Metaphysical Quotes - Page 7

• The disparagement of empirical evidence in favor of a metaphysical world of illusion has its origin in the conflicy between the emancipated individual of bourgeois society and his fate within that society.

  Max Horkheimer

  Fate, World, Favors

  Max Horkheimer (1972). “Critical Theory: Selected Essays”, p.138, A&C Black

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• If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men…. There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern with eternity.

  Hannah Arendt

  Loss, Men, Space

  Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.55, University of Chicago Press

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• Professors rarely speak of the place of eros or the erotic in our classrooms. Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is present, and not the body.

  Bell Hooks

  Believe, Philosophical, Erotic

  Bell Hooks (2014). “Teaching To Transgress”, p.199, Routledge

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• The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.

  Edward Abbey

  Gnarly, World, Knobs

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.9, RosettaBooks

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• ... human free will implies God's prior decision not to tamper with the metaphysical base of that free will. It also implies man's ability to reject the persuasion God uses to influence that free will while leaving its metaphysical base intact! Persuasion, not compulsion, is what even He must rely upon! And persuasion, by its very definition, must be resistible!

  Don Richardson

  Men, Rely Upon, Decision

  Don Richardson (1984). “Eternity in Their Hearts”, Baker Publishing Group

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• For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Suicide, Sex, Body

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• Small objects, like the Walkman first and then the iPod, create bubbles of space around us that enable us to have a metaphysical space that is much bigger than our physical space.

  Paola Antonelli

  Technology, Small Objects, Ipods

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• There is something about the light, the heat (physical and perhaps metaphysical), the vibrancy of street life, and the rawness and disjointedness of much of the tropical world that has moved and disturbed me - in places where the indigenous culture is often transformed by an external northern culture (sometimes my own... I suspect that one has a few serious creative obsessions in life. I certainly cannot seem to escape this one.

  Alex Webb

  Light, Creative, Culture

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• I have these obsessions that I do not completely understand, with the deep mark, with the ruptured surface, with scars and traces, traces that human beings are leaving on the earth. It is not a comment on the environment... it is metaphysical.

  Sophie Ristelhueber

  Leaving, Earth, Scar

  Sophie Ristelhueber, Cheryl A. Brutvan, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2001). “Details of the world”, Museum of Fine Arts Boston

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• Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

  Albert Camus

  Order, History, Creative

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• From a pure metaphysical perspective, there is no world outside ourselves. So, at the deepest level, the state of the planet is more a reflection of the consciousness of mankind than the consciousness of mankind is a reflection of world events.

  Marianne Williamson

  Reflection, Perspective, Events

  Source: rayhemachandra.com

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• We create our own reality because of our inner emotional - our subconscious - reality draws us into those situations from which we learn. We experience it as strange things happening to us (and) we meet the people in our lives that we need to learn from. And so we create these circumstances at a very deep metaphysical and subconscious level.

  Edgar Mitchell

  Reality, Emotional, People

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• The pictures achieve something rarely articulated about the metaphysical state of swimming: The body, immersed, feels amplified, heavier and lighter at the same time. Weightless yet stronger.

  Leanne Shapton

  Swimming, Stronger, Body

  Leanne Shapton (2012). “Swimming Studies”, p.188, Penguin

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• A healthy society is life-affirming. Homosexuality is the metaphysical negation of life. Incapable of reproduction (giving life), it can replenish its numbers only by seduction.

  Don Feder

  Numbers, Giving, Healthy

  Don Feder (1993). “A Jewish conservative looks at pagan America”, Vital Issues Pr

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• It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Past, Thinking, Law

  R. Buckminster Fuller (1982). “Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking”, p.278, Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

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• Monotheistic religions in the West have tended to conflate having a general orientation in life, having a specific theory of the world, having a sense of the positive meaningfulness of one's existence, and having a fixed set of rules for behavior, but these elements are in principle separable. ... The "metaphysical need," ... both Marx and Nietzsche held, is a historical phenomenon that arises under determinate circumstances, and could be expected to disappear under other circumstances that we could relatively easily envisage.

  Raymond Geuss

  Historical, Principles, Needs

  "Philosophy and Real Politics". Book by Raymond Geuss, 2008.

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• There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Fall, Physicians, Dull

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.801, Modern Library

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• If we want to make sense of the possibility of successful inductive inference, and if we want to explain the possibility of laws of nature, we will need to appeal to something like natural kinds. This is, to be sure, a metaphysical commitment, but it is a metaphysical commitment that is implicit in science, as I see it.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Commitment, Successful, Law

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• love is so very subtle an essence, such an indefinable metaphysical marvel, that its due force, though very cruelly felt by the sufferer himself, is never clearly understood by those who look on at its torments and wonder why he takes the common fever so badly.

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Love Is, Essence, Fever

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon (2015). “Lady Audley's Secret”, p.344, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• The relevant features of scientific practice often have mundane explanations which don't point to any deep metaphysical moral. (Thus it would simply be messy and pointless for the chemists to essay physical reductions, or for the biologists to offer number-free explanations. It's a weird kind of science-worship that views these practical considerations as clues to the nature of reality.)

  David Papineau

  Reality, Numbers, Views

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy, fitted for all persons and all dispositions; and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon, which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom.

  David Hume

  Philosophy, Air, Giving

  David Hume (1854). “The Philosophical Works of David Hume: Including All the Essays, and Exhibiting the More Important Alterations and Corrections in the Successive Editions Pub. by the Author”, p.9

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• It was the fashion of the times to attribute every remarkable event to the particular will of the Deity; the alterations of nature were connected, by an invisible chain, with the moral and metaphysical opinions of the human mind; and the most sagacious divines could distinguish, according to the colour of their respective prejudices, that the establishment of heresy tended to produce an earthquake, or that a deluge was the inevitable consequence of the progress of sin and error.

  Edward Gibbon

  Fashion, Earthquakes, Errors

  Edward Gibbon (2016). “THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (All 6 Volumes): From the Height of the Roman Empire, the Age of Trajan and the Antonines - to the Fall of Byzantium; Including a Review of the Crusades, and the State of Rome during the Middle Ages”, p.1209, e-artnow

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• The indispensability argument says (roughly) that if you have ample reason to accept an empirical scientific theory that makes indispensable use of mathematics, and that theory entails that numbers exist, then you have ample reason to accept that numbers exist. The argument affirms the antecedent of this conditional, and concludes that you have ample reason to believe that numbers exist. What is striking about this argument is that it seems to show that the empirical reasons that suffice for accepting a scientific theory also suffice for accepting a metaphysical claim.

  Elliott Sober

  Believe, Numbers, Use

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The indispensability argument seeks to assimilate the epistemology of metaphysical statements to the epistemology of statements that are obviously empirical. I think it fails to achieve this goal. The argument does not refute the Carnapian thesis that scientific theories and metaphysical claims differ epistemologically - observations can provide evidence for the former, but not for the latter.

  Elliott Sober

  Thinking, Goal, Doe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but a human wish, intensifying since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation - a wish for power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another... Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the act of reproduction.

  Stanley Cavell

  Photography, Long, Wish

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