Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essence, which Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as affording the intellectu...al deliverance from the evil of time. Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a detached intellect, one who, in Plato's phrase, becomes a "spectator of all time and all existence." This ideal of the philosopher as the highest human type--the theoretical intellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all time and existence--is altogether foreign to the Hebraic concept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too earth-bound, too laden with oppressive images of mortality, to permit him to experience the philosopher's detachment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Philosophy can be compared to some powders that are so corrosive that, after they have eaten away the infected flesh of a wound, t...hey then devour the living flesh, rot the bones, and penetrate to the very marrow. Philosophy at first refutes errors. But if it is not stopped at this point, it goes on to attack truths. And when it is left on its own, it goes so far that it no longer knows where it is and can find no stopping place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Seeing our common-sense conceptual framework for mental phenomena as a theory brings a simple and unifying organization to most of... the major topics in the philosophy of mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a commonplace that all religion expresses itself in mythological or metaphorical terms; it says one thing and means another;... it uses imagery to convey truth. But the crucial fact about religion is not that it is metaphor, but that it is unconscious metaphor. No one can express any thought without using metaphors, but this does not reduce all philosophy and science to religion, because the scientist knows that his metaphors are merely metaphors and that the truth is something other than the imagery by which it is expressed, whereas in religion the truth and the imagery are identified. To repeat the Creed as a religious act it is necessary not to add "All this I believe in a symbolical or figurative sense": to make that addition is to convert religion into philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A philosophy can and must be worked out with the greatest rigour and discipline in the details, but can ultimately be founded on n...othing but faith: and this is the reason, I suspect, why the novelties in philosophy are only in elaboration, and never in fundamentals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In many ways chess ... is very like philosophy. Both have long histories which most practitioners are aware of and frequently cons...ult. The chess master is just as likely to be found replaying the past games of Morphy and Capablanca as the modern philosopher is to be found rehearsing the arguments of Descartes and Kant. Further, chess games, like philosophical problems, can often be sufficiently complex to defy complete analysis. It has been calculated that after only two full moves 71,852 legal positions can be reached, while the number of distinct forty-move games is the colossal figure of 25 x 10115. Chess is also similar to philosophy in possessing a number of long-standing unsolved problems. There is for white, however expert, no opening which will guarantee victory, and no response from black which can be relied upon to preserve him from defeat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You may decry some of these scruples and protest that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosoph...y. I am concerned, rather, that there should not be more things dreamt of in my philosophy than there are in heaven or earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any effort in philosophy to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while th...e reward of success is banality. An answer, once found, is dull; and the only remaining interest lies in a further effort to render equally dull what is still obscure enough to be intriguing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When Philosophy with its abstractions paints grey in grey, the freshness and life of youth has gone, the reconciliation is not a r...econciliation in the actual, but in the ideal world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »