Nigel Warburton > Quotes

“إنّ القارئ المثالي: هو القارئُ الناقد، الذي يعتمد المناقشة المستمرة للبراهين المستعملة، والتفكير في براهين مناقضة لها”
― Nigel Warburton, Philosophy: The Basics

“A human being can choose what to do, what to become. We are all free. No one but you can decide what you make of your life. If you let other people decide how you live, that is, again, a choice. It would be a choice to be the kind of person other people expect you to be.
Obviously if you make a choice to do something, you might not always succeed in doing it. And the reasons why you don't succeed may be completely outside your control. But you are responsible for wanting to do that thing, for trying to do it, and for how you respond to your failure to be able to do it.
Freedom is hard to handle and many of us run away from it. One of the ways to hide is to pretend that you aren't really free at all. If Sartre is right, we can't make excuses: we are completely responsibile for what we do every day and how we feel about what we do. Right down to the emotions we have. If you're sad right now, that's your choice, according to Sartre. You don't have to be sad. If you are sad, you are responsible for it. That is frightening and some people would rather not face up to it because it is so painful. He talks about us being 'condemned to be free'. We're stuck with this freedom whether we like it or not.”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“Philosophy is not a spectator sport.”
― Nigel Warburton, Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide

“The best way to live, then, was this: have a very simple lifestyle, be kind to those around you, and surround yourself with friends.”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“The problem as he saw it was not how short our lives are, but rather how badly most of us use what time we have.”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“لقد رسم العامة صورة للفيلسوف صورة شخص عبقري في تعامله مع الفكر المجرد، وهو قابع في مقعده الوثير بحجرته داخل أكسفورد أو كامبريدج، وعاجز في الوقت ذاته عن التعامل مع الجوانب العملية في الحياة، فهو الشخص القادر على تأويل أعقد ما في فلسفة هيجل، والعاجز في الآن نفسه عن أن يسلق لنفسه بيضة”
― Nigel Warburton, Philosophy: The Basics

“Socrates

“Life, he declared, is only worth living if you think about what you are doing. An unexamined existence is all right for cattle, but not for human beings.”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“Preserving freedom of speech maximizes the chance of truth emerging from its collision with error and half-truth.”
― Nigel Warburton, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction

“If you do something just because of how you feel that is not a good action at all.”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“The best way to eliminate all suffering in the world would be to eliminate all sentient life. If there were no living things capable of feeling pain, then there would be no pain.”
― Nigel Warburton, Philosophy: The Basics

“Sartre explained what he meant by the anguish of choice through the true story of a student who had come to ask his advice during the war. This young man had to make a very difficult decision. He could either stay at home to look after his mother; or he could run off and try to join the French Resistance and fight to save his country from the Germans. This was the most difficult decision of his life and he wasn't sure what to do. If he left his mother, she would be vulnerable without him. He might not succeed in getting to the Resistance fighters before being caught by the Germans, and then the whole attempt to do something noble would be a waste of energy and of a life. But if he stayed at home with his mother, he'd be letting others do the fighting for him. What should he do? What would you do? What advice would you give him? Sartre's advice was a bit frustrating. He told the student that he was free and that he should choose for himself. If Sartre had given the student any practical advice about what to do, the student would still have had to decide whether or not to follow it. There is no way to escape the weight of responsibility that comes with being human.”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“We are all basically selfish, driven by fear of death and the hope of personal gain,”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“Central to Mill’s approach throughout On Liberty is his ‘Harm Principle’, the idea that individual adults should be free to do whatever they wish up to the point where they harm another person in the process. Mill’s principle is apparently straightforward: the only justification for interference with someone’s freedom to live their life as they choose is if they risk harming other people.”
― Nigel Warburton, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction

“As soon as you start to doubt your own existence, the act of doubting proves that you exist as a thinking thing. This”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“Even if I believe my opinion to be true, and am highly confident about its truth, unless it is ‘fully, frequently and fearlessly’ discussed, I will end up holding it as a dead dogma, a formulaic and unthinking response.”
― Nigel Warburton, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction

“Pyrrho

“You shouldn’t rely on what you believe to be true. You might be mistaken. Everything can be questioned, everything doubted. The best option, then, is to keep an open mind. Don’t commit, and you won’t be disappointed.”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“Human knowledge progresses when people recognize that they may be wrong even on issues that seem certain to them. Wisdom involves openness to those who disagree with us. It is only when our ideas have been subjected to criticism and all objections considered—if necessary seeking these objections out—that we have any right to think of our judgement as better than another’s.”
― Nigel Warburton, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction

