A Little History of Philosophy
Nigel WarburtonA Little History of Philosophy Sözleri ve Alıntıları
A Little History of Philosophy sözleri ve alıntılarını, A Little History of Philosophy kitap alıntılarını, A Little History of Philosophy en etkileyici cümleleri ve paragragları 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.The Owl of Minerva, Georg W.F. Hegel
‘The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.’
"This was the view of
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). But what does it
mean? Actually, that question ‘What does it mean?’ is one that
readers of Hegel’s works ask themselves a lot. His writing is
fiendishly difficult, partly because, like Kant’s, it is mostly
expressed in very abstract language and often uses terms that he
has himself invented. No one, perhaps not even Hegel, has
understood all of it. The statement about the owl is one of the
easier parts to decipher. This is his way of telling us that wisdom
and understanding in the course of human history will only
come fully at a late stage, when we’re looking back on what has
already happened, like someone looking back on the events of a
day as night falls."
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Learning from Mistakes, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn
"In 1666 a young scientist was sitting in a garden when an apple
fell to the ground. This made him wonder why apples fall
straight down, rather than going off to the side or upwards. The
scientist was Isaac Newton, and the incident inspired him to
come up with his theory of gravity, a theory that explained the
movements of planets as well as apples. But what happened
next? Do you think that Newton then gathered evidence that
proved beyond all doubt that his theory was true? Not according
to Karl Popper (1902–94)."
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The Man Who Didn’t Ask Questions
,
Hannah Arendt
"The Nazi Adolf Eichmann was a hard-working administrator.
From 1942 he was in charge of transporting the Jews of Europe
to concentration camps in Poland, including Auschwitz. This
was part of Adolf Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’: his plan to kill all Jews
living in land occupied by the German forces. Eichmann wasn’t
responsible for the policy of systematic killing – it was not his
idea. But he was heavily involved in organizing the railway
system that made it possible."
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Glimpses of Reality, Arthur Schopenhauer
"Life is painful and it would be better not to have been born.
Few people have such a pessimistic outlook, but Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788–1860) did. According to him, we are all
caught up in a hopeless cycle of wanting things, getting them,
and then wanting more things. It doesn’t stop until we die.
Whenever we seem to get what we want, we start wanting some-
thing else. You might think you would be content if you were a
millionaire, but you wouldn’t be for long. You’d want something
you hadn’t got. Human beings are like that. We’re never satisfied,
never stop craving for more than we have. It’s all very depressing."
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The Imaginary Watchmaker
David Hume
"Take a look in the mirror at one of your eyes. It has a lens that
focuses the image, an iris that adapts to changing light, and
eyelids and eyelashes to protect it. If you look to one side, the
eyeball swivels in its socket. It’s also quite beautiful. How did
that happen? It’s an amazing bit of engineering. How could an
eye have turned out this way just by chance?"
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Is the Present King of France Bald?
/ Bertrand Russell
"Bertrand Russell’s main interests as a teenager were sex, religion
and mathematics – all at a theoretical level. In his very long life
(he died in 1970, aged 97) he ended up being controversial
about the first, attacking the second, and making important
contributions to the third."
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The Best of All Possible Worlds?
"If you were designing the world would you have done it this
way? Probably not. But in the eighteenth century some people
argued that theirs was the best of all possible worlds. ‘Whatever
is, is right,’ declared the English poet Alexander Pope (1688–
1744). Everything in the world is the way it is for a reason:
it’s all God’s work and God is good and all-powerful. So even if
things seem to be going badly, they’re not. Disease, floods,
earthquakes, forest fires, drought – they’re all just part of God’s
plan. Our mistake is to focus close up on individual details
rather than the larger picture. If we could stand back and see the
universe from where God sits we would recognize the perfec-
tion of it, how each piece fits together and everything that seems
evil is really part of a much larger plan."
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True Happiness, Aristotle
‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer.’
"You might think this
phrase comes from William Shakespeare or another great poet.
It sounds as if it should. In fact it’s from Aristotle’s book The
Nicomachean Ethics, so called because he dedicated it to his son
Nicomachus."
