MY BEST PHILOSOPHICAL APHORISMS

Every age needs a myth. Ours is that we live in an age that no longer needs a myth.

Philosophical inquiry is not instrumental. It is not a tool. It aims at clarity, not as a means to facilitate action or to further independent life-goals, but simply for the sake of clarity. There is philosophical technique, but there is no philosophical technology.

Philosophical writings are not for reading through; they are for reading down into.

The practicing philosopher is a conceptual craftsman. Ultimately, then, philosophy can be mastered only through the doing of it, and the beginnings of such mastery evolve only gradually out of a long series of failed attempts. Behind every masterwork of cabinetry lies an ancestry of wobbly bookcases and skewed sideboards. So it is, too, with philosophy.

Socrates taught us to be suspicious of answers. It was not until the twentieth century, however, that we learned to be properly suspicious of questions.

The conditions of thinking sensibly are identical to the conditions of speaking sensibly — but there is appearance and reality with respect to language, and the language in which philosophy itself is practiced is not exempt.

The fact that what someone says is correct doesn’t establish that he’s said anything true. Indeed, it does not even establish that he’s said anything intelligible, for even plain, patent nonsense can be correct or incorrect.

To terminate a regress of background languages in our own "taken at face value" is to cash a forged check with counterfeit currency. If "reference is nonsense except relative to a coordinate system," it does no good to pretend that, of course, reference in the coordinate system isn’t really nonsense.

The noun ‘pain’ is not the name of a person, place, or thing. It is merely a manner of speaking. Pains are not mysterious objects; they are nominal objects, What are all too real are suffering people.

I am suspicious of the notion of unrequited suffering, in particular, of its inescapable implication that suffering can be "requited". Suffering is not a debit entry in some ledger, something that can be offset by an appropriate credit on another page. Suffering is intrinsic disvalue. Positive consequences may flow from it, but it cannot thereby be "made good".

 "Can I believe in helping, when, sub specie aeternitatis, I hold that there is no ultimate resolution." Of course I can, if 'helping' means the only thing it can mean for such limited beings as we are — slaking today's thirst, assuaging today's hunger, and binding today's wounds. One hopes, perhaps, sub specie aeternitatis, but one helps, if at all, only here and now.

I distrust the metaphor of life as a journey. I distrust it because journeys are characteristically from somewhere to somewhere, and living is not. One departs on a journey and, with luck, one arrives at a destination, but living is not a matter of departure and arrival. Living only begins and ends. Birth is not a point of departure, and death is not a destination.

The "rational attitude toward death" is neither fear nor dread, neither joy nor anticipation. The "rational attitude toward death", if it is anything, is realism.

Right now I don't need a reason not to commit suicide next week or next month or next year. Right now, all I need is a reason that's good enough for right now. Next week or next month or next year, if the question arises, then I'll need to find another, different reason not to commit suicide — and I'll probably find one. Such very small reasons are as common as grains of sand on the beach.

The de facto moral permissibility of euthanasia will have been secured, not when people are prepared to say certain things, but when they are prepared to do certain things … and to wonder what all the fuss was all about.

What is the relation between the ideal or conceptual order and the real? The question is a perennial preoccupation of our discipline, but the question rests upon a thesis: that these are two orders, and not one. That is the Myth of Mind Apart.

The ideal order is the real, not in the false sense that "the world is Idea", but in the sense that our representings of the world are at the same time doings in the world.

   Ultimately all knowledge is self-knowledge, not for the idealists’ reason that there is nothing else to know, but for the deeper reason that to understand what else there is to know — and there is much — we must come to understand our understanding of it.

  We are amazed that the jigsaw-puzzle pieces fit together to form such a beautiful picture — until we remember that we made the puzzle by sawing up the picture.