The Symposium library

• Adam Smith — 1723-1790 · It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
• Alfred Adler — 1870-1937 · To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest.
• Theodor W. Adorno — 1903-1969 · Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
• Anaximander — c. 610 - c. 546 BCE · Things give justice and reparation to one another according to the assessment of Time.
• Elizabeth Anscombe — 1919-2001 · It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy.
• Anselm of Canterbury — 1033-1109 · Credo ut intelligam — I believe in order that I may understand.
• Hannah Arendt — 1906-1975 · Men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.
• Aristotle — 384-322 BCE · We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
• Augustine of Hippo — 354-430 · Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.
• Marcus Aurelius — 121-180 CE · What we do now echoes in eternity.
• J.L. Austin — 1911-1960 · We are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena.
• A.J. Ayer — 1910-1989 · No moral system can rest solely on authority.
• James Mark Baldwin — 1861-1934 · The self is realized by taking in 'persons' from over against it; the ego and the alter are born together.
• Jean Baudrillard — 1929-2007 · We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
• Jeremy Bentham — 1748-1832 · Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.
• Henri Bergson — 1859-1941 · Time is invention, or it is nothing at all.
• George Berkeley — 1685-1753 · We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
• Alfred Binet — 1857-1911 · Intelligence is not a fixed quantity; we must protest against this brutal pessimism.
• Hugh Blair — 1718-1800 · Perspicuity is the fundamental quality of style, a quality so essential that no degree of ornament can atone for its absence.
• Boethius — 477-524 · If there is a God, whence evil? If there is not, whence good?
• Nick Bostrom — 1973-present · Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.
• Edmund Burke — 1729-1797 · Society is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
• Mary Whiton Calkins — 1863-1930 · There is no consciousness that is not the consciousness of a self.
• George Campbell — 1719-1796 · Eloquence is that art or talent by which discourse is adapted to its end.
• Albert Camus — 1913-1960 · Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
• Rudolf Carnap — 1891-1970 · In logic, there are no morals.
• David Chalmers — 1966-present · Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind.
• Jean-Martin Charcot — 1825-1893 · Theory is good; but it does not prevent things from existing.
• Marcus Tullius Cicero — 106-43 BCE · Let arms yield to the toga.
• G. A. Cohen — 1941-2009 · If you're an egalitarian, how come you're so rich?
• Confucius — 551-479 BCE · At seventy I followed my heart's desire without crossing the line.
• Nicholas of Cusa — 1401-1464 · He is most learned who knows the ignorance distinctively his.
• Arthur C. Danto — 1924-2013 · Art has come to an end.
• Donald Davidson — 1917-2003 · All understanding of the speech of another involves radical interpretation.
• Gilles Deleuze — 1925-1995 · A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through.
• Democritus — c. 460 - c. 370 BCE · By convention sweet, by convention bitter; but in reality atoms and void.
• Daniel Dennett — 1942-2024 · Darwin's idea is a universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept.
• Jacques Derrida — 1930-2004 · Deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place.
• René Descartes — 1596-1650 · I think, therefore I am.
• John Dewey — 1859-1952 · Democracy is freedom.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky — 1821-1881 · The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.
• W.E.B. Du Bois — 1868-1963 · The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
• Ronald Dworkin — 1931-2013 · Two great values, dignity and equal concern, anchor the rest.
• Hermann Ebbinghaus — 1850-1909 · Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson — 1803-1882 · Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
• Empedocles — c. 495 - c. 435 BCE · There is no birth of any of all mortal things, nor any end in baneful death; only mixing and separation of what was mixed.
• Friedrich Engels — 1820-1895 · The state is not abolished. It withers away.
• Epictetus — c. 50/60 - c. 135 CE · Some things are in our power; others are not.
• Epicurus — 341-271 BCE · Don't fear god; don't worry about death; what is good is easy to get; what is terrible is easy to endure.
• Philippa Foot — 1920-2010 · Morality just cannot be subjective in the way that different attitudes are subjective.
• Michel Foucault — 1926-1984 · Man is a recent invention.
• Gottlob Frege — 1848-1925 · We must ask for the meaning of a word only in the context of a sentence, never in isolation.
• Sigmund Freud — 1856-1939 · The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious.
• Francis Galton — 1822-1911 · Whenever you can, count.
