Pseudo Philosophical Quotes

[T]he problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not a pseudo-problem of armchair philosophers: it has grave ethical and political implications.

But are there philosophical problems? The present position of English philosophy - my point of departure - originates, I believe, in the late Professor Ludwig Wittgenstein's doctrine that there are none; that all genuine problems are scientific problems; that the alleged propositions or theories of philosophy are pseudo-propositions or pseudo-theories; that they are not false (if they were false, their negations would be true propositions or theories) but strictly meaningless combinations of words, no more meaningful than the incoherent babbling of a child who has not yet learned to speak properly.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

Pseudo-philosophers, on the contrary, use speech, not indeed to conceal their thoughts, as M. de Talleyrand has it, but rather to conceal the absence of them

it is my duty, as the last remaining member of the Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists, to make a major philosophical intervention aimed at correcting the skewed and pitifully narrow perception of the world’s pseudo intellectuals and heretics, your erroneous brethren!

Shakespeare’s oft-quoted advice, “To thine own self be true,” runs deep in our philosophical DNA. Many of us are uncomfortable with the idea of taking on a “false” persona for any length of time. And if we act out of character by convincing ourselves that our pseudo-self is real, we can eventually burn out without even knowing why. The genius of Little’s theory is how neatly it resolves this discomfort. Yes, we are only pretending to be extroverts, and yes, such inauthenticity can be morally ambiguous (not to mention exhausting), but if it’s in the service of love or a professional calling, then we’re doing just as Shakespeare advised.

Hume concluded that many of the questions that philosophers asked were pseudo questions—that is, questions that cannot be answered with the likes of logic, mathematics, and pure reason because their answers will always be founded at some level on an unprovable belief, on an axiom. He thought that philosophers should stop wasting everyone’s time writing copiously about pseudo questions, dump their a priori assumptions, and rein in their speculations, as the scientists had. They had to reject everything that was not founded on fact or observation, and that included eliminating any appeal to the supernatural.

A great liberal betrayal is afoot. Unfortunately, many “fellow-travelers” of Islamism are on the liberal side of this debate. I call them “regressive leftists”; they are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogenous and inherently opposed to human rights values. They are culturally reductive in how they see “Eastern”—and in my case, Islamic—culture, and they are culturally deterministic in attempting to freeze their ideal of it in order to satisfy their orientalist fetish. While they rightly question every aspect of their “own” Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of “cultural authenticity” and anticolonialism. They claim that their reason for refusing to criticize any policy, foreign or domestic—other than those of what they consider “their own” government—is that they are not responsible for other governments’ actions. However, they leap whenever any (not merely their own) liberal democratic government commits a policy error, while generally ignoring almost every fascist, theocratic, or Muslim-led dictatorial regime and group in the world. It is as if their brains cannot hold two thoughts at the same time. Besides, since when has such isolationism been a trait of liberal internationalists? It is a right-wing trait. They hold what they think of as “native” communities—and I use that word deliberately—to lesser standards than the ones they claim apply to all “their” people, who happen to be mainly white, and that’s why I call it reverse racism. In holding “native” communities to lesser—or more culturally “authentic”—standards, they automatically disempower those communities. They stifle their ambitions. They cut them out of the system entirely, because there’s no aspiration left. These communities end up in self-segregated “Muslim areas” where the only thing their members aspire to is being tin-pot community leaders, like ghetto chieftains. The “fellow-travelers” fetishize these “Muslim” ghettos in the name of “cultural authenticity” and identity politics, and the ghetto chieftains are often the leading errand boys for them. Identity politics and the pseudo-liberal search for cultural authenticity result in nothing but a downward spiral of competing medieval religious or cultural assertions, fights over who are the “real” Muslims, ever increasing misogyny, homophobia, sectarianism, and extremism. This is not liberal. Among the left, this is a remnant of the socialist approach that prioritizes group identity over individual autonomy. Among the right, it is ironically a throwback from the British colonial “divide and rule” approach. Classical liberalism focuses on individual autonomy. I refer here to liberalism as it is understood in the philosophical sense, not as it’s understood in the United States to refer to the Democratic Party—that’s a party-political usage. The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims—all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm.

