Top 1200 Philosophical Questions Quotes & Sayings

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.

My first degree was in mathematics. That was great, but it didn't help with many of the things that puzzled me. I became a philosopher because I wanted to understand everything, especially those things that didn't make sense. And that has continued to be my philosophical motivation. That's one reason I have such a roving philosophical eye - once I have figured out a philosophical topic to my satisfaction, I find myself moving on to new problems.

As a filmmaker, I ask questions but don't have answers. Moviemaking is a philosophical exploration. I invite the audience to come on the journey and discover what they think and feel.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

I would say I was a philosophical boy. Thoughts about 'identical stones' are the earliest philosophical thoughts I remember. But when I was a teenager I also thought about the more typical philosophical problems teenagers think about: the existence of god, the objectivity of morality, whether one can know that the external world exists.

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

Justin's testimony about becoming a Christian is that he had been searching various philosophical traditions of the time, and then accidentally encountered a man who posed questions that pointed Justin [Martyr ] in a new direction.

Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night.

The great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries did not think that epistemological questions floated free of questions about how the mind works. Those philosophers took a stand on all sorts of questions which nowadays we would classify as questions of psychology, and their views about psychological questions shaped their views about epistemology, as well they should have.

In a way, math isn't the art of answering mathematical questions, it is the art of asking the right questions, the questions that give you insight, the ones that lead you in interesting directions, the ones that connect with lots of other interesting questions -the ones with beautiful answers.

God is the ultimate philosophical questioner, the one who asks the logically paradoxical ultimate philosophical question about the nature of his own existence.

From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

Isn't it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first step, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking .. questions that are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world.

I think there's some pretty amazing language in the Bible. The thing that's always been interesting to me about religion is that compared to the more modern spirituality, the West Coast pseudo-Buddhist thing that people go for these days, actual Buddhism and Islam have been looking at these philosophical questions, at really hard questions, for a long time. There's a lot of stuff that philosophy doesn't talk about, and in the secular world, a lot of times, people don't talk about these ideas, and that was always really interesting for me.

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.

In the first place a philosophical proposition must be general. It must not deal specially with things on the surface of the earth, or within the solar system, or with any other portion of space and time. . . . This brings us to a second characteristic of philosophical propositions, namely that they must be a priori. A philosophical proposition must be such as can neither be proved nor disproved by empirical evidence. . . . Philosophy, if what has been said is correct, becomes indistinguishable from logic as that word has now come to be used.

I'm really bothered by questions of humanity, questions of war, questions of slavery.

If we do get a quantum theory of spacetime, it should answer some of the deepest philosophical questions that we have, like what happened before the big bang?

Fundamentally, all art is about human beings. You're always showing larger moral questions through the smaller moral, philosophical, or political choices through one character in the book.

The importance of Plotinus is not only his own philosophical ideas which are quite interesting, but his historical impact as the founder of neo-Platonism which is the main philosophical tradition of late antiquity.

Philosophical questions and modes of thought just seem natural to me. They mesh with the way my mind works.

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.

If sculpture can really deal with the body, because we all inhabit ourselves, and if sculpture can really do that, which it is supposed to be able to do, and through it ask questions, philosophical questions, about being, I think these are all things we work on, all of us in our different ways, so perhaps somewhere in there, there are moments where dumb objects can speak.

I'm not sure that I 'am' a philosopher - but I do engage with questions that are generally recognized as philosophical questions, such as the character of human existence and what makes for a good human life.

Logical investigations can obviously be a useful tool for philosophy. They must, however, be informed by a sensitivity to the philosophical significance of the formalism and by a generous admixture of common sense, as well as a thorough understanding both of the basic concepts and of the technical details of the formal material used. It should not be supposed that the formalism can grind out philosophical results in a manner beyond the capacity of ordinary philosophical reasoning. There is no mathematical substitute for philosophy.

Science, it is said, no doubt has ameliorated the material conditions of human life, but is powerless to solve those moral and philosophical questions that interest cultured people so deeply.

Many environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever.

