Analytical Philosophy Quotes

“The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”
― Wilfrid Stellars

“Language is a social art.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object

“In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied.”
― Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism

“Analytic philosophy, that is to say, can very occasionally produce practically conclusive results of a negative kind. It can show in a few cases that just too much incoherence and inconsistency is involved in some position for any reasonable person to continue to hold it. But it can never establish the rational acceptability of any particular position in cases where each of the alternative rival positions available has sufficient range and scope and the adherents of each are willing to pay the price necessary to secure coherence and consistency. Hence the peculiar flavor of so much contemporary analytic writing—by writers less philosophically self-aware than Rorty or Lewis—in which passages of argument in which the most sophisticated logical and semantic techniques available are deployed in order to secure maximal rigor alternate with passages which seem to do no more than cobble together a set of loosely related arbitrary preferences; contemporary analytic philosophy exhibits a strange partnership between an idiom deeply indebted to Frege and Carnap and one deriving from the more simple-minded forms of existentialism”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Your unknown fear is the region within you that an entire life's blueprint is based upon.”
― Bikash Bhandari

“In everyday language it very frequently happens that the same word has different modes of signification — and so belongs to different symbols — or that two words that have different modes of signification are employed in propositions in what is superficially the same way. Thus the word 'is' figures as the copula, as a sign for identity, and as an expression for existence; 'exist' figures as an intransitive verb like 'go', and 'identical' as an adjective; we speak of something, but also of something's happening. (In the proposition, 'Green is green'— where the first word is the proper name of a person and the last an adjective — these words do not merely have different meanings: they are different symbols.)”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“The book review pages of those journals are the graveyards of constructive academic philosophy, and any doubts as to whether rational consensus might not after all be achievable on modern academic moral philosophy can be put to rest by reading them through regularly.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“[…] This kind of philosophy is, when conducted in self-aware fashion, what some of its most acute exponents always said that it was, a way of clarifying issues and alternatives but not if providing grounds for conviction on matters of any substance.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“There is no practical rationality then without the virtues of character. The vicious argue unsoundly from false premises about the good, while the akratic ignores the sound arguments available to him. Only the virtuous are able to argue soundly to those conclusions which are their actions […]”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“Lest the discipline should live up to its lamentable reputation as being little more than speculation, mellifluous ideals, and the disconsolate profligacy of ink, effort, and time, the act of philosophizing must lead somewhere.”
― Jack Abaza, The Definitive Answer to the Meaning of Life