• René Girard — 1923-2015 · Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.
• Kurt Gödel — 1906-1978 · Mathematics is reality.
• Gorgias — c. 483 - c. 376 BCE · Speech is a great potentate, who with the smallest and most invisible body achieves the most divine deeds.
• H. P. Grice — 1913-1988 · It might be held that the *ultimate* subject of all philosophy is ourselves.
• G. Stanley Hall — 1844-1924 · The child is father of the man, and the race is the ancestor of the child.
• H.L.A. Hart — 1907-1992 · The existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit another.
• G.W.F. Hegel — 1770-1831 · What experience and history teach us is this: that people and governments have never learned anything from history.
• Martin Heidegger — 1889-1976 · Only a god can save us.
• Heraclitus — c. 540 - c. 480 BCE · Nature loves to hide.
• Thomas Hobbes — 1588-1679 · The condition of man... is a condition of war of every one against every one.
• David Hume — 1711-1776 · Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.
• Edmund Husserl — 1859-1938 · All consciousness is consciousness of something.
• Ibn Khaldun — 1332-1406 · Dynasties have a natural life-span like individuals.
• Isocrates — 436-338 BCE · The power to speak well is the surest index of a sound understanding.
• William James — 1842-1910 · Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
• Pierre Janet — 1859-1947 · Hysteria is a malady of the personal synthesis — a narrowing of the field of consciousness.
• Karl Jaspers — 1883-1969 · To philosophize is at the same time to learn how to live and to learn how to die.
• Carl Jung — 1875-1961 · In each of us there is another whom we do not know.
• Immanuel Kant — 1724-1804 · Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
• Søren Kierkegaard — 1813-1855 · Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
• Wolfgang Köhler — 1887-1967 · The whole is something else than the sum of its parts.
• Emil Kraepelin — 1856-1926 · The course of a disease is its truest name.
• Saul Kripke — 1940-2022 · Names are rigid designators: in every possible world they designate the same object.
• Peter Kropotkin — 1842-1921 · Well-being for all is not a dream.
• Thomas Kuhn — 1922-1996 · Normal science... is low on innovation and high on dogma.
• François de La Rochefoucauld — 1613-1680 · Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise.
• Imre Lakatos — 1922-1974 · Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
• Laozi (Lao Tzu) — c. 571 - c. 471 BCE · The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.
• Gustave Le Bon — 1841-1931 · The age we are about to enter will in truth be the era of crowds.
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — 1646-1716 · This is the best of all possible worlds — for God, being supremely wise and good, could have chosen no other.
• Aldo Leopold — 1887-1948 · A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
• Emmanuel Levinas — 1906-1995 · I am responsible for the Other, even for the responsibility of the Other.
• David Lewis — 1941-2001 · There are many other ways that a world might be; and one of these many ways is the way that this world is.
• C. Lloyd Morgan — 1852-1936 · In no case is an action to be interpreted as the outcome of a higher faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.
• John Locke — 1632-1704 · The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.
• Niccolò Machiavelli — 1469-1527 · It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.
• Alasdair MacIntyre — 1929-present · This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.
• Maimonides — 1138-1204 · The foundation of all foundations and the pillar of wisdom is to know that there is a Primary Being who brought into being all existence.
• Herbert Marcuse — 1898-1979 · A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.
• Karl Marx — 1818-1883 · The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.
• William McDougall — 1871-1938 · The human mind has certain innate tendencies which are the essential springs of all thought and action.
• Mencius (Mengzi) — c. 372 - c. 289 BCE · All humans have the heart that cannot bear to see the suffering of others.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — 1908-1961 · True philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world.
• John Stuart Mill — 1806-1873 · The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.
• Michel de Montaigne — 1533-1592 · Que sais-je? — What do I know?
• G.E. Moore — 1873-1958 · The question of what is good is the most fundamental question in all of ethics.
• Hugo Münsterberg — 1863-1916 · The time is ripe to carry the results of the laboratory into the practical life of the world.
• Nāgārjuna — c. 150-250 CE · Whatever is dependently arisen, that we call emptiness; this is dependent designation, and it is itself the middle way.
• Thomas Nagel — 1937-present · If the mental is not itself merely physical, it cannot be fully explained by physical science.
