This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The justest division of human learning is that derived from the three different faculties of the soul, the seat of learning; history being relative to the memory, poetry to the imagination, and philosophy to the reason.
History | Imagination | Learning | Memory | Philosophy | Poetry | Reason | Soul |
A little philosophy inclineth a man to atheism. Depth in philosophy brings a man back to God.
Atheism | God | Little | Man | Philosophy |
The road to true philosophy is precisely the same with that which leads to true religion; and from both the one and the other, unless we would enter in as little children, we must expect to be totally excluded.
Children | Little | Philosophy | Religion |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Age generally makes men more tolerant; youth is always discontented. The tolerance of age is the result of the ripeness of a judgment which, not merely as the result of indifference, is satisfied even with what is inferior, but, more deeply taught by the grave experience of life, has been led to perceive the substantial, sold worth of the object in question. The insight then to which - in contradistinction fro those ideals - philosophy is to lead us, is, that the real world is as it ought to be, that the truly good, the universal divine reason, is not a mere abstraction, but a vital principle capable of realizing itself.
Age | Experience | Good | Grave | Ideals | Indifference | Insight | Judgment | Life | Life | Men | Object | Philosophy | Question | Reason | World | Worth | Youth | Youth |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Absolute is Mind (Spirit) - this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burden was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science; and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world... It remains for philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the ultimate reality.
Absolute | Education | History | Impulse | Meaning | Mind | Philosophy | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Religion | Science | Spirit | Unity | World |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason. Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts.
Individual | Philosophy | Reason | Time | Child |
The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.
Civilization | Little | Men | Philosophy | Time |
A dramatic centre of action and passion… utterly unlike what in modern philosophy we call consciousness. The soul causes the body to grow, to assume its ancestral shape, to develop all its ancestral instincts, to wake and to sleep by turns… and at the same time determines the responses that the living body shall make to the world.
Action | Body | Consciousness | Passion | Philosophy | Soul | Time | World |
Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.
Harmony | Philosophy | Reason |
The picture of scientific method drafted by modern philosophy is very different from traditional conceptions. Gone is the ideal of a universe whose course follows strict rules, a predetermined cosmos that unwinds itself like an unwinding clock. Gone is the ideal of the scientist who knows the absolute truth. The happenings of nature are like rolling dice rather than like revolving stars; they are controlled by probability laws, not by causality, and the scientist resembles a gambler more than a prophet. He can tell you only his best posits - he never knows beforehand whether they will come true. He is a better gambler, though, than the man at the green table, because his statistical methods are superior. And his goal is staked higher - the goal of foretelling the rolling dice of the cosmos.
Absolute | Better | Man | Method | Nature | Philosophy | Truth | Universe | Will |
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
Common Sense | Philosophy | Sense |
Both poetry and philosophy are prodigal of eulogy over the mind which ransoms itself by its own energy from a captivity to custom, which breaks the common bounds of empire, and cuts a Simplon over mountains of difficulty for its own purpose, whether of good or of evil.
Custom | Difficulty | Energy | Evil | Good | Mind | Philosophy | Poetry | Purpose | Purpose |
Not only are moral laws with their principles essentially distinguished from every other kind of practical knowledge in which there is anything empirical, but all moral philosophy rests wholly on its pure part. When applied to man, it does not borrow the least thing from the knowledge of man himself (anthropology), but gives laws a priori to him as a rational being. No doubt these laws require a judgment sharpened by experience, in order on the one hand to distinguish in what cases they are applicable, and on the other to procure for them access to the will of the man and effectual influence on conduct; since man is acted on by so many inclinations that, though capable of the idea of a practical pure reason, he is not so easily able to make it effective in concreto in his life.
Conduct | Distinguish | Doubt | Experience | Influence | Judgment | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Order | Philosophy | Principles | Reason | Will |
In view of the complete systematic unity of reason, there can only be one ultimate end of all the operations of the mind. To this all other aims are subordinate, and nothing more than means for its attainment. This ultimate end is the destination of man, and the philosophy which relates to it is termed moral philosophy.
Aims | Attainment | Man | Means | Mind | Nothing | Philosophy | Reason | Unity |
Religion is life, philosophy is thought; religion looks up, friendship looks in. We need both thought and life, and we need that the two shall be in harmony.
Harmony | Life | Life | Looks | Need | Philosophy | Religion | Thought | Friendship | Thought |
John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
Justification | Man | Philosophy | Search | Selfishness |
Being morally good, for the majority of Americans, means following the norms and values of their society or culture - whether this be their peer culture, their church, their country, or a combination of these. The theory that morality is relative to societal norms is known in moral philosophy as cultural relativism. Many others claim that morality is relative to the individual and is different for every person depending on what they feel. This theory is known in philosophy as ethical subjectivism.
Church | Culture | Good | Individual | Majority | Means | Morality | Philosophy | Society | Society | Following |
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatest which does not bow before children.
Children | Philosophy | Wisdom |
Any adequate philosophy of life must be based on the harmony of our given instincts.
Harmony | Life | Life | Philosophy |