La conséquence immédiate de ceci, c’est que connaître et être ne sont au fond qu’une seule et même chose ; ce sont, si l’on veut, deux aspects inséparables d’une réalité unique, aspects qui ne sauraient même plus être distingués vraiment là où tout est « sans dualité ». Cela suffit à rendre complètement vaines toutes les « théories de la connaissance » à prétentions pseudo-métaphysiques qui tiennent une si grande place dans la philosophie occidentale moderne, et qui tendent même parfois, comme chez Kant par exemple, à absorber tout le reste, ou tout au moins à se le subordonner ; la seule raison d’être de ce genre de théories est dans une attitude commune à presque tous les philosophes modernes, et d’ailleurs issue du dualisme cartésien, attitude qui consiste à opposer artificiellement le connaître à l’être, ce qui est la négation de toute métaphysique vraie. Cette philosophie en arrive ainsi à vouloir substituer la « théorie de la connaissance » à la connaissance elle-même, et c’est là, de sa part, un véritable aveu d’impuissance ; rien n’est plus caractéristique à cet égard que cette déclaration de Kant : « La plus grande et peut-être la seule utilité de toute philosophie de la raison pure est, après tout, exclusivement négative, puisqu’elle est, non un instrument pour étendre la connaissance, mais une discipline pour la limiter »1. De telles paroles ne reviennent-elles pas tout simplement à dire que l’unique prétention des philosophes doit être d’imposer à tous les bornes étroites de leur propre entendement ? C’est là, du reste, l’inévitable résultat de l’esprit de système, qui est, nous le répétons, antimétaphysique au plus haut point.

There would seem to be only one question for philosophy to resolve: what must I do? Despite being combined with an enormous amount of unnecessary confusion, answers to the question have at any rate been given within the philosophical tradition of the Christian nations. For example, in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, or in Spinoza, Schopenhauer and especially Rousseau. But in more recent times, since Hegel's assertion that all that exists is reasonable, the question of what one must do has been pushed to the background and philosophy has directed its whole attention to the investigation of things as they are, and to fitting them into a prearranged theory. This was the first step backwards. The second step, degrading human thought yet further, was the acceptance of the struggle for existence as a basic law, simply because that struggle can be observed among animals and plants. According to this theory the destruction of the weakest is a law which should not be opposed. And finally, the third step was taken when the childish originality of Nietzche's half-crazed thought, presenting nothing complete or coherent, but only various drafts of immoral and completely unsubstantiated ideas, was accepted by the leading figures as the final word in philosophical science. In reply to the question: what must we do? the answer is now put straightforwardly as: live as you like, without paying attention to the lives of others. Turgenev made the witty remark that there are inverse platitudes, which are frequently employed by people lacking in talent who wish to attract attention to themselves. Everyone knows, for instance, that water is wet, and someone suddenly says, very seriously, that water is dry, not that ice is, but that water is dry, and the conviction with which this is stated attracts attention. Similarly, the whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions). One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche's books. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the superman, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of the pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love - virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the ideas of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.

In provisionally characterizing the object which serves as the theme of our investigation (the Being of entities, or the meaning of Being in general), it seems that we have also delineated the method to be employed. The task of ontology is to explain Being itself and to make the Being of entities stand out in full relief. And the method of ontology remains questionable in the highest degree as long as we merely consult those ontologies which have come down to us historically, or other essays of that character. Since the term "ontology" is used in this investigation in a sense which is formally broad, any attempt to clarify the method of ontology by tracing its history is automatically ruled out. When, moreover, we use the term "ontology," we are not talking about some definite philosophical discipline standing in interconnection with the others. Here one does not have to measure up to the tasks of some discipline that has been presented beforehand; on the contrary, only in terms of the objective necessities of definite questions and the kind of treatment which the 'things themselves' require, can one develop such a discipline. With the question of the meaning of Being, our investigation comes up against the fundamental question of philosophy. This is one that must be treated *phenomenologically*. Thus our treatise does not subscribe to a 'standpoint' or represent any special 'direction'; for phenomenology is nothing of either sort, nor can it become so as long as it understands itself. The expression 'phenomenology' signifies primarily a *methodological conception*. This expression does not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research as subject-matter, but rather the *how* of that research. The more genuinely a methodological concept is worked out and the more comprehensively it determines the principles on which a science is to be conducted, all the more primordially is it rooted in the way we come to terms with the things themselves, and the farther is it removed from what we call "technical devices," though there are many such devices even in the theoretical disciplines. Thus the term 'phenomenology' expresses a maxim which can be formulated as 'To the things themselves!' It is opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it is opposed to taking over any conceptions which only seem to have been demonstrated; it is opposed to those pseudo-questions which parade themselves as 'problems', often for generations at a time. Yet this maxim, one may rejoin, is abundantly self-evident, and it expresses, moreover, the underlying principle of any scientific knowledge whatsoever. Why should anything so self-evident be taken up explicitly in giving a title to a branch of research? In point of fact, the issue here is a kind of 'self-evidence' which we should like to bring closer to us, so far as it is important to do so in casting light upon the procedure of our treatise. We shall expound only the preliminary conception [Vorbegriff] of phenomenology. This expression has two components: "phenomenon" and "logos." Both of these go back to terms from the Greek: φαινόμενον and λόγος. Taken superficially, the term "phenomenology" is formed like "theology," "biology," "sociology"―names which may be translated as "science of God," "science of life," "science of society." This would make phenomenology the *science of phenomena*. We shall set forth the preliminary conception of phenomenology by characterizing what one has in mind in the term's two components, 'phenomenon' and 'logos', and by establishing the meaning of the name in which these are *put together*. The history of the word itself, which presumably arose in the Wolffian school, is here of no significance." ―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, pp. 49-51