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The Anguish of Freedom
,
Jean-Paul Sartre -Simone de Beauvoir and
Albert Camus
"If you could travel back in time to 1945 and to a café in Paris
called Les Deux Magots (‘The Two Wise Men’), you would find
yourself sitting near a small man with goggly eyes. He is
smoking a pipe and writing in a notebook. This man is Jean-
Paul Sartre (1905–80), the most famous existentialist philoso-
pher. He was also a novelist, playwright and biographer. He
lived most of his life in hotels and did most of his writing in
cafés. He didn’t look like a cult figure, but within a few years
that’s what he would become."
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Born Free, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"In 1766 a small dark-eyed man in a long fur coat went to see a
play at the Drury Lane theatre in London. Most of the people
there, including the king, George III, were more interested in
this foreign visitor than in the play being performed on stage.
He seemed uncomfortable and was worried about his Alsatian
dog, which he’d had to leave locked in his room. This man didn’t
enjoy the sort of attention he got in the theatre and would have
been far happier out in the country somewhere on his own
looking for wild flowers. But who was he? And why did
everyone find him so fascinating? The answer is that this was
the great Swiss thinker and writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–78). A literary and philosophical sensation, Rousseau’s
arrival in London, at David Hume’s invitation, caused the sort
of commotion and crowds that a famous pop star would today.
By this time the Catholic Church had banned several of his
books because they contained unconventional religious ideas.Rousseau believed that true religion came from the heart and
didn’t need religious ceremonies. But it was his political ideas
that caused the most trouble."
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Life’s Sacrifices
,
Søren Kierkegaard
"Abraham has a message from God. It is a truly awful one: he
must sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Abraham is in emotional
torment. He loves his son, but he is also a devout man
and knows he has to obey God. In this story from Genesis in
the Old Testament, Abraham takes his son up to the top of a
mountain, Mount Moriah, ties him to a stone altar and is about
to kill him with a knife, as God has instructed. At the very last
second, though, God sends an angel who stops the slaughter.
Instead, Abraham sacrifices a ram that is caught in some bushes
nearby. God rewards Abraham’s loyalty by allowing his son
to live."
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Practical Bliss
,
Jeremy Bentham
"If you visit University College London you may be surprised to
find Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), or rather what’s left of his
body, in a glass case. He is sitting looking out at you, with his
favourite walking cane that he nicknamed ‘Dapple’ resting
across his knees. His head is made of wax. The real one is
mummified and kept in a wooden box, though it used to be
on display. Bentham thought that his actual body – he called
it an auto-icon – would make a better memorial than a statue.
So when he died in 1832 he left instructions about how to deal
with his remains. The idea has never really caught on, though
Lenin’s body was embalmed and put on display in a special
mausoleum."
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"Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains"
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Learning Not to Care
;
Epictetus, Cicero, Seneca
"If it starts to rain just as you have to leave your house, that is
unfortunate. But if you have to go out, apart from putting on a
raincoat or getting your umbrella, or cancelling your appoint-
ment, there isn’t much you can do about it. You can’t stop the
rain no matter how much you want to. Should you be upset
about this? Or should you just be philosophical? ‘Being philo-
sophical’ simply means accepting what you can’t change. What
about the inevitable process of growing older and the shortness
of life? How should you feel about these features of the human
condition? Same again?"
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Rose-Tinted Reality, Immanuel Kant (1)
"If you are wearing rose-tinted spectacles they will colour
every aspect of your visual experience. You may forget that you
are wearing them, but they will still affect what you see.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) believed that we are all walking
around understanding the world through a filter like this. The
filter is the human mind. It determines how we experience
everything and imposes a certain shape on that experience.
Everything we perceive takes place in time and space, and every
change has a cause. But according to Kant, that is not because of
the way reality ultimately is: it is a contribution of our minds.
We don’t have direct access to the way the world is. Nor can we
ever take the glasses off and see things as they truly are. We’re
stuck with this filter and without it we would be completely
unable to experience anything. All we can do is recognize that
it is there and understand how it affects and colours what we
experience."
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