Naturalism Quotes - Page 2

• There are also two Christianities in the world today. There is (1) the Christianity of the New Testament, and there is (2) the Christianity of accommodation to modernism, egalitarianism, niceness, naturalism, pop psychology, secular humanism, relativism, subjectivism, individualism, "Enlightenment" rationalism or postmodern irrationalism. New converts to the first Christianity are constantly amazed and scandalized by finding many of their clergy to be in love with the second and in fear of the first.

  Peter Kreeft

  Egalitarianism, Two, Psychology

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• We're looking for a certain kind of realism or naturalism, and we go about it in different ways, but I think we're all striving for the same end result, which is to capture the patterns of conversations and how people interact in a very realistic way.

  Joe Swanberg

  Thinking, People, Different

  Source: editorial.rottentomatoes.com

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• To accept Naturalism is to reject such entities as Cartesian minds, private visual and tactual spaces, angelic beings and God.

  David Malet Armstrong

  Space, Mind, Accepting

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• What we take ourselves to be doing when we think about what is the case or how we should act is something that cannot be reconciled with a reductive naturalism, for reasons distinct from those that entail the irreducibility of consciousness. It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem....Thought and reasoning are correct or incorrect in virtue of something independent of the thinker's beliefs, and even independent of the community of thinkers to which he belongs. (p. 71)

  Thomas Nagel

  Independent, Thinking, Community

  Thomas Nagel (2012). “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False”, p.72, Oxford University Press

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• [There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.

  William James

  Responsibility, World, Paganism

  William James, Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis (1982). “Essays in Religion and Morality”, p.128, Harvard University Press

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• If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this. ... We call our strategy the "wedge."

  Phillip E. Johnson

  Reality, Challenges, Mind

  "Defeating Darwinism by opening minds" by Phillip E. Johnson, (pp. 91-92), 1997.

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• It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction. . . Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.

  John Dos Passos

  Rams, Fiction, Way

  John Dos Passos (2015). “The Best Times: An Informal Memoir”, p.222, Open Road Media

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• The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life whichdoes not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest.

  Robert Benchley

  Family, Country, Character

  Robert Benchley (1922). “Love Conquers All”

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• My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat--a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Sea

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• In our greatest universities, naturalism - the doctrine that nature is all there is - is the virtually unquestioned assumption that underlies not only natural science but intellectual work of all kinds.

  Philip Johnson

  Scary, Intellectual, Doctrine

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• It would be impossible to accept naturalism itself if we really and consistently believed naturalism. For naturalism is a system of thought. But for naturalism all thoughts are mere events with irrational causes. It is, to me at any rate, impossible to regard the thoughts which make up naturalism in that way and, at the same time, regard them as a real insight into external reality...If it is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Cutting, Events

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.144, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• You can't really judge an actor's abilities by their career, because the business is going to pigeonhole people into whatever turns a profit, and no artist is less in charge of how their work is presented than an actor, the appeal of Vince was that within a great naturalism, he can convey fierce intelligence, complex emotion, and a real warmth married to a real edge, strength and vulnerability and danger and humor. There are essential contradictions at work that makes him fascinating to watch.

  Nic Pizzolatto

  Strength, Real, Artist

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• We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things; the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.

  George Santayana

  Names, Goes On, Action

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana: Character and opinion in the United States. The genteel tradition at bay. Dewey's naturalistic metaphysics. Philosophical heresy”

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• Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

  Philip Johnson

  Mean, Scary, Materialism

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• If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize; just look... and paint what you see until the canvas ends.

  David Hockney

  Nature, Needs, Looks

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• When I began in the late '90s, I felt quite lonely. We were coming out of the grunge era; it was the time of Corinne Day, The Face, the height of the YBAs, where models had to be "real," on real locations with no lighting. I rebelled against the grungeys - I didn't find the faux naturalism to be representative!

  Miles Aldridge

  Lonely, Real, Grunge

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. The way I write is about life and is quite truthful, and there is a kind of brutal side to the relationship, and to the feelings, that makes it somewhat painful, but I think it's a very intense portrait of the relationship of two people. And a bit about what people feel like when they're alone, because it all takes place in one day, and during the day, they spend a lot of time alone in their different - you get to imagine what their fantasy lives are like.

  Wallace Shawn

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: film.avclub.com

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• It's part of my job to maintain the emotional reality and the naturalism even when the atmosphere is contrived.

  Michel Gondry

  Jobs, Reality, Emotional

  "Michel Gondry on Mood Indigo, special effects, Jim Carrey, and Charlie Kaufman". Interview with A.A. Dowd, www.avclub.com. July 23, 2014.

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• It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present.

  William Gibson

  Writing, Belief, Kind

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• I love a certain kind of acting style that I would call non-American, which tends to be more detail-oriented and less externalized. There's a kind of naturalism that I often find in non-American actors. I also find that quality in the American actors I work with, but I like to bring in those influences creatively.

  Ira Sachs

  Style, Quality, Acting

  Source: www.mtv.com

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• My ethical naturalism sees us as facing the predicament of being social animals without evolved adaptations that make social life easy. The fundamental problem that sparks the ethical project lies in our limited responsiveness to one another. The only way we have to address that problem is through a representative, informed, and engaged conversation.

  Philip Kitcher

  Lying, Animal, Fundamentals

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'm not able to completely escape naturalism. It's very difficult to escape from naturalism without being too dry. That's what I try to do in my cinema - escape naturalism and do films that are, at the same time, realistic but have a lot of fantasy. It's very difficult in cinema to get away from what life is about, from real life. The way the actors work has to be realistic - you can't do Baroque acting - so it's very complicated. And, we're human beings, so we're not perfect. I'm trying to do something different.

  Philippe Garrel

  Real, Perfect, Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I do think that it is legitimate to talk of goals and functions in nature, and that these things can be made sense of in naturalistic terms. There is nothing at all contrary to naturalism in the idea of goal-directed systems.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Thinking, Ideas, Goal

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

  Freeman Dyson

  Science, Imagination, Nomenclature

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• Now, as when I made films that were too autobiographical, the problem is how to escape naturalism. If you tell a strictly true story, because the way you are telling it is false, it creates naturalism. But I become a naturalist. And to become a naturalist is something I avoid. It is fake life - that is the problem. It is because we are familiar with situationnisme, and the critique of the spectacle, et cetera, which is a very fair criticism. People who have no life, and who watch this fake life on a screen - it's a very alienated situation. And that's what situationnisme is about.

  Philippe Garrel

  People, Fake, Criticism

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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