[Plato's] achievements are impaired by his hatred of the society in which he was living, and by his romantic love for the old tribal form of social life. It is this attitude which led him to formulate an untenable law of historical development, namely, the law of universal degeneration or decay. And the same attitude is also responsible for the irrational, fantastic, and romantic elements of his otherwise excellent analysis. On the other hand, it was just his personal interest and his partiality which sharpened his eye and so made his achievements possible. He derived his historicist theory from the fantastic philosophical doctrine that the changing visible world is only a decaying copy of an unchanging invisible world. But this ingenious attempt to combine a historicist pessimism with an ontological optimism leads, when elaborated, to difficulties. These difficulties forced upon him the adoption of a biological naturalism, leading (together with ‘psychologism’, i.e. the theory that society depends on the ‘human nature’ of its members) to mysticism and superstition, culminating in a pseudo-rational mathematical theory of breeding. They even endangered the impressive unity of his theoretical edifice.

From rationalism religion was bound to sink into sentimentalism, and it is in the Anglo-Saxon countries that the most striking examples of this are to be found. What remains is therefore no Ionger even a dwindling and deformed religion, but simply “ religiosity,” that is to say vague sentimental aspirations unjustified by any real knowledge : to this final stage correspond theories such as that of the “ religious experience ” of William James which goes to the point of finding in the “ subconscious ” man’s means of entering into communication with the divine. At this stage the final products of religious and of philosophical decline mingle together and “religious experience” becomes merged in pragmatism, in the name of which a limited God is stipulated as being more “ advantageous ” than an infinite God, in so far as one can feel for him sentiments comparable to those one would feel for a higher man. At the same time, the appeal to the “ subconscious ” joins hands with modern spiritualism and all those “ pseudo-religions ” which are so characteristic of our time and which we have studied in other works.

The 'Big Bang' idea of pseudo armchair pundits, too is as much a theory as a human-like big buffoon, that your so-called 'holy' books call god.

Il faudrait pouvoir restituer au mot « philosophie » sa signification originelle : la philosophie — l'« amour de la sagesse » — est la science de tous les principes fondamentaux ; cette science opère avec l'intuition, qui « perçoit », et non avec la seule raison, qui « conclut ». Subjectivement parlant, l'essence de la philosophie est la certitude ; pour les modernes au contraire, l'essence de la philosophie est le doute : le philosophe est censé raisonner sans aucune prémisse (voraussetzungsloses Denken), comme si cette condition n'était pas elle-même une idée préconçue ; c'est la contradiction classique de tout relativisme. On doute de tout, sauf du doute(1). La solution du problème de la connaissance — si problème il y a — ne saurait être ce suicide intellectuel qu'est la promotion du doute ; c'est au contraire le recours à une source de certitude qui transcende le mécanisme mental, et cette source — la seule qui soit — est le pur Intellect, ou l'Intelligence en soi. Le soi-disant « siècle des lumières » n'en soupçonnait pas l'existence ; tout ce que l'Intellect pouvait offrir — de Pythagore jusqu'aux scolastiques — n'était pour les encyclopédistes que dogmatisme naïf, voire « obscurantisme ». Fort paradoxalement, le culte de la raison a fini dans cet infra-rationalisme — ou dans cet « ésotérisme de la sottise » — qu'est l'existentialisme sous toutes ses formes ; c'est remplacer illusoirement l'intelligence par de l'« existence ». D'aucuns ont cru pouvoir remplacer la prémisse de la pensée par cet élément arbitraire, empirique et tout subjectif qu'est la « personnalité » du penseur, ce qui est la destruction même de la notion de vérité ; autant renoncer à toute philosophie. Plus la pensée veut être « concrète », et plus elle est perverse ; cela a commencé avec l'empirisme, premier pas vers le démantèlement de l'esprit ; on cherche l'originalité, et périsse la vérité(2). (...) ! Somme toute, la philosophie moderne est la codification d'une infirmité acquise ; l'atrophie intellectuelle de l'homme marqué par la « chute » avait pour conséquence une hypertrophie de l'intelligence pratique, d'où en fin de compte l'explosion des sciences physiques et l'apparition de pseudo-sciences telles que la psychologie et la sociologie.

