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Not only our moral life, but even our use of theoretical reason - on which we rely in rationally inquiring into nature - presupposes that we are free.

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
Nature
Presupposes
Reason
Rationally
Even
Inquiring
Life
Theoretical
Rely
Moral
Free
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More quotes by Allen W. Wood

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If being iron headed is to be lacking such feelings, then Kant's position is that an ironheaded person could not be a moral agent because such a person would not be rational.
Allen W. Wood
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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
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We totally misunderstand both his aims and his contribution if we try to read into Marx some anticipation of either the modest successes or the disastrous failures of those who later thought they were acting in his name.
Allen W. Wood
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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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Until I was a junior in high school, I was a boy scientist type and expected to go into chemistry. Then I discovered the humanities. I read the plays of Shakespeare voraciously, some novels, such as Pasternack's Dr. Zhivago and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and I got into philosophy by reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Allen W. Wood
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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
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The problem is that many who reject Marx do not read him, or read him only by bringing prejudices to their reading that prevent them from understanding him.
Allen W. Wood
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We can't coherently deny, or even decline to affirm, that we are free.
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 does not think that the silly commandment universalize your maxims is the be-all and end-all of ethics or that it provides us with some sort of general decision procedure that is supposed to tell us what to do under all circumstances.
Allen W. Wood
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Those who employ their modest talents as best they can do make a contribution to a better human future.
Allen W. Wood
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Fichte is a necessary step to both Hegel and Marx.
Allen W. Wood
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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
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Virtues consist not only of acting in certain ways, but in ways of caring and feeling.
Allen W. Wood
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The relation of the law to the self is only a helpful way of thinking about the law, that helps us better understand its validity for us.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant attempted to work out a view of religion and religious belief according to which existing religions could be brought into harmony with modernity, science and reason.
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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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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Fichte thinks that the mutual recognition of one another as free beings belongs among the transcendental conditions of self-consciousness itself.
Allen W. Wood
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Some empirical feelings, such as sympathy, are indispensable parts of certain moral virtues.
Allen W. Wood