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Freedom is a permanent problem for us, both unavoidable and insoluble.

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
Problem
Insoluble
Unavoidable
Permanent
Freedom

More quotes by Allen W. Wood

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It was an important part of Mendelssohn's philosophical and religious view that the traditional rationalist proofs for God's existence should be sound an convincing. Kant thought they were not. So Kant's critique was world-shaking for Mendelssohn.
Allen W. Wood
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Reason necessarily expresses itself through emotions and emotions are healthy only insofar as they are expressions of reason.
Allen W. Wood
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Being aware of truths about what is good or right or about what we ought to do is not the same as deciding what to do. Nor can the former truths be derived from decisions about what to do, or about procedures for making such decisions, unless these procedures themselves rest in some way on the apprehension of truths about what we ought to do.
Allen W. Wood
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When consequentialist theories are developed in terms of an equally shallow psychology of the good - such as a crude form of hedonism - the results can sometimes strike sensible people as revolting and inhuman. People can be reduced to simple repositories of positive or negative sensory states, and their humanity is lost sight of entirely.
Allen W. Wood
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Notice that tearing oneself out of the insensible state is the opposite of remaining in it the man who is beneficent from duty nevertheless acts with feelings, if not with empirical inclinations.
Allen W. Wood
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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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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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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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Those who see Smith as a defender of capitalism - as it existed in Marx's day, or as it exists today - show above all that they are not living in the real world. They are behaving as though the undeveloped form of capitalism Smith studied is still with us.
Allen W. Wood
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I am a one-trick pony. But I have worked hard at something I would have liked to do even if I weren't paid a penny for it, and made a good living at it. You can't be luckier than that in this life, no matter who you are or what you do.
Allen W. Wood
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There is a tradition of modernist theology arising out of post-Kantian thought - Fichte was the real father of it, but Schleiermacher and others also developed it - which might have more promise if it had greater influence on popular religion.
Allen W. Wood
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Kant can provide, and has provided, a good model for philosophers to think about the relation of metaphysics to science and scientific methodology.
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 don't think Kant's approach to religion is any longer viable in its original form. But that does not mean it is simply wrong or that we cannot learn from it.
Allen W. Wood
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Our procedures of deliberation are not ways of finding out independent moral truths but instead ways of constructing these truths, in the process of deciding what to do.
Allen W. Wood
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It is a culturally interesting (but also deeply depressing) fact that many religious claims seem to retain their emotional power for believers only if taken in ways that are intellectually unsupportable and even morally contemptible.
Allen W. Wood
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We usually can't know how, and we probably should not even ask, how our lives contribute to a better world.
Allen W. Wood
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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
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Kant says that we may regard ourselves as legislator of the moral law, and consider ourselves as its author, but not that we are legislators or authors of the law.
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