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Philosophy has to be enquiring it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.

Julian Baggini

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Julian Baggini
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 9
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Authority
Establishing
Philosophy
Methods
Faith
Truths
Reason
Acceptance
Nothing
Method
Take
Argument
Blind
Based
Enquiring

More quotes by Julian Baggini

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When you try to cool down hot emotions, what tends to happen is that you end up either repressing them or losing them altogether. Neither is desirable. Without emotion, much social interaction loses its meaning, or changes for the worse.
Julian Baggini
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The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives.
Julian Baggini
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There are many things you shouldn't measure. Don't, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!
Julian Baggini
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The mark of a mature, psychologically healthy mind is indeed the ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only as much as there really is. Uncertainty is no virtue when the facts are clear, and ambiguity is mere obfuscation when more precise terms are applicable.
Julian Baggini
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If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately.
Julian Baggini
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I don't believe in God because certain reasons and arguments weigh more heavily in my mind than others, not because I have willfully decided to reject my creator, as many religious people seem to think. I could no more simply decide to believe in God than I could decide to like beetroot, just like that.
Julian Baggini
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We do wrong willfully when we fail to think hard about whether what we're doing is right.
Julian Baggini
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Justice can only be dispensed when you have all the facts in front of you.
Julian Baggini
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It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.
Julian Baggini
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If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities.
Julian Baggini
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The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy.
Julian Baggini
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The reason Buddhism can be so naturalised is because, stripped of its supernatural elements, its core teachings can be giving a sound, secular philosophical interpretation. In other words, it becomes a religion acceptable to the contemporary, naturalistic mind only when it ceases to be a religion.
Julian Baggini
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It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim never say never is one of the most important in ethics.
Julian Baggini
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Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing.
Julian Baggini
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Constructive complaint requires only two things: that what you are complaining about should be different, and that it can be different. It sounds simple, but too often our protests fail this test.
Julian Baggini
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I am only me for practical purposes.
Julian Baggini
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Stress means something different if it is the result of rewarding work rather than struggling to keep the family out of debt.
Julian Baggini
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Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality.
Julian Baggini
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Morality is more than possible without God, it is entirely independent of him.
Julian Baggini
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I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.
Julian Baggini