This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence.
Consciousness | Ends | Knowledge | Life | Life | Philosophy | Reality | Science | Speculation |
Woe be unto him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one. Language, literature and history, physics, math and philosophy - subjects which seem the most remote from one another - are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system.
Knowledge | Literature | Philosophy | Reality | Science |
Karl Wilheim Friedrich Schlegel, later Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel
He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.
Philosophy | Religion | Will |
Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger
Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us. This is the message of old religions and new psychiatries. Unless this message is heard, unless we ... can give up our delicious satisfactions in opportunities for vengeful retaliation on scapegoats, we cannot expect to preserve our peace, our public safety, or our mental health... the punitive attitude persists. And just so long as the spirit of vengeance has the slightest vestige of respectability, so long as it pervades the public mind and infuses its evil upon the statute books of the law, we will make no headway toward the control of crime. We cannot assess the most appropriate and effective penalties so long as we seek to inflict retaliatory pain.
Books | Control | Evil | Mind | Philosophy | Public | Question | Retaliation | Spirit | Vengeance | Will | Old |
L. P. Jacks, fully Lawrence Pearsall Jacks
Philosophy has been called the search for the Permanent amid the changing. With this account of philosophy there is no need to quarrel. But having accepted it, a distinction remains to be observed, a distinction of capital importance, which we are in constant danger of forgetting. It is one thing to find the Permanent; it is another thing to find a form of words in which the Permanent shall stand permanently expressed. It is one thing to experience something fixed and changeless; it is another thing to fix this something by a changeless definition. The first may be possible, while the second remains impossible for ever.
Danger | Distinction | Experience | Need | Philosophy | Search | Words | Danger |
My philosophical viewpoint: The world is rational. Human reason can, in principle, be developed more highly (through certain techniques). There are systematic methods for the solution of all problems. There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind. The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived. There is incomparably more knowable a priori that is currently known. The development of human thought since the Renaissance is thoroughly one-dimensional. Reason in mankind will be developed in every direction. Formal rights comprise a real science. Materialism is false. The higher beings are connected to the others by analogy, not by composition. Concepts have an objective existence. There is a scientific (exact) philosophy and theology, which deals with concepts of the highest abstractness; and this is also most highly fruitful for science. Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not.
Mankind | Materialism | Philosophy | Reason | Religion | Rights | Thought | Will | World | Thought |
L. P. Jacks, fully Lawrence Pearsall Jacks
The human mind loves the bondage of words and is apt, when freed from one form of their tyranny, to set up another more oppressive than the last. The highest function of philosophy is to enforce the attitude of meditation and therewithall restrain the excessive volubility of the tongue. To us it seems that the reflective thinker wins his greatest victories when by what he says he compels us to recognise the relative insignificance of anything he can say. His task is not to capture Reality, but to free it from captivity.
Insignificance | Meditation | Mind | Philosophy | Words |
The world is a garden of philosophy. God is its gardener; Man is the visitor. And any tree that does not bear fruits of philosophy either does not belong to that garden or is yet to be grown
God | Man | Philosophy | World | God |
John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
A liberal is only a bundle of prejudices until he has mastered, has understood, experienced the philosophy of Conservatism.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Life is short - while we speak it flies; enjoy, then, the present, and forget the future; such is the moral of ancient poetry, a graceful and a wise moral - indulged beneath a southern sky, and all deserving the phrase applied to it, “The philosophy of the garden.”
Philosophy | Wise |
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.
Humor | Philosophy |
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
Life | Life | Mankind | Philosophy | Poetry | Religion | Science | Will |
The idea inherent in all idealistic metaphysics–that the world is in some sense a product of the mind–is thus turned into its opposite: the mind is a product of the world, of the processes of nature. Hence, according to popular Darwinism, nature does not need philosophy to speak for her: nature, a powerful and venerable deity, is ruler rather than ruled. Darwinism ultimately comes to the aid of rebellious nature in undermining any doctrine, theological or philosophical, that regards nature itself as expressing a truth that reason must try to recognize. The equating of reason with nature, by which reason is debased and raw nature exalted, is a typical fallacy of the era of rationalization. Instrumentalized subjective reason either eulogizes nature as pure vitality or disparages it as brute force, instead of treating it as a text to be interpreted by philosophy that, if rightly read, will unfold a tale of infinite suffering. Without committing the fallacy of equating nature and reason, mankind must try to reconcile the two. In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature–even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man–frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy.
Aid | Antagonism | Doctrine | Era | Fallacy | Good | Mankind | Mind | Nature | Need | Organic | Philosophy | Practice | Reason | Sense | Spirit | Theology | Truth | Will | World | Theoretical | Value |
Max DePree, alternatively De Pree or Depree
Whether leaders articulate a personal philosophy or not, their behavior surely expresses a personal set of values and beliefs. The way we build and hold our relationships, the physical settings we produce, the products and services our organizations provide, the way in which we communicate—all of these things reveal who we are.
Behavior | Philosophy |
Max DePree, alternatively De Pree or Depree
Whether leaders articulate a personal philosophy or not, their behavior surely expresses a personal set of values and beliefs.
Behavior | Philosophy |
Publication of the "Humanist Manifesto" will, in my opinion, serve no sufficient purpose. I cannot believe with you that it will clarify the public mind, or do constructive work for the cause. A set of fifteen principles, detached from the living experience which precipitated them and lacking the life and warmth of the interests they represent, can do little to inform the mind and nothing to stir the heart. Humanism—if I understand the philosophy of it—cannot be "sold" to people. If the "Manifesto" were a rallying cry issuing with glowing conviction from a group on the march together, or if it gave promise of gripping men and women of humanistic leanings, drawing them into closer, more understanding and more active unity, it would be a desirable signal. Unfortunately, I see no such service in it. And experience has taught me to beware of deceiving myself into thinking something has really been done when all that has been done is that something has been said. It would be easier for me to write, "Sure, go ahead, put me down." If I take the harder course and do not sign the document which I know will carry the names of men I greatly admire and respect, it is because of a deep conviction that the "Manifesto" will prove to be an ineffectual gesture, and a tactical error.
Experience | Life | Life | Little | Men | Mind | Nothing | Philosophy | Promise | Public | Service | Thinking | Understanding | Will | Work | Understand |
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe
‘One’ semantically represents the One God, the mystical One and Monism. However, in its detailed examination of the term ‘One,’ Hassidic philosophy finds that this term lacks a certain resilience and is not as watertight as the formulators of Hassidic thought would like. In their attempt to describe a higher and more consummate Oneness that they feel is the particular nature of the unio-mystica and also of Redemption. Moreover, as the idea of the ‘One God’ is the basis for ‘Monotheism,’ it is understandably a term, that although from a mystical perspective is interpreted as being beyond division, the mystical tradition feels that the idea has been misused and/or misunderstood as a description of the ‘One God of the world’ as opposed to the Monistic and mystical realisation of the Oneness of all Existence. Therefore, the term ‘Only’ is generally used in an attempt to describe the type of Oneness that expresses the mystical reality of there ‘Only’ being God.
God | Mystical | Nature | Oneness | Philosophy | Reality | Resilience | Thought | Tradition | God | Thought |