Great Throughts Treasury
This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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William P. Montague, fully William Pepperell Montague
American Philosopher of the New Realist School, Professor of Philosophy at U.C. Berkeley and Columbia, President of the American Philosophical Association
"Atheism leads not to badness but only to an incurable sadness and loneliness."
"To regard the successful experiences which ensue from a belief as a criterion of its truth is one thing--and a thing that is sometimes bad and sometimes good--but to assume that truth itself consists in the process by which it is verified is a different thing and always bad. "
"No actual skeptic, so far as I know, has claimed to disbelieve in an objective world. Skepticism is not a denial of belief, but rather a denial of rational grounds for belief. "
"Realism holds that things known may continue to exist unaltered when they are not known, or that things may pass in and out of the cognitive relation without prejudice to their reality, or that the existence of a thing is not correlated with or dependent upon the fact that anybody experiences it, perceives it, conceives it, or is in any way aware of it. "
"Skepticism is not a denial of belief, but rather a denial of rational grounds for belief."
"One high certainty that is quite philosophy's own: Ideals are eternal things, and the life that incarnates them attains an absolute value that time alone could not create and that their death is powerless to destroy."