Simon Blackburn Quotes

How you think about what you are doing affects how you do it, or whether you do it at all.

People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.

There are always people telling us what we want, how they will provide it, and what we should believe. Convictions are infectious, and people can make others convinced of almost anything.

Someone sitting on a completely unreasonable belief is sitting on a time bomb. The apparently harmless, idiosyncratic belief of the Catholic Church that one thing may have the substance of another, although it displays absolutely none of its empirical qualities, prepares people for the view that some people are agents of Satan in disguise, which in turn makes it reasonable to destroy them.

Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.

Reflection opens the avenue to criticism, and the folkways may not like criticism. In this way, ideologies become closed circles, primed to feel outraged by the questioning mind.

[...] like any human practices, those of religions are not exempt from ethical questioning. Rituals and rites in groups change behavior, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. For the madness of crowds is a very close cousin to the fervor or congregations and the martial spirit of armies.

We can check on what people say by seeing what they do.

Freedom is a dangerous word, just because it is an inspirational one.

To process thoughts well is a matter of being able to avoid confusion, detect ambiguities, keep things in mind one at a time, make reliable arguments, become aware of alternatives, and so on.

Science similarly contains within itself the devices for correcting the illusions of science. That is its crowning glory. When we come upon intellectual endeavours that contain no such devices—one might cite psychoanalysis, grand political theories, ‘new age’ science, creationist science—we need not be interested.

So the middle-ground answer reminds us that reflection is continuous with practice, and our practice can go worse or better according to the value of our reflections.

The time we take out, whether it is to do mathematics or music, or to read Plato or Jane Austen, is time to be cherished.

the unexamined life is not worth living. It has insisted on the power of rational reflection to winnow out bad elements in our practices, and to replace them with better ones.

Reflection matters because it is continuous with practice. How you think about what you are doing affects how you do it, or whether you do it at all.

belief is to knowledge as shadow is to original

A system of thought is something we live in, just as much as a house, and if our intellectual house is cramped and confined, we need to know what better structures are possible. The

Others may want to stand upon the ‘politics of identity’, or in other words the kind of identification with a particular tradition, or group, or national or ethnic identity that invites them to turn their back on outsiders who question the ways of the group. They will shrug off criticism: their values are ‘incommensurable’ with the values of outsiders. They are to be understood only by brothers and sisters within the circle. People like to retreat to within a thick, comfortable, traditional set of folkways, and not to worry too much about their structure, or their origins, or even the criticisms that they may deserve. Reflection opens the avenue to criticism, and the folkways may not like criticism. In this way, ideologies become closed circles, primed to feel outraged by the questioning mind.

WORTH IT? It is no credit to our phase of civilization if it is fear rather than ambition that drives most of those who bankrupt themselves on the vanities, or who end up under the surgeon's knife. It is the fear of falling short, of being inadequate in the eyes of others, including loved ones. [...] It is unfitting, one might say, improper, treating one's owm body as a tool rather than a part of oneself. [...] The bottom line is that it dishonors ourselves, for we ought to think better of ourselves than that.

It is the thought that the least efficient way of of finding either happiness or pleasure is to pursue them. Put in terms of happiness, we can see it like this: To be happy you must quite literally "lose yourself". You must lose yourself in some pursuit; you need to forget your own happiness and find other goals and projects, other objects of concern that might include the welfare of some other people, or the cure of the disease, or simply in the variety of everyday activities with their little successes and setbacks.

I cannot climb out onto the nature of your mind. So how then do I know anything about your mental life? How do I know, for instance, that you see the colour blue the way that I do? Might it be that some of us feel pain more, but make less fuss about it, or that others feel pain less, but make more fuss?

We may worry that the witness has the whole of time and space in its gaze, and our life shrinks to nothingness, just an insignificant, infinitesimal fragment of the whole. ‘The silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me,’ said Blaise Pascal (1623–62). But the Cambridge philosopher Frank Ramsey (1903–30) replied: Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly seventeen stone. My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings, and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits.

One peculiarity of our present [ethical] climate is that we care much more about our rights than about our 'good'. For previous thinkers about ethics, such as those who wrote the Upanishads, or Confucius, or Plato, or the founders of the Christian tradition, the central concern was the state of one's soul, meaning some personal state of justice or harmony. Such a state might include resignation or renunciation, or detachment, or obedience, or knowledge, especially self-knowledge. For Plato there could be no just political order except one populated by just citizens.... Today we tend not to believe that; we tend to think that modern constitutional democracies are fine regardless of the private vices of those within them. We are much more nervous talking about our good: it seems moralistic, or undemocratic, or elitist. Similarly, we are nervous talking about duty. The Victorian ideal of a life devoted to duty, or a calling, is substantially lost to us. So a greater proportion of our moral energy goes to protecting claims against each other, and that includes protecting the state of our soul as purely private, purely our own business.

