Simon Blackburn quotes:

Nobody ever inferred from the multiple infirmities of Windows that Bill Gates was infinitely benevolent, omniscient, and able to fix everything.

[...] like any human practices, those of religions are not exempt from ethical questioning. Rituals and rites in groups change behavior, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. For the madness of crowds is a very close cousin to the fervor or congregations and the martial spirit of armies.

The absolutist trumpets his plain vision; the relativist sees only someone who is unaware of his own spectacles.

Myself, I have never seen a bumper sticker saying " Hate if you Love Jesus ", but I sometimes wonder why not. It would be a good slogan for the religious Right.

The word " philosophy " carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, unworldly, weird.

Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility.

Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction.

In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual.

Paradigms can be asked to show their worth, an some of them do not stand up.

Perhaps to restore human freedom we should deny determinism ?

The absolutist takes himself to read nature in her very own language, but the relativist insists that nature does not speak, and we hear only what we have elected to hear.

When the hoary old question of nature versus nurture comes around, sides form quickly.

A god that created the world and then walked off the site leaving it to its own devices is not a fit object of worship, nor a source of moral authority.

An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat shop or the concentration camp and the death march.

Chance is as relentless as necessity.

If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma , are sometimes consoling.

Induction is the process of taking things within our experience to be representative of the world outside our experience. It is a process of projection or extrapolation.

It can seem an amazing fact that laws of nature keep on holding, that the frame of nature does not fall apart.

It is sometimes said that one of the casualties of the general suspicion and mistrust that permeated the old Soviet Union was that the distinction between truth and other motivations to believe tended to break down. Upon hearing a purported piece of information, the reaction was not 'Is this true?' but 'Why is this person saying this? - What machinations or manipulations are going on here?' The question of truth did not, as it were, have the social space in which it could breath.

People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.

Respect, of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way to garden.

Since there is no telling in advance where it may lead, reflection can be seen as dangerous .

The absolutist lays down the law, but the relativist hears only roaring and bawling. Or, when the relativist voice, as it is heard from philosophers such as Nietzsche or James, itself starts to grate and sounds shrill, as it often does, and when the relativist then offers concessions, the absolutist hears only insincerity. The war of words can often turn into a dialogue of the deaf, and this too if part of its power to arouse outrage and fury.

The absolutist parades his good solid grounding in observation, reason, objectivity, truth and fact; the relativist sees only fetishes.

The absolutist takes himself to speak to the ages, with the tongue of angels, but the relativist hears only one version among others, the subjectivity of the here and now.

The fantasist in whom the reality barrier has broken down is unreliable, believing things when he should not, and telling things as true when they are not.

The gods we make in our own image are tribal gods. They tell you how very, very little you should tolerate outsiders, who are less favoured of the Lord. Amazingly, there are no recorded cases of the holy man going up the mountain and finding that it's the others who are right. It always turns out that God wants unbelievers to suffer, and what could be more noble than to help him a little? When religion rules, toleration disappears, for you cannot cherish the verdict of death to the infidels, yet also tolerate those who disagree - for those are the very same infidels...

The scientific world is to be less threatening than was feared. It is to made safe for human beings. And the way to make it safe is to reflect on the foundation of knowledge.

There are normal times when it is wholly admirable to be steadfast, resolute, unconflicted, and therefore when integrity is unmistakenly a virtue. The person of integrity knows what to do, and does it. But as we have been exploring, there are also times when certainty and single-mindedness indicate something less admirable: a deafness to voices that should be heard or a blindness to aspects of a situation that need to be considered.

There may be rhetoric about the socially constructed nature of Western science, but wherever it matters, there is no alternative. There are no specifically Hindu or Taoist designs for mobile phones, faxes or televisions. There are no satellites based on feminist alternatives to quantum theory. Even that great public sceptic about the value of science, Prince Charles, never flies a helicopter burning homeopathically diluted petrol, that is, water with only a memory of benzine molecules, maintained by a schedule derived from reading tea leaves, and navigated by a crystal ball.

This doctrine, that of the ghost in the machine, strictly separates the mind or soul from the body. And by doing so it takes the soul outside the sphere of mechanical or scientific explanation. It splits the world of the mind from the world of science. It is often supposed to protect our cherished free will.

Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there.

We can grieve over lost powers and memories, or rejoice over gained knowledge and maturity, according to taste.

Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?

Wittgenstein imagined that the philosopher was like a therapist whose task was to put problems finally to rest, and to cure us ofbeing bewitched by them. So we are told to stop, to shut off lines of inquiry, not to find things puzzling nor to seek explanations. This is intellectual suicide.