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In fact people do not know enough about themselves and what is good for them to form a sufficiently definite conception of the general happiness (or whatever the end is) to establish definite rules for its pursuit.
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
People
Whatever
Happiness
Sufficiently
Fact
Establish
Facts
Definite
Ends
Conception
Form
Pursuit
Enough
Rules
Good
General
More quotes by Allen W. Wood
Kant certainly was sympathetic with the metaphysical tradition of rational theology that he criticized.
Allen W. Wood
The moral law is simply the way we think our own freedom as self-determination.
Allen W. Wood
We can treat human responses to cognitions as involving law-like connections grounded on free choices which show themselves in our character.
Allen W. Wood
Surely the world will be a better place, at least marginally, if people have a better understanding of Kant and Hegel, if Marx's thought its studied and appreciated, if people gain a better understanding of Fichte, whose philosophy is far more important than people realize.
Allen W. Wood
Many who are committed to reason and science have turned against religion altogether and treat it with fear and contempt.
Allen W. Wood
As long as the Republican party exists in its present form, our nation cannot endure as a free society. Still worse, under their policies the human race is being rapidly propelled toward its extinction.
Allen W. Wood
In the mid-1960s, as hard to believe as it may be now, choosing to go into academic philosophy was not an imprudent career choice. There were lots of academic jobs in philosophy then.
Allen W. Wood
When Marx, in the Theses on Feuerbach, says that only idealism up to now has understood the active side of material Praxis, what he says is more true of Fichte than of any other philosopher in the classical German tradition.
Allen W. Wood
I think the term Kantian constructivism as an oxymoron. Kant was a constructivist about mathematics, but not about ethics.
Allen W. Wood
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
I think the contribution people make is not proportionate to their fame or success. In fact, I think the relation is often inverse.
Allen W. Wood
Kant did think he had a moral route back to rational faith in God, for those who need it, and he thought that at some level, we all do need something like it.
Allen W. Wood
We can establish empirical criteria for free actions, and investigate human actions on the presupposition we are free.
Allen W. Wood
What Smith and Marx have in common is that they were both philosophers of great vision and perceptiveness, deep humanity, and a sense of social reality that has been lost in the abstractly formalistic economic theories that have dominated the field since the last third of the nineteenth century.
Allen W. Wood
Kant does not regard freedom as an item of faith because it is too basic to our agency to be related to any end.
Allen W. Wood
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
We cannot predict the effects of our actions, especially our collective actions over generations or centuries, to use instrumental reasoning toward these big final ends to tell us what we ought to do.
Allen W. Wood
Clearly no working class movement ever came about that was able to do what Marx was hoping for.
Allen W. Wood
People are often most proud of precisely those things of which they should most be ashamed.
Allen W. Wood
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
