Ens Quotes

“6.41 Der Sinn der Welt muss ausserhalb ihrer liegen.”
― Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“According to Carnap,...... "reality"is a metaphysical term for which there is no legitimate use.......
We are interested in other people's loves and hates, pleasures and pains, because we are firmly persuaded
that they are as "real" as our own. We mean something we say this.”
― Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth

“Chapter VII
Of Simple Ideas of both Sensation and Reflection
1. Ideas of pleasure and pain.
There be other simple ideas which convey themselves into the mind by all the ways of sensation and reflection, viz. pleasure or delight,
and its opposite, pain, or uneasiness; power; existence; unity.”
― John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

“The three greatest metaphysicians who ever existed - Plato, Aristotle and St.Thomas Aquinas - had no system in the idealistic sense of the word. Their ambition was not to achieve philosophy once and for all, but to maintain it and to serve it in ours. For us, as for them, the great thing is not to achieve a system of the world as if being could be deduced from thought, but to relate reality, as we know it, to the permanent principles in whose light all the changing problems of science, of ethics and of art have to be solved. A metaphysics of existence cannot be a system wherewith to get rid of philosophy, it is an always open inquiry, whose conclusions are both always the same and always new, because it is conducted under the guidance of immutable principles, which will never exhaust experience, or be themselves exhausted by it. For even though, as is impossible, all that which exists were known to us, existence itself would still remain a mystery. Why, asked Leibniz, is there something rather than nothing ?”
― Étienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience