Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
There are many critics whose work I greatly admire. Even though I diverge from T.J. Reed in several important ways, I've learned greatly from his writings on Mann.
Philip Kitcher
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Philip Kitcher
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 20
Philosopher
University Teacher
London
England
Philip Stuart Kitcher
Writing
Admire
Even
Critics
Diverge
Work
Whose
Mann
Way
Learned
Reed
Ways
Reeds
Though
Writings
Many
Greatly
Important
Several
More quotes by Philip Kitcher
So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.
Philip Kitcher
I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics.
Philip Kitcher
Britten's opera tends to see things in simpler terms. It portrays an Aschenbach who wants a richer form of sexual fulfillment, and who is hemmed in by the social conventions to which he subscribes. But Visconti's use of the Mahler Adagietto is perfect for what I take to be Aschenbach's sexual desire.
Philip Kitcher
It's a very bad idea for scientific conclusions to be accepted because they fit with the political values of a group of researchers.
Philip Kitcher
Most influential of all is the philosopher Stanley Cavell, and a younger generation of philosophers who have attempted to follow his pioneering work in thinking about literature philosophically.
Philip Kitcher
Because the problems are objective features of the human situation - social animals without the capacities for making social life come easily - ethics is objectively constrained. It's not the case that anything goes.
Philip Kitcher
I don't think readers of Mann have overlooked the fact that he was a great ironist, but they have tended to see the irony in particular parts of the novella, and to miss it in others.
Philip Kitcher
I didn't know that Mahler would come to play so large a role, nor that music and literature and philosophy can interinanimate one another in the way I've come to think they do in this case.
Philip Kitcher
Any writer who could handle all these different voices would deserve high praise, but to do so without any sense of jarring or incoherence is an extraordinary accomplishment.
Philip Kitcher
The theory of evolution explains to us what our ancestry has been. It does not explain away our worth. Why should we be afraid to learn more about what we are?
Philip Kitcher
Wilhelmine Germany was hostile to the expression of same-sex love - and, of course, Mann would have known of the fate of Oscar Wilde. His early reading of Platen's poetry, and, probably when he was in his early twenties, of Platen's diaries, introduced him to a form of sexual expression he found profoundly congenial. It's not quite Platonic.
Philip Kitcher
For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every word in it has three score and ten toptypsical meanings - an exaggeration, of course, but an important reminder to readers who like their fiction definite.
Philip Kitcher
Many of the greatest works of philosophy seem to me to be valuable not because of their arguments, but because they offer us perspectives that open up new possibilities. They show us how we might start in different places, and not buy into the assumptions tacitly made on the first pages of the philosophical works that have influenced us.
Philip Kitcher
Ethical inquiry has always been motivated by the aim of improving human conduct. It doesn't follow from that that the goal is to produce a complete rule book that would be applicable to all cases.
Philip Kitcher
If the research agenda reflects market forces, the problems of the poor are likely to be even more neglected than they already are.
Philip Kitcher
The point of philosophy, as I see it, is to change thinking, and thereby to change the conversation.
Philip Kitcher
I felt I should also contrast Visconti's treatment of the novella - usually damned by Mann fans (who typically respect Britten's more faithful adaptation). The Visconti film does many quite wonderful things, although there are good reasons for the condemnation.
Philip Kitcher
It is hard to hide our genes completely. However devoted someone may be to the privacy of his genotype, others with enough curiosity and knowledge can draw conclusions from the phenotype he presents and from the traits of his relatives.
Philip Kitcher
I'm very suspicious of the idea of a final theory in natural science, and the thought of a complete system of ethical rules seems even more dubious.
Philip Kitcher
I would like to undermine the stereotype of strict philosophy. J.L. Austin remarked that, when philosophy is done well, it's all over by the bottom of the first page. I take him to have meant that the real work comes in setting up the problem with which you are dealing, and thus getting your reader to take particular things for granted.
Philip Kitcher