Great Throughts Treasury

"Sometimes we miss what is most important simply because we are looking in the wrong direction, or through the wrong end of the telescope."

"Stressing the jolly side of atheism not only glosses over its harsher truths, it also disguises its unique selling point. The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy. The more brutal facts of life are harsher for us than they are for those who have a story to tell in which it all works out right in the end and even the most horrible suffering is part of a mystifying divine plan. If we don?t freely admit this, then we?ve betrayed the commitment to the naked truth that atheism has traditionally embraced."

"Taken to its logical conclusion, postmodernism itself would simply be one narrative among others, constituted by the discourses of its time, and no more worthy of respect than any other system of thought."

"Stereotyping is also linked to false ideas of essence. Being a ?builder?, for instance, is not just a description of your job, it?s an indicator of your core identity. People often readily take on this essentialism for themselves."

"The brain is not like a tape recorder. ?Memories don?t just fade, as the old saying would have us believe; they also grow,?"

"The central truth is not that character is a myth, but that it varies more according to situation than we tend to assume."

"The Buddha?s teaching is really about how we come to terms with the world of appearances. For him there is nothing behind the veil of appearances, there is simply an open field of impermanent and contingent and very often tragic suffering and painful events.?"

"The Ego Trick is not to persuade us that we exist when we do not, but to make us believe we are more substantial and enduring than we really are."

"The Forer Effect (often known as the Barnum Effect) is named after the psychologist who first demonstrated it in 1948. Forer simply showed a description of a personality to a number of subjects and asked them to rate how accurately it described them. On average, people rated it 4.26 out of 5 for accuracy. But each person had been given the same description,"

"The fact that we can imagine something does not prove that it is possible."

"The Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley once wrote, ?Philosophers have raised a dust and then complain that they cannot see.?"

"The introvert who hates social functions may create an outgoing persona, a pretense that can just be kept up long enough to get through the horrors of a hosting a dinner party."

"The Key is that proverbs and sayings capture certain thoughts in pithy and memorable ways, but we cannot avoid having to work out for ourselves to what situations those thoughts actually apply."

"The limitations of the ?ethical? are perhaps most obvious to the modern mind. The life of eternity is just an illusion, for we are all-too mortal, flesh-and-blood creatures. To believe we belong there is to live in denial of our animality. So the world has increasingly embraced the ?aesthetic?. But this fails to satisfy us, too. If the moment is all we have, then all we can do is pursue pleasurable moments, ones that dissolve as swiftly as they appear, leaving us always running on empty, grasping at fleeting experiences that pass. The materialistic world offers innumerable opportunities for instant gratification without enduring satisfaction and so life becomes a series of diversions. No wonder there is still so much vague spiritual yearning in the West: people long for the ethical but cannot see beyond the aesthetic."

"The self has no immutable essence. Rather, it is constructed, like a fiction."

"The problem with the postmodern conception of the self is that the fragmentation it sees is more of a theoretical necessity than an empirical reality."

"The self is a construction of the mind, one flexible enough to withstand constant renovation, partial demolition and reconstruction, but one that can be brought down if the foundations are undermined."

"The solidity of self is an illusion; the self itself is not."

"The university can be seen in a similar light, with the additional feature that, to put it metaphorically, what looks like a blade may turn out to be a bottle-opener after all. Take some of the surprising uses of philosophy. Computer scientists start to work on artificial intelligence and philosophers contribute to their understanding of what intelligence is and the ethical implications of artificial intelligence. Biologists work with human DNA and embryos, and bioethicists are required to help clear the moral ground. Educationalists realize that children need help to develop their critical thinking skills, so philosophers and psychologists are enlisted to help meet that need. All of this is made much easier by the fact that philosophers, educationalists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists and biologists are part of the same institution: the university. And this is no happy accident. It reflects a deeper philosophical truth that all human knowledge is interconnected. So there is, after all, one single function which universities can perform: provide a common home for the various but interrelated branches of human knowledge. It is right and proper that these various branches are kept interconnected because the various parts of the tree of knowledge are not discrete, and they are still growing. And that is what is truly worrying about forthcoming reforms. More competition and specialized suppliers means a further fragmentation of the intellectual ecosystem. The damage to education we should fear is not a matter of money or competition as such, but the ways in which these tools end up being used as chainsaws to turn human understanding from an organic whole into dead, inert logs, fit only for burning."

"The self is like a cloud that not only looks like a single object from the outside, but feels like one from the inside too."

"The social matters for the psychological, but it is still inside the mind, not outside of it, that our identity resides."

"The social aspect of identity is therefore of comparable importance to the bodily aspect."

"There is a small but significant percentage of people who always do the right (or wrong) thing, regardless of the changes in situation. Some of these do so purely because they happen to be so disposed, others because they have developed their characters in good or bad ways."

