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The species of anti-Enlightenment religion we find among evangelical protestants is far more impoverished, anti-intellectual and downright wretched.

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
Wretched
Anti
Enlightenment
Species
Intellectual
Downright
Among
Impoverished
Religion
Protestants
Find
Evangelical

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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Marx is thought of as an implacable foe of capitalism. But go back and read the first section of the Communist Manifesto. Notice how it contains a paean of praise for the way capitalism and the bourgeoisie have both enriched the human powers of production and also enabled us to see with clear vision the nature of human society and human history.
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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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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I don't think Kant's theory looks bad to people except insofar as they have misunderstood it (for instance, as heartless and ironheaded, or as committed to an absurd metaphysical conception of freedom that violates Kant's own philosophy).
Allen W. Wood
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Since the Enlightenment, popular religion has rejected the Enlightenment path and transformed itself into a bastion of resistance against reason.
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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Kant considers belief in God and immortality to be items of faith because he relates faith to the pursuit of ends - in this case, the highest good.
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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In general, those who defend capitalism are basically out of touch with reality.
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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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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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
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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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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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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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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