The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to b...e taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I hope I may claim in the present work to have made it probable that the laws of arithmetic are analytic judgments and consequentl...y a priori. Arithmetic thus becomes simply a development of logic, and every proposition of arithmetic a law of logic, albeit a derivative one. To apply arithmetic in the physical sciences is to bring logic to bear on observed facts; calculation becomes deduction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We men know very little a priori, and have our senses to thank for nearly all our knowledge. Through experience we know only appea...rances ..., but not the modum noumenon ..., not things as they are in themselves.... God knows all things as they are in themselves a priori and immediately through an intuitive understanding.... If we were to flatter ourselves so much as to claim that we know the modum noumenon, then we would have to be in community with God so as to participate immediately in the divine ideas. To expect this in the present life is the business of mystics and theosophists. Thus arises the mystical self- annihilation of China, Tibet, and India, in which one is under the delusion that he will finally be dissolved in the Godhead. Fundamentally Spinozism could just as well be called a great fanaticism as a form of atheism. For of God, the one substance, Spinoza affirms two predicates: extension and thought. Every soul, he says, is only a modification of God's thought, and every body is a modification of his extension. Thus Spinoza assumed that everything existing could be found in God. But by making this assumption he fell into crude contradictions. For if only a single substance exists, then either I must be this substance, and consequently I must be God (but this contradicts my dependency); or else I am an accident (but this contradicts the concept of my ego, in which I think myself as an ultimate subject which is not the predicate of any other being).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any necessary truth, whether a priori or a posteriori, could not have turned out otherwise. In the case of some necessary a poster...iori truths, however, we can say that under appropriate qualitatively identical evidential situations, an appropriate corresponding qualitative statement might have been false.... The inaccurate statement that Hesperus might have turned out not to be Phosphorus should be replaced by the true contingency ... two distinct bodies might have occupied, in the morning and evening, respectively, the very positions actually occupied by Hesperus- Phosphorus-Venus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Chaucer sawed life in half and out tumbled hundreds of unpremeditated lives, because he didn't have the cast-iron grid of a priori... coherence that makes reading Goethe, Shakespeare, or Dante an exercise in searching for signs of life among the conventions, compulsions, self-justifications, proofs, wise saws, simple but powerful messages, and poetry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The a priori method is distinguished for its comfortable conclusions. It is the nature of the process to adopt whatever belief we ...are inclined to, and there are certain flatteries to the vanity of man which we all believe by nature, until we are awakened from our pleasing dream by rough facts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous w...ith science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat--a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Educating a son I should allow him no fairy tales and only a very few novels. This is to prevent him from having 1. the sense of r...omantic solitude (if he is worth anything he will develop a proper and useful solitude) which identification with the hero gives. 2. cant ideas of right and wrong, absurd systems of honor and morality which never never will he be able completely to get rid of, 3. the attainment of "ideals," of a priori desires, of a priori emotions. He should amuse himself with fact only: he will then not learn that if the weak younger son do or do not the magical honorable thing he will win the princess with hair like flax.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The so-called law of induction cannot possibly be a law of logic, since it is obviously a proposition with a sense.--Nor, therefor...e, can it be an a priori law.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The very hope of experimental philosophy, its expectation of constructing the sciences into a true philosophy of nature, is based ...on induction, or, if you please, the a priori presumption, that physical causation is universal; that the constitution of nature is written in its actual manifestations, and needs only to be deciphered by experimental and inductive research; that it is not a latent invisible writing, to be brought out by the magic of mental anticipation or metaphysical mediation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »