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There's not much to be done about the impossibility. One must instead get rid of the desire.

Ernest Sosa

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Ernest Sosa
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: June 17
Philosopher
University Teacher
Cardenas
Done
Must
Much
Impossibility
Instead
Desire

More quotes by Ernest Sosa

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There isn't a formal definition of success.
Ernest Sosa
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The success of an archery shot may bring food to the hunter's starving family, or may constitute a horrible murder. But these outcomes are irrelevant to the assessment of that shot as a hunter-archery shot, as an attempt to hit prey without running excessive risk of failure.
Ernest Sosa
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I am mainly concerned with unqualified knowledge, by contrast with the varieties of expert knowledge: scientific knowledge of various sorts, legal knowledge, medically expert knowledge, and so on.
Ernest Sosa
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Lowered reliability obviously yields a lesser competence. But lowered breadth does so as well.
Ernest Sosa
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If the agent aims to make the attempt if and only if it would be apt, then a distinctive element of risk assessment becomes relevant: How probably would the agent succeed in attempting that fuller end?
Ernest Sosa
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When you dream, your perceptual (and other) competence is affected. You are then unable to get it right competently with the beliefs in your dream.
Ernest Sosa
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Flourishing is properly the main human end, and flourishing is activity of soul that succeeds in accord with virtue.
Ernest Sosa
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It is bad to want something that not even God could attain, especially when the impossibility becomes obvious.
Ernest Sosa
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A hunter archer can also be out to shock by taking crazy shots. What makes his shots crazy is set by excessive risk, judged by hunting-archery standards, which would tend to draw agreement from knowledgeable observers.
Ernest Sosa
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The correctness of much testimonially based belief is no more than minimally creditable to the believer.
Ernest Sosa
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We can pursue the Cartesian project without restricting ourselves to theology and a priori faculties. A better, broader perspective is properly sought if we pursue the project with reliance on science broadly and on our full span of epistemic competences, including the empirical as well as the a priori.
Ernest Sosa
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Philosophers do need to have intuitions of various specific sorts: ethical, metaphysical, etc., depending on their targeted subject matter. And they must make intuition reports, as they record the contents of their intuitions. But they need not go into whether an intuition has been enjoyed.
Ernest Sosa
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The data on which philosophical theorizing is based are rather the intuited contents themselves, concerning the various thought experiments. At least that is so outside the epistemology of the a priori.
Ernest Sosa
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You attain aptness by judging while in good shape and in a good situation (good light, good distance, etc.), through the exercise of good barn-sorting epistemic competence.
Ernest Sosa
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We must distinguish judging from guessing.
Ernest Sosa
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When the risk of failure is too high, the right choice is to forbear.
Ernest Sosa
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One does not avoid incompetence if one makes an attempt whose likelihood of success is too low. This seems little more than analytic: when the performance is in a domain that imposes standards of risk, attempts may or may not meet such standards. And the relevant competence of agents then includes reliably enough meeting those standards.
Ernest Sosa
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Animal knowledge is metaphysically constituted by apt belief, by belief whose correctness manifests the believer's epistemic competence, a relevant disposition to get it right on the matter at hand when one tries to do so.
Ernest Sosa
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Through our perceptual systems, we represent our surroundings, aiming to do so accurately, where the aiming is functional or teleological, rather than intentional. And the same goes for our functional beliefs. Through our judgments, however, we do intentionally, even consciously, attempt to get it right.
Ernest Sosa
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In order to qualify as a judgment, an affirmation must aim at getting it right aptly, through competence, and not just through a lucky guess.
Ernest Sosa