• Friedrich Nietzsche — 1844-1900 · He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
• Nishida Kitarō — 1870-1945 · It is not that I have experience because I exist; I exist because I have experience.
• Robert Nozick — 1938-2002 · Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.
• Derek Parfit — 1942-2017 · What am I more than elaborate sentience?
• Parmenides — c. 515 - c. 450 BCE · It is the same thing to think and to be.
• Blaise Pascal — 1623-1662 · Between us and hell or heaven there is only life, the most fragile thing in the world.
• Ivan Pavlov — 1849-1936 · The conditioned reflex opened the way to an objective study of the highest nervous activity.
• Jean Piaget — 1896-1980 · To understand is to invent.
• Alvin Plantinga — 1932-present · Of all the antitheistic arguments only the argument from evil deserves to be taken really seriously.
• Plato — 428/427-348/347 BCE · The unexamined life is not worth living.
• Plotinus — 204/5-270 CE · Our concern is not to be free of sin, but to be god.
• Karl Popper — 1902-1994 · We can never know; we can only guess.
• W.V.O. Quine — 1908-2000 · To be is to be the value of a variable.
• Marcus Fabius Quintilianus — c. 35 - c. 100 CE · A good man skilled in speaking.
• James Rachels — 1941-2003 · There is a deep difference between having a life and merely being alive.
• John Rawls — 1921-2002 · Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.
• Théodule Ribot — 1839-1916 · The dissolution of the mind follows, in inverse order, the course of its development.
• Richard Rorty — 1931-2007 · I have spent 40 years looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — 1712-1778 · Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
• Gilbert Ryle — 1900-1976 · In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted.
• Jean-Paul Sartre — 1905-1980 · Man is condemned to be free, and from the moment he is thrown into the world he is responsible for everything he does.
• F.W.J. Schelling — 1775-1854 · Philosophy is nothing but a doctrine of the nature of our mind.
• Friedrich Schiller — 1759-1805 · Beauty is freedom in appearance.
• Arthur Schopenhauer — 1788-1860 · Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
• John Searle — 1932-present · Syntax is not the same as, nor is it by itself sufficient for, semantics.
• Wilfrid Sellars — 1912-1989 · 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.
• Seneca — c. 4 BCE - 65 CE · We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
• Henry Sidgwick — 1838-1900 · The Cosmos of Duty is thus really reduced to a Chaos.
• Charles Spearman — 1863-1945 · Every normal man, woman, and child is a genius at something.
• Oswald Spengler — 1880-1936 · There is no people that remains majestic through the centuries.
• Baruch Spinoza — 1632-1677 · I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
• Max Stirner — 1806-1856 · Nothing is more to me than myself.
• James Sully — 1842-1923 · The study of illusion has a peculiar value: it shows us the working of the mind by the light of its errors.
• Sun Tzu — c. 544 - c. 496 BCE · The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
• Edward L. Thorndike — 1874-1949 · Whatever exists at all exists in some amount.
• Edward Bradford Titchener — 1867-1927 · The task of psychology is to analyse mind into its simplest components — and there is no experience which cannot be so analysed.
• Alan Turing — 1912-1954 · A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.
• Margaret Floy Washburn — 1871-1939 · All the processes of consciousness have their roots in movement.
• John B. Watson — 1878-1958 · Give me a dozen healthy infants and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist.
• Simone Weil — 1909-1943 · Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
• Richard Whately — 1787-1863 · A presumption in favour of any supposition means, not that it is antecedently probable, but that it must stand good till some sufficient reason is adduced against it.
• Alfred North Whitehead — 1861-1947 · The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
• Norbert Wiener — 1894-1964 · Any labor which is in competition with slave labor, whether the slaves are human or mechanical, must accept the conditions of work of slave labor.
• Bernard Williams — 1929-2003 · There is no reason to expect that ethical life can be adequately represented by any system.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein — 1889-1951 · The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
• Wilhelm Wundt — 1832-1920 · Mental life is a process of continuous creative synthesis, never the mere sum of its elements.
• Xenophanes — c. 570 - c. 478 BCE · If oxen had hands, they would draw their gods like oxen.
• Zhuangzi — ca. 369-286 BCE · I'd rather enjoy myself wallowing in the filth than let myself be controlled by some head of state.
• Slavoj Žižek — 1949-present · The truth has the structure of a fiction.