philosophy

• The best thing about the sciences is their philosophical ingredient, like life for an organic body. If one dephilosophizes the sciences, what remains left? Earth, air, and water.

  — Novalis

• The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.

  — Willard Van Orman Quine

• Of the fifty or hundred systems of philosophy that have been advanced at different times of the world's history, perhaps the larger number have been, not so much results of historical evolution, as happy thoughts which have accidently occurred to their authors.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• In a sense, all explanation must end in an ultimate arbitrariness.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

  — Willard Van Orman Quine

• Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.

  — Willard Van Orman Quine

• I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

  — Willard Van Orman Quine

• What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.

  — Charles Sanders Peirce

• If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their unison can knowledge arise.

  — Immanuel Kant

• Philosophieren ist: falsche Argumente zurückweisen.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.

  — Willard Van Orman Quine

• No sane person should believe that something is 'subjective' merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.

  — Hilary Putnam

• Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.

  — Rudolf Carnap

• If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein