A Quote by George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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Because Expect Much Other Severe Too Too Much Towards Very

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George Santayana
Spanish - Novelist
December 16, 1863 - September 26, 1952

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 couple of hundred years from now, maybe [science fiction writers] Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the twentieth century, and the professional philosophers will almost all be forgotten, because they're just shallow and wrong, and their ideas aren't very powerful.

Marvin Minsky

I think the nature of songwriters is that they are philosophers, and philosophers have a bent towards poetry and songwriting, so I think that the two run around together. The nature of a songwriter could be philosophical. Looking for universal ideas, a way to say things, get the story across as a means of entertaining, provoking thought.

Tom T. Hall

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

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

Bertrand Russell

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

I feel friendship towards philosophers, but towards sophists, teachers of literature, or any other such kind of godforsaken people, I neither feel friendship now, nor may I ever do so in the future.

Apollonius of Tyana

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

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

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

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

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.

Hans Reichenbach

Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God.

Thomas Huxley

The kind of approach I take is different from much of experimental philosophy. Although the experimental philosophers and I are certainly in agreement about the relevance of empirical work to philosophy, a good deal of their work is devoted to understanding features of our folk concepts, and in this respect, at least, I see them as making the same mistake as those armchair philosophers who are interested in conceptual analysis.

Hilary Kornblith

A Quote by George Santayana

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