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Philosophy is about getting the facts right, but it is also about thinking rightly about them. Philosophy is more about the latter than the former.

Allen W. Wood

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Allen W. Wood
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: January 1
Academic
Philosopher
Professor
University Teacher
Seattle
Washington
Allen William Wood
Right
Thinking
Rightly
Latter
Former
Philosophy
Getting
Facts
Also

More quotes by Allen W. Wood

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It is both theoretically mistaken and morally wrong to regard others as objects of investigation rather than partners in free rational communication.
Allen W. Wood
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For the utilitarian, there is a fact of the matter about the good (the general happiness, or whatever conception of the good the utilitarian adopts) and about which actions or moral rules would contribute to maximizing the good. For the rational intuitionist, there are truths about which actions should be done and not done.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant thinks of judgment as a special faculty or talent of the mind, not reducible to discursive reasoning but cultivated through experience and practice.
Allen W. Wood
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Marx's writings still have something to teach us about capitalism. They have little or nothing to teach us about any alternatives to it. Anyone who had read them knows that.
Allen W. Wood
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Many who are committed to reason and science have turned against religion altogether and treat it with fear and contempt.
Allen W. Wood
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Karl Marx left it to others to find the way beyond capitalism to a higher form of society. He saw his role as giving them as accurate a theory as he could of how capitalism works, which would also show them the reasons why it needs to be abolished and replaced by a freer and more human form of society.
Allen W. Wood
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Descartes recommended that we distrust the senses and rely on the ... use of our intellect.
Allen W. Wood
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I wish that our culture could retain the symbolism and emotional power of traditional religion while combining it with reason and science and using the combination to enhance our humanity rather than impoverishing it by choosing the one side or the other.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant takes a free will to be a being or substance with the power to cause a state of the world (or a whole series of such states) spontaneously or from itself.
Allen W. Wood
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It is often difficult to know about one's own era which philosophers in it will be remembered as the most important ones, but I think it is already clear that John Rawls is the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century.
Allen W. Wood
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I think it is clear that what we ought to do has to be independent of our decisions about what to do, and independent of any procedures we might use in making such decisions.
Allen W. Wood
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We can establish empirical criteria for free actions, and investigate human actions on the presupposition we are free.
Allen W. Wood
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We can never prove that we are free or integrate our freedom in any way into our objective conception of the causal order of nature.
Allen W. Wood
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We commit not only theoretical error but also moral wrong in objectifying ourselves or other rational beings, ignoring their capacities for free action and communicative interaction with us.
Allen W. Wood
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Freedom is a permanent problem for us, both unavoidable and insoluble.
Allen W. Wood
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What are we to think of the shortsightedness of the great mass of people who are content to do nothing about it, and even worse, the greed or venality of the rich and powerful who deliberately bar the way to human survival?
Allen W. Wood
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I could identify for virtually every important figure in the history of modern continental philosophy an idea (or more than one) absolutely central to that philosopher's thought, whose original author was Fichte.
Allen W. Wood
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Fichte would identify all states of our minds with states of our body - perhaps not merely of our brain, but the whole body as an acting organism.
Allen W. Wood
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Capitalism has proven to be a far more terrible system than Marx could ever bring himself to imagine. Those who are so deluded as to find something good in it, or even feel loyalty toward it, are its most pitiful victims.
Allen W. Wood
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It is probably not a good idea to ask someone to expound a position they do not accept and do not feel they even fully understand.
Allen W. Wood