So the middle-ground answer reminds us that reflection is continuous with practice, and our practice can go worse or better according to the value of our reflections. A system of thought is something we live in, just as much as a house, and if our intellectual house is cramped and confined, we need to know what better structures are possible

This is not to say that the injunction has no effect at all. It may well bring shame and embarrassment to those who find that they cannot conform to it. This may even be its function, since it may thereby reinforce their subservience in the face of the implacable authority that commanded it.

literature is but the shadow of good talk

seperate morality from its effects, and you will see that everyone regards ias a nuisance, an annoying brake on their freedom of action.

Convictions are infectious, and people can make others convinced of almost anything. We are typically ready to believe that our ways, our beliefs, our religion, our politics are better than theirs, or that our God-given rights trump theirs or that our interests require defensive or pre-emptive strikes against them. In the end, it is ideas for which people kill each other. It is because of ideas about what the others are like, or who we are, or what our interests or rights require, that we go to war, or oppress others with a good conscience, or even sometimes acquiesce in our own oppression by others. When these beliefs involve the sleep of reason, critical awakening is the antidote. Reflection enables us to step back, to see our perspective on a situation as perhaps distorted or blind, at the very least to see if there is argument for preferring our ways, or whether it is just subjective

It is one thing to be the common-or-garden villain who says, "I don't care if I have wronged you by breaking my word or stealing your goods." But it is another to achieve the rather extraordinary pitch of villainy, which says, "I don't even recognize that you have a complaint." A society in which people are incapable of recognizing others as having a complaint, whatever they do, would be one without an ethic - but for that very reason, it would be hard to recognize it as a society at all.

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

His idea was that the argument starts off from the premise ‘everything has a [distinct, previous] cause’, but ends with the conclusion that there must be something that has no distinct, previous cause, but ‘carries the reason of his existence in himself. Then the conclusion denies what the premise asserts.

It is good, then, to remember four options in epistemology (the theory of knowledge). There is rational foundationalism, as attempted by Descartes. There is natural foundationalism, as attempted in Hume. There is coherentism. And brooding over all of them, there is scepticism, or the view that there is no knowledge. Each of these has had distinguished defenders. Whichever the reader prefers, he or she will find good philosophical company. One might think that Descartes got almost everything right, or that he got almost everything wrong. The baffling thing is to defend whichever answer commends itself.

The first reaction is that one of the premises is untrue. The second is that the reasoning is invalid. Of course, an argument may be subject to both criticisms: its premises are untrue, and the reasoning from them is invalid. But the two criticisms are distinct (and the two words, untrue and invalid, are well kept for the distinction).

Our concepts or ideas form the mental housing in which we live. We may end up proud of the structures we have built. Or we may believe that they need dismantling and starting afresh. But first, we have to know what they are.

Goya’s full motto for his etching is, ‘Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.

our ideas and concepts can be compared with the lenses through which we see the world. In philosophy the lens is itself the topic of study. Success will be a matter not of how much you know at the end, but of what you can do when the going gets tough: when the seas of argument rise, and confusion breaks out. Success will mean taking seriously the implications of ideas. WHAT IS THE POINT?

Accepting a religion may be more like enjoying a poem, or following the football. It might be a matter of immersion in a set of practices. Perhaps the practices have only an emotional point, or a social point. Perhaps religious rituals only serve necessary psychological and social ends. The rituals of birth, coming of age, or funerals do this. It is silly to ask whether a marriage ceremony is true or false. People do not go to a funeral service to hear something true, but to mourn, or to begin to stop mourning, or to meditate on departed life. It can be as inappropriate to ask whether what is said is true as to ask whether Keats’s ode to a Grecian urn is true. The poem is successful or not in quite a different dimension, and so is Chartres cathedral, or a statue of the Buddha. They may be magnificent, and moving, and awe-inspiring, but not because they make statements that are true or false.

what Russell called a ‘logical construction out of aggregates of facts. (This does not mean that all statements about the average are sensible or useful: as has been said, the average person has one testicle and one breast.)

