Philip Kitcher Quotes - Page 4

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• Secular humanists should recognize those forms of religion as allies in the struggle for human advancement. They should also learn from them, as they try to build a fully secular world in which people can have the opportunity to live rich and fulfilling lives.

  Philip Kitcher

  Struggle, Opportunity, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Mann was profoundly influenced by two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who returned to the most ancient of all philosophical questions - "How to live?" - and whose writings offered novel perspectives for considering that question (much more perspective-offering than rigorous argument!)

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Writing, Offering

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• So this is my attempt to give a preliminary - probably far too crude - account of how philosophy by showing can really teach us. The attempts we make to work through problems by reasoning always presuppose starting points, and even the most self-critical philosophers adopt some of those starting points simply by picking them up from the social environments in which they grow up.

  Philip Kitcher

  Growing Up, Philosophy, Self

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Sometimes, however, the new synthetic complex proves stable, and even serves as the beginning of a much larger cluster of attitudes that displace some we've previously considered to be fixed parts of ourselves.

  Philip Kitcher

  Attitude, Sometimes, Synthetic

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The amalgam of psychological attitudes we form is the synthetic complex. It may fall apart quite quickly as further reflection or further experience bears on it, and we may revert to our former judgments, feelings and tendencies.

  Philip Kitcher

  Attitude, Fall, Reflection

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There are many critics whose work I greatly admire. Even though I diverge from T.J. Reed in several important ways, I've learned greatly from his writings on Mann.

  Philip Kitcher

  Writing, Important, Way

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Part of my methodological approach is made explicit when I discuss ways in which literature can have philosophical significance. Literature doesn't typically argue - and when it does, it's deadly dull. But literature can supply the frame within which we come to observe and reason, or it can change our frame in highly significant ways. That's one of the achievements I'd claim for Mann, and for Death in Venice.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Venice, Achievement

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I use biography, I use literary connections (as with Platen - this seems to me extremely helpful for appreciating the nuances of Mann's and Aschenbach's sexuality), I use philosophical sources (but not in the way many Mann critics do, where the philosophical theses and concepts seem to be counters to be pushed around rather than ideas to be probed), and I use juxtapositions with other literary works (including Mann's other fiction) and with works of music.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Ideas, Appreciate

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Mann is widely recognized as a master of irony and ambiguity, yet it's remarkable how quickly people foreclose options he carefully leaves open. Lots of readers - including eminent critics - jump to conclusions: that Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy is a central background text, that Aschenbach is an inferior writer, that he's never been attracted by pubescent male beauty before, that he dies of cholera.

  Philip Kitcher

  People, Tragedy, Males

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'm a pluralist about perspectives on literature. There seem to me to be all sorts of illuminating ways of responding to major literary works, some of them paying considerable attention to context, others applying various theoretical ideas, yet others focusing on details of language, or linking the work to the author's life, or connecting it with other works.

  Philip Kitcher

  Ideas, Perspective, Details

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In elaborating how "philosophy by showing" works, and in defending the idea that literature and music can contribute to philosophical "showing", I am also doing something more standardly philosophical. But I view most of the book as an interweaving of philosophy and literary criticism. If that entails a broadening of a standard idea of philosophy, it's a broadening I'd like to see happen.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Book, Philosophical

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I intend Deaths in Venice to contribute both to literary criticism and to philosophy. But it's not "strict philosophy" in the sense of arguing for specific theses. As I remark, there's a style of philosophy - present in writers from Plato to Rawls - that invites readers to consider a certain class of phenomena in a new way. In the book, I associate this, in particular, with my good friend, the eminent philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, who practices it extremely skilfully.

  Philip Kitcher

  Plato, Philosophy, Book

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I didn't know that Mahler would come to play so large a role, nor that music and literature and philosophy can interinanimate one another in the way I've come to think they do in this case.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Using the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth is one of the touches of pure genius in Visconti's film (even though Mahlerians complain very loudly that the piece has been ruined), since it corresponds perfectly to Aschenbach's yearnings and to his circling walks around Venice.

  Philip Kitcher

  Venice, Complaining, Genius

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• We know that he gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name, and also his facial features. So Visconti picks up on something interesting. That led me to think about ways of developing further the Aschenbach-Mahler connection.

  Philip Kitcher

  Thinking, Names, Interesting

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Presenting Aschenbach as a composer - based on Mahler - leads to some dreadful scenes (especially those in which Aschenbach is berated by his student), and it surely distorts the character Mann created. Yet, we know that Mann's novella was based on a holiday in Venice he took with his wife and brother, and that while he was there he followed the reports in the German newspapers, describing the dying Mahler's progress as he returned from New York to Vienna.

  Philip Kitcher

  Brother, New York, Holiday

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I felt I should also contrast Visconti's treatment of the novella - usually damned by Mann fans (who typically respect Britten's more "faithful" adaptation). The Visconti film does many quite wonderful things, although there are good reasons for the condemnation.

  Philip Kitcher

  Faithful, Fans, Doe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Both Proust and Joyce record the ways in which human perspectives can be transformed. In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus is constantly undergoing epiphanies, but their effects are transitory: the new synthetic complex quickly falls apart. Proust's characters, by contrast, often achieve lasting changes of perspective.

  Philip Kitcher

  Fall, Character, Lasting Change

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The moment in which the narrator, reaching for his boots, becomes vividly and lastingly aware of the finality of his grandmother's death is another such moment. It would be interesting to explore Proust's great novel from the perspective of seeing how stable synthetic complexes are formed and modified.

  Philip Kitcher

  Grandmother, Interesting, Perspective

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• As I read Mann in German for the first time, the full achievement - both literary and philosophical - of Death in Venice struck me forcefully, so that, when I was invited to give the Schoff Lectures at Columbia, the opportunity to reflect on the contrasts between novella and opera seemed irresistible.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Opportunity, Venice

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Aschenbach is not only a projection of Mann in the obvious ways - same daily routines, author of the works Mann had planned - nor even in sharing his author's aspirations, doubts, and sexual identity. His watchword, "Durchhalten!" [persevere, keep going] could be Mann's own.

  Philip Kitcher

  Doubt, Identity, Way

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I suggest in my own discussion of this episode, Mann invites us to set the attempt to philosophize about his predicament in the context of Aschenbach's life. The literary presentation thus adds to the naked philosophical skeleton.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Skeletons, Naked

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Mann's Death in Venice actually contains a snippet of philosophy about the second question, when Aschenbach, collapsed in the plaza, engages in his quasi-Socratic, anti-Socratic, ruminations.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Venice, Rumination

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There are actually two separate issues here. The first is whether (as ancient philosophers and Nietzsche assume) only the privileged elite can live a worthwhile life. The second is whether it's possible to fulfill the roles of both serious artist and upstanding citizen. It seems to me that philosophy can dissect both questions, by delineating clearly the anatomy of the good life and the structural conditions of the roles.

  Philip Kitcher

  Good Life, Philosophy, Artist

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• First, my frame of reference for the Britten opera shifted. I'd always thought of Britten's approach in Death in Venice as another exploration of the plight of the individual whose aspirations are at odds with those of the surrounding community: his last opera returning to the themes of Peter Grimes. As I read and listened and thought, however, Billy Budd came to seem a more appropriate foil for Death in Venice.

  Philip Kitcher

  Odds, Venice, Community

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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