves a certain purpose, which may be known or unknown to us.

Maimonides

Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was the software, not the hardware, increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind.

Patricia Churchland

A State would be happy where philosophers were kings, or kings philosophers.

Plato

If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God, say nothing about right or wrong, good or bad. To admit this would force philosophers to confront the possibility that the physical sciences offer a grossly inadequate view of reality. And since philosophers very much wish to think of themselves as scientists, this would offer them an unattractive choice between changing their allegiances or accepting their irrelevance.

David Berlinski

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.

John Dewey

A Quote by Bertrand Russell

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