Epicurus old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil? Cleanthes

We must inspect each part, and we have to do so while relying on other parts. But the result of that inspection may, if we are coherent and imaginative, be perfectly seaworthy.

getting clear about the right categories with which to understand human motivation, is an important practical task.

Reflection enables us to step back, to see our perspective on a situation as perhaps distorted or blind, at the very least to see if there is argument for preferring our ways, or whether it is just subjective.

There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.

Leibniz thought that if we had a sufficiently logical notation, dispute and confusion would cease, and men would sit together and resolve their disputes by calculation.

people.

Convictions are infectious, and people can make others convinced of almost anything. We are typically ready to believe that our ways, our beliefs, our religion, our politics are better than theirs, or that our God-given rights trump theirs or that our interests require defensive or pre-emptive strikes against them. In the end, it is ideas for which people kill each other. It is because of ideas about what the others are like, or who we are, or what our interests or rights require, that we go to war, or oppress others with a good conscience, or even sometimes acquiesce in our own oppression by others. When these beliefs involve the sleep of reason, critical awakening is the antidote.

Peopleare sometimes largely powerless, politically, or even psychologically (because we are not flexible, but are indeed brainwashed, or in the grip of strange obsessions that we cannot shake). When we are powerless, fatalism may be a natural frame of mind into which to relapse. If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma, are sometimes consoling.

As English philosopher Simon Blackburn put it, “chance is as relentless as necessity” in seemingly precluding free will.[

Wittgenstein said: Always get rid of the idea of the private object in this way: assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you.

Thoughts are strange things. They have ‘representational’ powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another.

In particular, if ‘God’s goodness’ is not to be understood in the same terms as what we think of as good (so that, for instance, it might be ‘good’ of God in this different sense to unleash bubonic plague on defenceless infants) then it has no implications for how I am to live my life.

Almost any positive good [positive liberty] can be described in terms of freedom from something [negative liberty]. Health is freedom from disease; happiness is a life free from flaws and miseries; equality is freedom from advantage and disadvantage.. Faced with this flexibility, the theorist will need to prioritize some freedoms and discount others. At its extreme we may get the view that only some particular kind of life makes for ‘real freedom’. Real freedom might, for instance, be freedom the bondage of desire, as in Buddhism and Stoicism. Or it might be a kind of self-realization or self-perfection only possible in a community of similarly self-realized individuals, pointing us towards a communitarian, socialist, or even communist ideal. To a laissez-faire capitalist, it is freedom from more than minimal necessary political and legal interference in the pursuit of profit. But the rhetoric of freedom will typically just disguise the merits or demerits of the political order being promoted. The flexibility of the term ‘freedom’ undoubtedly plays a huge role in the rhetoric of political demands, particularly when the language of rights mingles with the language of freedom. ‘We have a right to freedom from…’ is not only a good way, but the best way to start a moral or political demand. Freedom is a dangerous word, just because it is an inspirational one. The modern emphasis on freedom is problematically associated with a particular self-image. This is the 'autonomous' or self-governing and self-driven individual. This individual has the right to make his or her own decisions. Interference or restraint is lack of respect, and everyone has a right to respect. For this individual, the ultimate irrationality would be to alienate his freedom, for instance by joining a monastery that requires unquestioning obedience to a superior, or selling himself into slavery to another. The self-image may be sustained by the thought that each individual has the same share of human reason, and an equal right to deploy this reason in the conduct of his or her own life. Yet the 'autonomous' individual, gloriously independent in his decision-making, can easily seem to be a fantasy. Not only the Grand Unifying Pessimisms, but any moderately sober reflection on human life and human societies, suggest that we are creatures easily swayed, constantly infected by the opinions of others, lacking critical self-understanding, easily gripped by fantastical hopes and ambitions. Our capacity for self-government is spasmodic, and even while we preen ourselves on our critical and independent, free and rational decisions, we are slaves of fashion and opinion and social and cultural forces of which we are ignorant. A little awareness of ethics will make us mistrustful of sound-bite-sized absolutes. Even sacred freedoms meet compromises, and take us into a world of balances. Free speech is sacred. Yet the law does not protect fraudulent speech, libellous speech, speech describing national secrets, speech inciting racial and other hatreds, speech inciting panic in crowded places, and so on. In return, though, we gain freedom from fraud, from misrepresentation of our characters and our doings, from enemy incursions, from civil unrest, from arbitrary risks of panic in crowds. For sure, there will always be difficult cases. There are websites giving people simple recipes on how to make bombs in their kitchens. Do we want a conception of free speech that protects those? What about the freedom of the rest of us to live our lives without a significant risk of being blown up by a crank? It would be nice if there were a utilitarian calculus enabling us to measure the costs and benefits of permission and suppression, but it is hard to find one.