withal vain-glorious, proud and inconstant. He whose arms are very short in respect to the stature of his body, is thereby signified to be a man of high and gallant spirit, of a graceful temper, bold and warlike. He whose arms are full of bones, sinews and flesh, is a great desirer of novelties and beauties, and one that is very credulous and apt to believe anything. He whose arms are very hairy, whether they be lean or fat, is for the most part a luxurious person, weak in body and mind, very suspicious and malicious withal. He whose arms have no hair on them at all, is of a weak judgment, very angry, vain, wanton, credulous, easily deceived himself, yet a great deceiver of others, no fighter, and very apt to betray his dearest friends. CHAPTER IV Of Palmistry, showing the various Judgments drawn from the Hand. Being engaged in this fourth part to show what judgment may be drawn, according to physiognomy, from the several parts of the body, and coming in order to speak of the hands, it has put me under the necessity of saying something about palmistry, which is a judgment made of the conditions, inclinations, and fortunes of men and women, from the various lines and characters nature has imprinted in their hands, which are almost as serious as the hands that have them. The reader should remember that one of the lines of the hand, and which indeed is reckoned the principal, is called the line of life; this line encloses the thumb, separating it from the hollow of the hand. The next to it, which is called the natural line, takes its

We are biological beings, shaped by genetic inheritance and the organization and health of our neurological structures. We have rich inner lives of diverse dispositions, motivations, cognitive abilities and processes, intrapsychic dynamics, and reinforcement histories. We are also social creatures, affected by our social and cultural environments. Together these elements help us understand normal phenomena (like memory construction, neurological function, and social attraction) and abnormal psychological occurrences (such as pseudo-memories, Alzheimer’s disease, and dysfunctional relationships). Unfortunately, much of the work on the

Hippies masquerading as pseudo philosophers love to tell anyone who will listen that reality doesn’t exist, it’s a construct, like everything else. But if reality doesn’t exist, then explain my shadow, the kid’s, the looks we receive. I remember coming home to you after receiving my extra shadow, both of us sore with shame and guilt. You were able to shed those feelings within a few days once the freshness wore off. But me, I’m simple—things designed to manipulate me tend to succeed. And my shadow is no exception. It follows me everywhere, a constant reminder of the one thing I can’t find it in me to talk about. I showed up to school and, seeing the shame in my eyes, one of my troubled kids pulled me aside and said, Old news, right, Miss? and I started crying on the spot. But you never blamed me, did you, Beau? It actually made me feel worse, as if I had to double the blame to make up for your understanding. If I was the only one blaming me, the guilt had no outlet, nothing to do but grow its own vascular system and circulate through my body. “What’s today going to be like?” I ask the kid. “Like yesterday, except today?” She is covered in snot, needing me.

I must confess that often, when I have tried to read the most popularly effective of German philosophical writers, Nietzsche, I have felt like throwing the book across the room. He is a boiling pot of enthusiasms and animosities, which he pours out volubly, skilfully, and eloquently. If he were content to label these outpourings " Prejudices," as Mr. Mencken so truly and candidly labels his own, one could accept them in the spirit in which they were offered ; there is no more interesting reading than the aired prejudices of a brilliant writer. But he obviously takes them for something more and something better ; he gakes them as philosophy instead of what they largely are, pseudo-Isaian prophesying, incoherent and unreasoned Sibylline oracles.

Everyone has gone postmodern. They can’t even read the text in the original—they’re so dependent on some pseudo-philosopher to tell them what it says.

Philosophy often appears to its common-sense opponents as a kind of Sigmaringen of ideas, churning out its irrelevant fictions and pretending that it offers the public insights on which the fate of humanity depends, while real life goes on somewhere else, indifferent to philosophical gigantomachias. Is philosophy really a mere theatre of shadows? A pseudo-event impotently mimicking real events? What if its power resides in its very withdrawal from direct engagement? What if, in its Sigmaringen-distance from the immediate reality of events, it can see a much more profound dimension of these same events, so that the only way to orient ourselves in the multiplicity of events is through the lens of philosophy?

When Michel Foucault, the celebrated French philosopher, wrote about his admiration for Khomeini and the movement in Iran, an Iranian woman named Atoussa H. called him out in a public letter. ‘Everywhere outside Iran, Islam serves as a cover for feudal or pseudo-revolutionary oppression,’ she wrote. Foucault suggested she failed to approach Islam with even ‘a minimum of intelligence’. Meanwhile his ‘intelligence’ extended to arguing that by ‘Islamic government’ no one possibly meant ‘a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control’.