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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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Julian Baggini
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 9
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Makes
True
Alternatives
Reason
Philosophical
Better
Convinced
Good
Embrace
World
Position
Least
Sense
More quotes by Julian Baggini
The truly humble feel the ground beneath their feet every day and do not only become aware of it when held aloft or pushed down to their knees.
Julian Baggini
When you try to translate any kind of real-life problem into a neat logical form, you're almost always simplifying it. We need a kind of blend - we need to use not just tools of logic, which are important and valuable - I'm not denying that, but also tools of judgement, and of inductive and abductive reasoning which can also inform.
Julian Baggini
No one has ever understood anything better by assuming that there is no reason for why it is the way it is.
Julian Baggini
We do wrong willfully when we fail to think hard about whether what we're doing is right.
Julian Baggini
I think that a lot of social movements, political movements, powerful ones - certainly they form, collectively, an idea of the truth which becomes hard to question. It becomes a dogma, and from the inside it starts to look like common sense.
Julian Baggini
There are many things you shouldn't measure. Don't, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!
Julian Baggini
People do care where their food, or other goods, comes from, not merely if the price is right. And that means no business can afford to ignore the impacts their buying practices have on producers and on the perceptions and choices of consumers.
Julian Baggini
The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions for followers.
Julian Baggini
Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing.
Julian Baggini
Stress means something different if it is the result of rewarding work rather than struggling to keep the family out of debt.
Julian Baggini
Science works because the phenomenon being described can be relied on to remain the same. Even in quantum physics, where phenomena are changed by observation, the way in which observation interferes is regular and falls within a limited range of possibilities. Human culture, however, has the nasty habit of never staying the same for very long.
Julian Baggini
Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality.
Julian Baggini
Economics is uncertain because its fundamental subject matter is not money but human action. That's why economics is not the dismal science, it's no science at all.
Julian Baggini
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
One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.
Julian Baggini
No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch today. You can't decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you've made in your life to date.
Julian Baggini
Waiting is so unusual that many of us can't stand in a queue for 30 seconds without getting out our phones to check for messages or to Google something.
Julian Baggini
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
Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in ways that can never be put right.
Julian Baggini
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