“Instead of looking to increase our pleasure in life, they think, we should try to become better people and do the right thing. That is what makes a life go well.”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“Kierkegaard was a Christian, though he hated the Danish Church and couldn't accept the way complacent Christians around him behaved. For him, religion was a heart-wrenching option, not a cosy excuse for a song in church.”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“Users of slippery slope arguments should take skiing lessons—you really can choose to stop.”
― Nigel Warburton

“Machiavelli stresses that it's better as a leader to be feared than to be loved. Ideally you would be both loved and feared, but that's hard to achieve. If you rely on your people loving you, then you risk them abandoning you when times get tough. If they fear you, they will be too scared to betray you. This is part of his cynicism, his low view of human nature. He thought that human beings were unreliable, greedy and dishonest. If you are to be a successful ruler, then you need to know this. It's dangerous to trust anyone to keep their promises unless they are terrified of the consequences of not keeping them. If”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“the mind shaping reality just is reality. There is nothing beyond it. But this did not mean that reality remained in a fixed state. For Hegel, everything is in a process of change, and that change takes the form of a gradual increase in self-awareness, our state of self-awareness being fixed by the period in which we live.”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“Mill was very clear on this point: offence should not be confused with harm.”
― Nigel Warburton

“Free speech does indeed cause hurt—but there is nothing wrong in this. Knowledge advances through the destruction of bad ideas. Mockery”
― Nigel Warburton, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction

“Mill is particularly concerned that minority opinions should not be silenced just because they are held by very few people. Unfashionable ideas have potential value for the whole of humanity, even if only held by one person: If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
― Nigel Warburton, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction

“was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“In Hobbes' memorable description, life outside society would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“But the basis of Freud's ideas aren't accepted by all philosophers, though many accept that he was right about the possibility of unconscious thought. Some have claimed that Freud's theories are unscientific. Most famously, Karl Popper (whose ideas are more fully discussed in Chapter 36) described many of the ideas of psychoanalysis as ‘unfalsifiable’. This wasn't a compliment, but a criticism. For Popper, the essence of scientific research was that it could be tested; that is, there could be some possible observation that would show that it was false. In Popper's example, the actions of a man who pushed a child into a river, and a man who dived in to save a drowning child were, like all human behaviour, equally open to Freudian explanation. Whether someone tried to drown or save a child, Freud's theory could explain it. He would probably say that the first man was repressing some aspect of his Oedipal conflict, and that led to his violent behaviour, whereas the second man had ‘sublimated’ his unconscious desires, that is, managed to steer them into socially useful actions. If every possible observation is taken as further evidence that the theory is true, whatever that observation is, and no imaginable evidence could show that it was false, Popper believed, the theory couldn't be scientific at all. Freud, on the other hand, might have argued that Popper had some kind of repressed desire that made him so aggressive towards psychoanalysis. Bertrand”
― Nigel Warburton, A Little History of Philosophy

“Muitas das actividades humanas adquirem o seu significado pelo facto de serem irrepetíveis. Fazemos escolhas, tomamos decisões que dão forma às pessoas em que nos tornamos. A nossa satisfação pela experiência imediata do padrão de luz e sombra numa floresta decorre, em parte, do facto de ser um efeito passageiro que podemos nunca mais voltar a ver. A nossa mortalidade faz-nos dar valor ao presente porque podemos não ter um futuro. O padrão das nossas escolhas e as coisas que nos acontecem dão-nos a nossa história pessoal. Contudo, se viermos a viver para sempre após a morte, esta fonte de significado não está disponível para nós. Haverá sempre tempo para fazer tudo. Bernard Williams (1929-2003) argumentou que uma imortalidade assim seria entediante e, afinal, sem significado. São os facto de haver morte e da sua finalidade que dão às nossas vidas o significado que elas têm.”
― Nigel Warburton, Philosophy: The Basics

“If the view is correct, then humanity misses the opportunity to exchange truth for error. If, however, the view is misguided, then we forfeit an opportunity to reinforce truth through its collision with error. Every opinion has value for us either because it is true, or else because, though false, it reinforces the truth and contributes to its emergence.”
― Nigel Warburton, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction