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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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Allen W. Wood
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: January 1
Academic
Philosopher
Professor
University Teacher
Seattle
Washington
Allen William Wood
Prove
Freedom
Free
Causal
Order
Integrate
Nature
Integrating
Way
Objective
Never
Conception
Objectives

More quotes by Allen W. Wood

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The problem I see with utilitarianism, or any form of consequentialism, is not that it gets the wrong answers to moral questions. I think just about any moral theory, worked out intelligently, and applied with good judgment, would get just about the same results as any other.
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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We can't coherently deny, or even decline to affirm, that we are free.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant has been famous for his rejection of eudaimonism, but I think Kantian ethics has a great deal in common with Aristotle, and some things in common with Stoicism as well. The traditions tend, I believe, to talk past each other when it comes to happiness or eudaimonia.
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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It would be nice, wouldn't it? if we could get comfortable about the problem of freedom. Kant thinks that we can't.
Allen W. Wood
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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
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Popular religion since the time of Kant and Fichte has gone in a direction they tried to prevent and that has been disastrous for the humanity both of believers and of the rest of us. Look at the role of religion in Republican presidential primaries if you need any confirmation of this last statement.
Allen W. Wood
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No theory about our bodies as mere objects of observation and calculation (as distinct from partners in communicative interaction, assumed to be free) can comprehend human nature.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant thinks that a free will is a will under moral laws and that freedom and the moral law are distinct thoughts that reciprocally imply each other. Fichte thinks they are the same thought.
Allen W. Wood
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We can make mistakes about what we ought to do, and these are not the same as making bad decisions about what to do.
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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We are generally forced to choose one way or the other of distancing ourselves from Kant. I suppose I tend to choose the irreligious way. But I regret that Kant's path has not been followed.
Allen W. Wood
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Sometimes when a philosopher's views are widely rejected by the world, the fault is not with the philosopher but with the world.
Allen W. Wood
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Utilitarians are usually empiricists who think they can solve every problem by accumulating enough empirical facts. They do not realize that thinking as well as experience is necessary to know anything or get anything right.
Allen W. Wood
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People are often most proud of precisely those things of which they should most be ashamed.
Allen W. Wood
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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
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Kant thinks we can show that there is no contradiction in supposing we are free.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant is not saying - about freedom or any other subject - anything of the form: Not-p but we must assume that p. That's close to self-contradictory, like Moore's paradox: p, but I don't believe that p.
Allen W. Wood
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Since we cannot know too much about the long term effects of our particular lives, and since success and fame are not good measures of the value of what we have done, it should be enough for any of us that as far as we can tell, in some small way we have made humanity's future better rather than worse.
Allen W. Wood