People are afraid of being more ignorant than their childrenespecially, apparantly, their daughters.
Does that mean that religious texts are worthless as guides to ethics? Of course not. They are magnificent sources of insight into human nature, and into the possibilities of ethical codes. Just as we...
But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be memes versus us, beca...
Those who are religious and believe religion to be the best hope of humankind cannot reasonably expect those of us who are skeptical to refrain from expressing our doubts if they themselves are unwill...
Philosophy—in every field of inquiry—is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.
Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide. —Napoleon Bonaparte
If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory,...
If nobody cares, then it doesn't matter what happens to flowers.
I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound—if I can remember any of the damn things. —Dorothy Parker
Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning and Turing’s equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talen...
Prosaic, pedestrian example, but everything
There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
Nobody ever became a famous philosopher by being a champion of ecumenical hybridism.
If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surfa...
Anything that is usefully and voluminously predictable from the intentional stance is, by definition, an intentional system, and as we shall see, many fascinating and complicated things that don’t hav...
Does require anyone who makes the trip to abandon some precious intuitions, but I think that I have at last found ways of making the act of jettisoning these obvious truths not just bearable but even...
We have all heard the forlorn refrain Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time! This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appr...
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. —Anonymous
Our manifest image, unlike the daisy’s ontology or Umwelt, really is manifest, really is subjective in a strong sense. It’s the world we live in, the world according to us.