Anthony Kenny > Quotes

“virtue is indeed teachable,”
― Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy: In Four Parts

“In exile in Lampsacus, Anaxagoras made his final benefaction to humanity: the invention of the school holiday.”
― Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy: In Four Parts

“Philosophy is not a matter of knowledge; it is a matter of understanding, that is to say, of organizing what is known.”
― Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy: In Four Parts

“[I]nternalized experiences of selfhood are linked to autobiographical narratives, which are linked to biographies, legal testimonies, and medical case histories, which are linked to forms of therapy and theories of the subject. . .”
― Anthony Kenny

“Like the positivists, Wittgenstein was hostile to metaphysics. But he attacked metaphysics not with a blunt instrument like the verification principle, but by the careful drawing of distinctions that enable him to disentangle the mixture of truism and nonsense within metaphysical systems. ‘When philosophers use a word—‘‘knowledge’’, ‘‘being’’, ‘‘object’’, ‘‘I’’, ‘‘proposition’’, ‘‘name’’—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language which is its original home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ (PI I, 116).”
― Anthony Kenny, Philosophy in the Modern World

“In the period between Homer and Socrates most philosophers wrote in verse, and Plato, writing in the great age of Athenian tragedy and comedy, composed dramatic dialogue. Aristotle, an exact contemporary of the greatest Greek orator Demosthenes, preferred to write in prose monologue.”
― Anthony Kenny, Ancient Philosophy

“I count myself among those who owe a great debt to The Concept of Mind. When it was published I was an undergraduate student of philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome. The book was drawn to my attention by Dr (now Bishop) Alan Clark, then Ripetitore in philosophy at the Venerable English College in Rome. I found its style exhilaratingly different from that of the scholastic textbooks which were prescribed in the courses of my Pontifical University; yet I came gradually to realize that the philosophical content of the book bore some surprising resemblances to the doctrines of Aristotle and Aquinas who were in theory the standard bearers of the philosophy in which my Jesuit mentors were striving to instruct me.”
― Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind

“Philosophy is linguistic’ may mean at least six different things.
(1) The study of language is a useful philosophical tool. (2) It is the only philosophical tool. (3) Language is the only subject matter of philosophy. (4) Necessary truths are established by linguistic convention. (5) Man is fundamentally a language using animal. (6) Everyday language has a status of privilege over technical and formal systems. These six propositions are
independent of each other. (1) has been accepted in practice by every philosopher since Plato. Concerning the other five, philosophers have been and are divided, including philosophers within the analytic tradition. In my own opinion (1) and (5) are true, and the other four false. But I do not argue for this sweeping generalization anywhere in the present book.”
― Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind

“Where then does evil come from? In his youth Augustine had subscribed to the Manichaean view that there were two supreme principles controlling the universe, one good and one evil, in conflict with each other. As a Christian he gave up belief in the evil principle, but this did not mean that he believed that the good God was the cause of evil. Evil is only a privation of good, it is not a positive reality and does not need a causal principle. Any evil in creatures is simply a loss of good—of integrity, beauty, health, or virtue (DCD XII. 3).”
― Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy: In Four Parts

“If grace was necessary for salvation, was it also sufficient? If you are offered grace, can you resist it? If so, then there would be some scope for freedom in human destiny. While some would end up in hell because they had never been offered grace, hell would also contain those who had been offered grace and turned it down. In the course of controversy Augustine’s position continually hardened, and in the end he denied even this vestige of human choice: grace cannot be declined, cannot be overcome. There are only two classes of people: those who have been given grace and those who have not, the predestined and the reprobate. We can give no reason why any individual falls in one class rather than another. If”
― Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy: In Four Parts

“In its stable state air is invisible, but when it is moved and condensed it becomes first wind and then cloud and then water, and finally water condensed becomes mud and stone. Rarefied air became fire, thus completing the gamut of the elements. In this way rarefaction and condensation can conjure everything out of the underlying air. In support of this claim Anaximenes appealed to experience, and indeed to experiment — an experiment that the reader can easily carry out for herself. Blow on your hand, First with the lips pursed, and then from an open mouth: the First time the air will feel cold, and the second time hot. This, argued Anaximenes, shows the connection between density and temperature.”
― Anthony Kenny, Ancient Philosophy

“The Pythagoreans' discovery that there was a relationship between musical intervals and numerical ratios led to the belief that the study of mathematics was the key to the understanding of the structure and order of the universe. Astronomy and harmony, they said, were sister sciences, one for the eyes and one for the ears). However, it was not until two millennia later that Galileo and his successors showed the sense in which it is true that the book of the universe is written in numbers.”
― Anthony Kenny, Ancient Philosophy

“There is no reason why someone who is in doubt about the existence of God should not pray for help and guidance on this topic as in other matters. Some find something comic in the idea of an agnostic praying to a God whose existence he doubts. It is surely no more unreasonable than the act of a man adrift in the ocean, trapped in a cave, or stranded on a mountainside, who cries for help though he may never be heard or fires a signal which may never be seen.”
― Anthony Kenny

“Philosophy, once called the queen of the sciences, and once called their handmaid, is perhaps better thought of as the womb, or the midwife, of the sciences.”
― Anthony Kenny, Ancient Philosophy