"There may be an illusion as to what we really are, but not that we really are."

"The world has no real essence that is just waiting for us to describe. Reality is constituted by our understanding of it."

"The whole point of dancing is that you let yourself go. You?re having a sensational time, that is to say you?re putting a premium once again on the senses, as you would as a small child, you?re back in the booming, buzzing confusion."

"The very notion of psychological continuity assumes a large degree of physical continuity, because a great deal of what fills our minds is intimately tied up with our bodies."

"The very word ?ecstasy? in Greek means to stand outside of yourself."

"There are more ways of being a person than meets the I."

"These grand narratives are all false, because they impose a unified, singular structure on a world which has no fixed essence. In their place we need a multiplicity of narratives, ones which capture the different, contradictory perspectives that people in different times and places have of the world."

"They have been wary of explanations which commit what is known as the homunculus fallacy. This is best explained through the example of vision. Armed with an elementary knowledge of how the eye works, it is tempting to think that light shines on the retina and then the brain creates from this a single, three-dimensional image. But who sees this image?"

"These are moments when we abrogate our sense of self, when we are no longer self-conscious, we?re just conscious.? This is what psychologists call depersonalization."

"Thinking and feeling are what brains and bodies do. Mind should not be thought of a substance, but as a kind of activity."

"Third, given that the pearl view is to be rejected, this means that your sense of self must in some way be a construction. If there is no single thing which makes you the person you are, then you must be the result of several parts or things working together."

"This is the heart of the Ego Trick. The trick is to create something which has a strong sense of unity and singleness from what is actually a messy, fragmented sequence of experiences and memories, in a brain which has no control center. The point is that the trick works."

"This body here is a decision-making instrument and it will make decisions, given its necessity to do so and its ability to do so."

"This also provides the link between imagination and rationality. A detached reason that cannot enter into the viewpoints of others cannot be fully objective because it cannot access whole areas of the real world of human experience. Kierkegaard taught me the importance of attending to the internal logic of positions, not just how they stand up to outside scrutiny."

"To identify a whole with what is simply one of its parts, no matter how important, is to commit what Max Bennett and Peter Hacker call the ?mereological fallacy?."

"This ties identity too much to what is impermanent and fragile, as can be seen in the mother who hangs on too tightly to that role when her children have grown up, or the manager who loses self-respect when he is fired."

"Unity is the product of the self-system, it is not the basis of it."

"Tsongkhapa?s philosophy follows what is known as Madhyamaka ? the middle way ? between the nihilism of believing that nothing real exists and the view that ultimate reality is eternal and unchanging."

"Virtue ethics is not a theory about how most people actually make their moral choices, but a proposal for how we should set about making ourselves able to make better moral choices."

"We are all part Someone, part Anyone and part Nobody."

"We acknowledge that religion comes in many shapes and forms and that therefore any attempt to define what religion ?really? is would be stipulation, not description. Nevertheless, we have a view of what religion should be, in its best form, and these four articles describe features that a religion fit for the contemporary world needs to have. These features are not meant to be exhaustive and nor do they necessarily capture what is most important for any given individual. They are rather a minimal set of features that we can agree on despite our differences, and believe others can agree on too. 1. To be religious is primarily to assent to a set of values, and/or practice a way of life, and/or belong to a community that shares these values and/or practices. Any creeds or factual assertions associated with these things, especially ones that make claims about the nature and origin of the natural universe, are at most secondary and often irrelevant. 2. Religious belief does not, and should not require the belief that any supernatural events have occurred here on Earth, including miracles that bend or break natural laws, the resurrection of the dead, or visits by gods or angelic messengers. 3. Religions are not crypto- or proto-sciences. They should make no claims about the physical nature, origin or structure of the natural universe. That which science can study and explain empirically should be left to science, and if a religion makes a claim that is incompatible with our best science, the scientific claim, not the religious one, should prevail. 4. Religious texts are the creation of the human intellect and imagination. None need be taken as expressing the thoughts of a divine or supernatural mind that exists independently of humanity."

"We are bodies of thought. It is thought ? which includes emotions and perceptions, not just rational processes ? that makes us who we are, but these thoughts are always embodied."

"We are critical of religion when necessary. Our willingness to accept what is good in religion is balanced by an equally honest commitment to be critical of it when necessary. We object when religion invokes mystery to avoid difficult questions or to obfuscate when clarity is needed. We do not like the way in which ?people of faith? tend to huddle together in an unprincipled coalition of self-interest, even when that means liberals getting into bed with homophobes and misogynists."

"We are nothing but our parts, but we are more than just our parts."

"We are indeed less unified, coherent, consistent and enduring than we usually suppose, but we are still real and individual."

"We are what we do."

"We are psychologically connected with past selves by memory, even in the absence of a specific memory of a particular past self."