Great Throughts Treasury

"We believe in not being tone-deaf to religion and to understand it in the most charitable way possible."

"We can indeed think of ourselves as pluralities, but in doing so we lose more than we gain."

"We know, if people label themselves in a certain way, that label comes to motivate behavior."

"We can strive to be certain types of person but we should not expect to automatically behave according to whatever regulative ideal we set for ourselves."

"Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like); fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; wise people fashion themselves."

"Without mental short cuts, we simply couldn?t get by. There is just too much information to process, and we often have to be quite crude as to how we filter it. But these generalizations are bound to lead us astray."

"We do not so much promise to be good spouses as promise to make ourselves into good spouses."

"You can?t tell whether or not a disposition is passive or active in any given case just from knowing what it is."

"What is it that Descartes said? I know that I am, but what is this I that I know??"

"You cannot explain the unity of experience by simply positing an inner, unified experiencer."

"When philosophy goes wrong, it?s like watching people try to nail custard to the wall."

"You fully understand who a person is not by observing them in only one kind of situation, but by knowing how they are in a variety of situations."

"You, me and everyone else are in some sense constructions, of mind and of matter."

"We would expect that character is often under-developed and that people would indeed behave differently according to circumstances. And that is precisely what the evidence does suggest."

"You probably think that you are being ignored because you are working outside of the universities, that snobbery is at work here. There may be some truth in this. It is much easier to have your work read if you have an academic position than not. But although this may be partly to do with snobbery that isn?t the whole story. The truth is that there is just too much philosophy being produced in the world, and anyone interested in it has to apply some crude filters to decide what to look at, let alone seriously read."

"Your life is not a pack of cells; your life is what your particular pack of cells collectively do."