Philip Kitcher Quotes - Page 3

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• Mann's sexuality and his attitudes towards it are extremely complex - and the complexities are inherited in the figure of Aschenbach. Mann had lived through a series of (almost certainly unconsummated) relationships with young men.

  Philip Kitcher

  Attitude, Men, Sexuality

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Mann was conscious of adopting different perspectives in different parts of the novella, but my guess is that there are plenty of passages in which the resonance of the words he chose struck him as exactly right (even though he didn't probe to discover exactly what tone or narrative device gave them that effect).

  Philip Kitcher

  Perspective, Different, Narrative

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• conclude, what Thomas Mann really wanted was a limited physical relationship with beautiful young men: the opportunity to gaze at them, an occasional touch, a restrained kiss. That isn't a surrogate for what he'd like to have if he were somehow free from social constraints. It's what the young Platen wanted, it's what he wanted - and it's what his Aschenbach wants.

  Philip Kitcher

  Beautiful, Kissing, Opportunity

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The classical allusions and the Platonic disquisitions on beauty are no longer a form of cover, but integral to Aschenbach's complex sexuality. Moreover, the wandering around Venice in pursuit of Tadzio isn't a prelude to some sexual contact for which Aschenbach is yearning.

  Philip Kitcher

  Venice, Wandering Around, Sexuality

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Careers, Mathematics

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• After two years of undergraduate study, it was clear that I was bored by the regime of problem-solving required by the Cambridge mathematical tripos. A very sensitive mathematics don recommended that I talk to the historian of astronomy, Michael Hoskin, and the conversation led me to enroll in the History and Philosophy of Science for my final undergraduate year.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Years, Two

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I was occupied by a range of questions, often different from those fashionable in the professional philosophy of the past half century, that have sometimes troubled philosophers in the past. It's taken me several decades to work out my own philosophical agenda, and it is wide.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Taken

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• A different vision of ethics is that of a collection of resources people can use to act better. The resources might be firm rules that could always be relied on. Or they might be ideals that could often be followed without thinking but that sometimes conflicted with one another.

  Philip Kitcher

  Thinking, Often Is, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Because the problems are objective features of the human situation - social animals without the capacities for making social life come easily - ethics is objectively constrained. It's not the case that "anything goes".

  Philip Kitcher

  Animal, Anything Goes, Ethics

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Sometime during the 1990s, when I was teaching philosophy at UCSD, my friend, colleague, and music teacher, Carol Plantamura, discussed the possibility of teaching a course together looking at ways in which various literary works (plays, stories, novels) had been treated as operas, and how different themes emerged in the opera and in its original. One of the pairings we planned to use was Mann's great novella and Britten's opera. Unfortunately, the course was never taught, but the idea remained with me.

  Philip Kitcher

  Teacher, Philosophy, Teaching

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The hardest problem of all is to appreciate the facts that the poor nations are - quite reasonably - not going to forgo their development, and that they can only afford to develop by consuming fossil fuels.

  Philip Kitcher

  Appreciate, Poor Nations, Development

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Those citizens are distracted by the toys technology has supplied, and fail to recognize the ways in which what they most deeply want is made vulnerable by the coming disruptions of human relations on an over-heated planet.

  Philip Kitcher

  Technology, Citizens, Want

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Current education in science treats all students as if they were going to have scientific careers. They are required to solve problems and memorize lists. For many of them, this kills interest very quickly.

  Philip Kitcher

  Careers, Lists, Students

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In my view, all students should be given an initial opportunity to pursue the science track as far as it goes. But for those who quickly decide that track isn't for them, a different style of teaching is in order.

  Philip Kitcher

  Teaching, Opportunity, Views

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'm quite pessimistic about climate change. This is an urgent problem, and much of the world is only now waking up to the easiest part of solving - the realization that anthropogenic global warming is real.

  Philip Kitcher

  Real, Climate, Wake Up

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Ethical inquiry has always been motivated by the aim of improving human conduct. It doesn't follow from that that the goal is to produce a complete rule book that would be applicable to all cases.

  Philip Kitcher

  Book, Goal, Would Be

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In my view, we ought to replace the notion of analytic philosophy by that of synthetic philosophy.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Views, Synthetic

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I have enormous respect for Derek Parfit, although he seems to me bound within an unfortunate philosophical tradition - rather like the extraordinarily brilliant exponents of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Middle Ages.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Age, Brilliant

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Experiments work when, and only when, they call into action cognitive capacities that might reliably deliver the conclusions drawn.

  Philip Kitcher

  Might, Action, Capacity

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• For a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language we actually use.

  Philip Kitcher

  Issues, Important, Purpose

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• If the intuition-mongering were abandoned, would that be the end of philosophy? It would be the end of a certain style of philosophy - a style that has cut philosophy off, not only from the humanities but from every other branch of inquiry and culture.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Cutting, Humanity

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The result can be quite new - perhaps a tendency to judge that something we've never conceived of is possible, or to feel sympathy for a trait or a type of person whom we've regarded with indifference or even hostility.

  Philip Kitcher

  Judging, Indifference, Results

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• When we read a literary work (or, in some instances, listen to music) our imagination is stimulated, we feel various emotions, and we arrive at new judgments. These attitudes are brought into relation with many others, including our standing tendencies to think and feel in particular ways, and we try to fit our psychological capacities and responses together.

  Philip Kitcher

  Attitude, Thinking, Imagination

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• One of the things I want to do in the book is to explore how philosophy can be done in literature. I start doing that in the first chapter, by introducing the idea of "philosophy by showing". What literature/philosophy shows is how to look at some important facets of life in a new way, thus changing the frame in which subsequent philosophical argument proceeds.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Book, Philosophical

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but perhaps, above all literary critics, I'm indebted to Wayne Booth (several people have suggested to me that I'm trying to reinvent "ethical criticism").

  Philip Kitcher

  People, Criticism, Trying

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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