Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Philip Kitcher
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 20
Philosopher
University Teacher
London
England
Philip Stuart Kitcher
Without
Situation
Easily
Life
Making
Animals
Objectively
Social
Case
Constrained
Problem
Capacity
Capacities
Anything
Problems
Objective
Human
Cases
Objectives
Humans
Goes
Features
Come
Animal
Ethics

More quotes by Philip Kitcher

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Those citizens are distracted by the toys technology has supplied, and fail to recognize the ways in which what they most deeply want is made vulnerable by the coming disruptions of human relations on an over-heated planet.
Philip Kitcher
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The amalgam of psychological attitudes we form is the synthetic complex. It may fall apart quite quickly as further reflection or further experience bears on it, and we may revert to our former judgments, feelings and tendencies.
Philip Kitcher
Image
Sometimes, of course, the artist does give up, saying, in effect, I've done enough. Prospero declares that the revels are ended, and breaks his staff - his author retires to Stratford. At the very end, Mann did something similar. Interestingly, in both instances, death came quite quickly after that.
Philip Kitcher
Image
Using the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth is one of the touches of pure genius in Visconti's film (even though Mahlerians complain very loudly that the piece has been ruined), since it corresponds perfectly to Aschenbach's yearnings and to his circling walks around Venice.
Philip Kitcher
Image
Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives.
Philip Kitcher
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics.
Philip Kitcher
Image
Think about Mann's own daily routine (ascribed to Aschenbach), read the extant diaries and the letters in which he discusses the novella's themes, and it won't be so obvious that the attraction to Tadzio is completely unprecedented it also won't be obvious that what Aschenbach wants is full sexual contact.
Philip Kitcher
Image
The point of philosophy, as I see it, is to change thinking, and thereby to change the conversation.
Philip Kitcher
Image
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
Image
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