Abraham Kaplan Quotes

Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled.

The price of training is always a certain "trained incapacity": the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently.

We are forever asking Nature whether it has stopped beating its wife.

CONVERSATION in which neither party is listening to the other was dubbed a “duologue” by Abraham Kaplan, a philosopher who died in 1993. A duologue, he suggested, is more than a monologue but less than a dialogue. (Multiply a duologue by a roomful of people, he cynically added, and you have a conference.)

How will history judge Heschel’s actions? While we cannot justify the humiliation Heschel inadvertently inflicted on the American Jewish Committee and its Vatican partners through his interview with Geula Cohen, we can try to understand why he appears to have panicked and been rendered speechless, unable to protest Cohen’s outrageous comparison of church officials to Nazis.

Heschel began with a dedication “to the martyrs of 1940-45” and ended the dedication with the bitterest question to God: “Why dost Thou hide Thy face?” He was continuing to ask, as he had a decade earlier in Man Is Not Alone: What is the meaning, if any, of the Nazi genocide?

To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, "What would the world be like if it were true?" The operationist asks, "What would we have to do to come to believe it?" For the pragmatist the question is, "What would we do if we did believe it?