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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

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Philip Kitcher
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 20
Philosopher
University Teacher
London
England
Philip Stuart Kitcher
Different
Praise
Would
Extraordinary
Deserve
Writer
Jarring
High
Incoherence
Voice
Accomplishment
Sense
Voices
Without
Handle

More quotes by Philip Kitcher

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I argue against literal interpretation of religious doctrines. Religions make progress when they emancipate themselves from literalism, and take their doctrinal statements to be metaphors or allegories.
Philip Kitcher
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When I try to outline the history of ethical life, it's sometimes possible to find evidence for a hypothesis about how important transitions actually went. Often, however, that isn't so. There are many facts about human life in the Paleolithic we're never likely to know.
Philip Kitcher
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The hardest problem of all is to appreciate the facts that the poor nations are - quite reasonably - not going to forgo their development, and that they can only afford to develop by consuming fossil fuels.
Philip Kitcher
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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
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In ethics, we don't make progress by discovering pre-existent truths we do so by solving problems.
Philip Kitcher
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The point of philosophy, as I see it, is to change thinking, and thereby to change the conversation.
Philip Kitcher
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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
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For a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language we actually use.
Philip Kitcher
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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
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We know that he gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name, and also his facial features. So Visconti picks up on something interesting. That led me to think about ways of developing further the Aschenbach-Mahler connection.
Philip Kitcher
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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
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Experiments work when, and only when, they call into action cognitive capacities that might reliably deliver the conclusions drawn.
Philip Kitcher
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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
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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
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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
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I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further ethical progress.
Philip Kitcher
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Look at Mann's reading habits, his explicit comments on Nietzsche, and his copy of Birth of Tragedy, and it starts to seem doubtful that this work of Nietzsche's played much role in the gestation of the novella.
Philip Kitcher
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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
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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
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Sometimes, however, the new synthetic complex proves stable, and even serves as the beginning of a much larger cluster of attitudes that displace some we've previously considered to be fixed parts of ourselves.
Philip Kitcher