The constitutional questions are in the first instance not questions of right but questions of might.

Theatre within theatre, when characters sees themselves on stage, always raises philosophical questions of choice and free will.

I'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.

What I've found I really like about sci-fi is it can look at philosophical questions about humanity but in a different context. It can really make you think. That's what 'Doctor Who' does, even if it's a bit silly some other times.

We have to reconcile ourselves with philosophical questions in every field. Every field should be open to inquiry and knowledge.

The world is a philosophical prison and Man is the philosophical prisoner.

Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.

I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs.

Mann was profoundly influenced by two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who returned to the most ancient of all philosophical questions - "How to live?" - and whose writings offered novel perspectives for considering that question (much more perspective-offering than rigorous argument!)

Art can end up answering questions or asking questions. But when it's not connected to actual movements, it doesn't ask the right questions.

If a specific question has meaning, it must be possible to find operations by which an answer may be given to it ... I believe that many of the questions asked about social and philosophical subjects will be found to be meaningless when examined from the point of view of operations.

Although I felt I was quite good at criticising a philosophical position, I was not very good at defending and making a case for a philosophical position.

Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.

Philosophical argument, trying to get someone to believe something whether he wants to believe it or not, is not, I have held, a nice way to behave towards someone; also it does not fit the original motivation for studying or entering philosophy. That motivation is puzzlement, curiousity, a desire to understand, not a desire to produce uniformity of belief. Most people do not want to become thought-police. The philosophical goal of explanation rather than proof not only is morally better, it is more in accord with one's philosophical motivation.

Science will always raise philosophical questions like, is any scientific theory or model correct? How do we know? Are unobserved things real? etc. and it seems to me of great importance that these questions are not just left to scientists, but that there are thinkers who make it their business to think as clearly and slowly about these questions as it is possible to. Great scientists do not always make the best philosophers.

One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions. Sometimes these failed solutions are scientific, and sometimes they are religious, and sometimes they are based on what is called plain common sense.

Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.

In a sense these are questions that most people ask themselves to some extent. They become philosophical when asked with a persistence and rigour that pushes past conventional or evasive answers. It's nothing to do with acquiring a technical facility in an academic discipline.

The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premisses you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to beleive it or not. A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, forces someone to a belief.

As human beings, don't we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?

There is a worry that many have expressed that, on the naturalistic way of approaching philosophical questions, philosophy will somehow be co-opted by science. I'm not much worried about this.

Paul Davies takes us on a logically and rhetorically compelling modern search for human agency. This outstanding analysis, well informed by naturalistic views of our evolved affective nature, is the kind of philosophical work that is essential for a field to move forward when ever-increasing findings from modern science are inconsistent with traditional philosophical arguments. This book is for all who wish to immerse themselves in the modern search for free will. It is steeped in the rich liqueur of current scientific and philosophical perspectives and delusions.

I was occupied by a range of questions, often different from those fashionable in the professional philosophy of the past half century, that have sometimes troubled philosophers in the past. It's taken me several decades to work out my own philosophical agenda, and it is wide.

I take on a philosophical and postmodernist approach to the art-making process, investigating problems on a personal and intuitive level. This process is what fuels my mind and informs me, raises new questions, and gives my work resonance.

The plain fact is that there are no conclusions. If we must state a conclusion, it would be that many of the former conclusions of the nineteenth-century science on philosophical questions are once again in the melting-pot.

Some of the big philosophical problems have been solved by science, at least to a 1st approximation. Examples: the problems of matter, and mind. Only philosophical reactionaries, like Noam Chomsky, claim that they are and will remain mysteries.

Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'

European shows are unafraid of investigating philosophical questions on behalf of their characters or elevating imagery or letting moments play out.

Art has no need of philosophical arguments, it does not follow the signposts of philosophical systems; Art like life, dictates systems to philosophy.

So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family.

I confess to being something of a philosophical butterfly. The world is full of so many interesting questions, and although my greatest passion is for some form of applied ethics, that leaves me with oodles of possibilities, many of which I have never had the time or opportunity to explore in great depth.