For he has found that even his senses deceive him, and it is "prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once". He puts to himself the objection that only madmen ("who say that they are dressed in purple when they are naked, or that their heads are made of earthenware, or that they are pumpkins or made of glass" -- madmen were evidently pretty colorful in the seventeenth century) deny the very obvious evidence of their senses.

Those who can make you believe absurdities,’ said Voltaire, ‘can make you commit atrocities.’ By contrast, my caution cannot do any such thing.

For the last two thousand years the philosophical tradition has been the enemy of this kind of cosy complacency. It has insisted that the unexamined life is not worth living. It has insisted on the power of rational reflection to winnow out bad elements in our practices, and to replace them with better ones. It has identified critical self-reflection with freedom, the idea being that only when we can see ourselves properly can we obtain control over the direction in which we would wish to move. It is only when we can see our situation steadily and see it whole that we can start to think what to do about it.

An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat-shop or the concentration camp and the death march.

Goya believed that many of the follies of mankind resulted from the ‘sleep of reason’. There are always people telling us what we want, how they will provide it, and what we should believe. Convictions are infectious, and people can make others convinced of almost anything. We are typically ready to believe that our ways, our beliefs, our religion, our politics are better than theirs, or that our God-given rights trump theirs or that our interests require defensive or pre-emptive strikes against them. In the end, it is ideas for which people kill each other. It is because of ideas about what the others are like, or who we are, or what our interests or rights require, that we go to war, or oppress others with a good conscience, or even sometimes acquiesce in our own oppression by others. When these beliefs involve the sleep of reason, critical awakening is the antidote. Reflection enables us to step back, to see our perspective on a situation as perhaps distorted or blind, at the very least to see if there is argument for preferring our ways, or whether it is just subjective. Doing this properly is doing one more piece of conceptual engineering.

What do we mean when we ask what the point is? Reflection bakes no bread, but then neither does architecture, music, art, history, or literature.

An argument is valid when there is no way—meaning no possible way—that the premises, or starting points, could be true without the conclusion being true

it seems as though Descartes (once more influenced by ideas from previous philosophical traditions) may have slipped into thinking that an idea of X actually shares X. So an idea of infinity, for instance, would be an infinite idea.

Why does causation run always from past to future, or does it make sense to think that the future might influence the past?

Que sais-je?’—what do I know?

We thus combine unreasonable optimism about what people might be like, with unreasonable hatred of them when they are not like that (pp269)

... consider the many ways of failing that await the poet who makes his or her own consciousness of emotions into the subject of a poem, instead of the emotion itself.

Human beings can grow to make killing fields, and they can grow to make gardens.

Broadminded though we take ourselves to be, lust gets a bad press. It is the fly in the ointment, the black sheep of the family, the ill- bred, trashy cousin of upstanding members like love and friendship.

We smile at lovers holding hands in the park. But we wrinkle our noses if we find them acting out their lust under the bushes. Love receives the world’s applause. Lust is furtive, ashamed, and embarrassed. Love pursues the good of the other, with self-control, concern, reason, and patience. Lust pursues its own gratification, headlong, impatient of any control, immune to reason. Love thrives on candlelight and conversation. Lust is equally happy in a doorway or a taxi, and its conversation is made of animal grunts and cries. Love is individual: there is only the unique Other, the one doted upon, the single star around whom the lover revolves. Lust takes what comes. Lovers gaze into each others’ eyes. Lust looks sideways, inventing deceits and stratagems and seductions, sizing up opportunities (fig. 9). Love grows with knowledge and time, court- ship, truth, and trust. Lust is a trail of clothing in the hallway...Living with lust is like living shackled to a lunatic.

We are no more than taking a philosophical stroll in the park, here and there stopping to point out an interesting view. The park is not a paradise. Weeds grow, serpents lie in wait, and people have built slums over parts of it. But we do not have to inhabit them, if we are careful.

Internalizing’ a set of values is very close to internalizing the gaze or voice of others. Recognizing that they have a complaint against you is regarding yourself as having fallen short in their eyes, and to have internalized their voice means finding that itself weighing with you.