Philip Kitcher Quotes - Page 2

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• The "little theme" from Vinteuil, heard by Swann as emblematic of his love for Odette, remains a point of reference for him, as the character of that love changes and as the love eventually fades.

  Philip Kitcher

  Character, Littles, His Love

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I would like to undermine the stereotype of "strict philosophy." J.L. Austin remarked that, when philosophy is done well, it's all over by the bottom of the first page. I take him to have meant that the real work comes in setting up the problem with which you are dealing, and thus getting your reader to take particular things for granted.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Real, Austin

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  6 Copy quote

• I argue against literal interpretation of religious doctrines. Religions make progress when they emancipate themselves from literalism, and take their doctrinal statements to be metaphors or allegories.

  Philip Kitcher

  Religious, Progress, Doctrine

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• When I try to outline the history of ethical life, it's sometimes possible to find evidence for a hypothesis about how important transitions actually went. Often, however, that isn't so. There are many facts about human life in the Paleolithic we're never likely to know.

  Philip Kitcher

  Important, Trying, Transition

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• If the research agenda reflects "market forces", the problems of the poor are likely to be even more neglected than they already are.

  Philip Kitcher

  Agendas, Research, Problem

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In my current work on global warming, I argue that the only apparent solution to the deep problem of climate change would require very large transfers of wealth from rich nations to poor nations, so that the entire world can make the transition to renewable forms of energy as fast as possible.

  Philip Kitcher

  Poor Nations, Energy, Climate

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Consider the different narrative styles within the story, and the glee with which the "moralistic narrator" celebrates Aschenbach's fall - maybe, then, this is a hostile verdict and the international fame is warranted after all (given that Mann modeled his protagonist so closely on himself, it would be quite odd if he had intended Aschenbach's literary inferiority to be a fixed part of the interpretation).

  Philip Kitcher

  Fall, Style, Narrators

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Think about Mann's own daily routine (ascribed to Aschenbach), read the extant diaries and the letters in which he discusses the novella's themes, and it won't be so obvious that the attraction to Tadzio is completely unprecedented; it also won't be obvious that what Aschenbach wants is full sexual contact.

  Philip Kitcher

  Thinking, Routine, Diaries

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Read Mann's notes, which contain precise accounts of cholera and its symptoms, and observe how careful he is throughout his fiction in getting medical details straight - then you might begin to wonder whether cholera is the only candidate for the cause of Aschenbach's death. What results from this, I think, is a deeper appreciation of Mann's brilliance in keeping so many possibilities in play. The ambiguity is even more artful than people have realized.

  Philip Kitcher

  Appreciation, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'm very concerned about the increasing distortion of research by the intrusion of the market. Universities are beginning to see science as a means of attracting funds.

  Philip Kitcher

  Mean, Research, Intrusion

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Schopenhauer's thought that Will is insatiable, that once satisfied in one form it must be expressed in new desires, is inherited both by Mann and by Aschenbach (it's in Mahler, as well). So life is inevitably incomplete.

  Philip Kitcher

  Desire, Mahler, Life Is

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Sometimes, of course, the artist does give up, saying, in effect, "I've done enough". Prospero declares that the revels are ended, and breaks his staff - his author retires to Stratford. At the very end, Mann did something similar. Interestingly, in both instances, death came quite quickly after that.

  Philip Kitcher

  Giving Up, Artist, Doe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

  Philip Kitcher

  Fighting, Artist, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Mann was less interested, I think, in constructing any kind of "portrait of an age" than he was in delineating an individual consciousness in which profound struggles about identity and direction arise - struggles that Mann himself had not only reflected on but felt keenly. Visconti takes up this central focus of the novella, but he couples it with a more social perspective.

  Philip Kitcher

  Couple, Struggle, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Mann and Joyce are very different, and yet their fiction often appeals to the same people: Harry Levin taught a famous course on Joyce, Proust, and Mann, and Joseph Campbell singled out Joyce and Mann as special favorites. To see them as offering "possibilities for living", as I do, isn't to identify any distinctive commonality. After all, many great authors would fall under that rubric.

  Philip Kitcher

  Fall, Offering, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  7 Copy quote

• The variety within Mann's fiction is impressive and fascinating. But Joyce is even more various and many-sided. He begins his career with a wonderful sequence of bleak studies about the ways in which human lives can go awry - in my view, Dubliners is underrated.

  Philip Kitcher

  Views, Careers, Fiction

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are inexhaustible. They are celebrations of the ordinary, compelling reactions to philosophical elitism about "the good life". I hope to examine both of them further, doing more justice to Joycean comedy than I did in my "invitation" to the Wake, and trying to understand how the extraordinary stylistic innovations, particularly the proliferation of narrative forms, enable Joyce to "see life foully" from a vast number of sides.

  Philip Kitcher

  Good Life, Philosophical, Numbers

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every word in it has three score and ten "toptypsical" meanings - an exaggeration, of course, but an important reminder to readers who like their fiction definite.

  Philip Kitcher

  Perspective, Important, Three

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I read Aschenbach's constant desire to go beyond the works he has already produced to be the counterpart of Mann's deep wish to surpass his previous fiction; sometimes the diaries express this in terms of a dejected judgment that the summit has already been reached.

  Philip Kitcher

  Wish, Desire, Diaries

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Finally, this is one way to reconcile the delight in beauty with the bourgeois life. Aschenbach, on one reading, has spent virtually all of his adult life balancing his restrained homosexuality, which is bound together with his sensitivity to beauty and thus with his artistic vocation, against the demands of conventional society.

  Philip Kitcher

  Reading, Together, Adults

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Britten's opera tends to see things in simpler terms. It portrays an Aschenbach who wants a richer form of sexual fulfillment, and who is hemmed in by the social conventions to which he subscribes. But Visconti's use of the Mahler Adagietto is perfect for what I take to be Aschenbach's sexual desire.

  Philip Kitcher

  Perfect, Desire, Use

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Klaus Mann saw very clearly how different was his own (more liberated) form of homosexuality from the same-sex attractions of his father - and that is reiterated in TM's diary queries about "how two men can sleep together".

  Philip Kitcher

  Sex, Father, Sleep

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• There's a disciplined erotic component to it, so that the height of sexual contact is the embrace, the modest touch, a relatively chaste kiss. An important passage from the surviving 1942 diary (one I quote in the book) relates this mode of sexual expression to his own life. Mann had returned to his diary for 1927 (one of those he burned) and to his parting from the young man, Klaus Heuser, whom the family had met on holiday and invited to Munich.

  Philip Kitcher

  Book, Holiday, Kissing

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Wilhelmine Germany was hostile to the expression of same-sex love - and, of course, Mann would have known of the fate of Oscar Wilde. His early reading of Platen's poetry, and, probably when he was in his early twenties, of Platen's diaries, introduced him to a form of sexual expression he found profoundly congenial. It's not quite Platonic.

  Philip Kitcher

  Sex, Reading, Fate

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• After the success of Buddenbrooks, he married and fathered six children. Yet the surviving diaries tell us of recurrent sexual problems - and of Katia Mann's extremely sympathetic response to them

  Philip Kitcher

  Children, Diaries, Six

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

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