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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

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Philip Kitcher
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: February 20
Philosopher
University Teacher
London
England
Philip Stuart Kitcher
Made
Planets
Toys
Way
Failing
Relations
Citizens
Vulnerable
Coming
Deeply
Disruptions
Technology
Recognize
Heated
Ways
Fail
Supplied
Human
Relation
Disruption
Humans
Planet
Distracted

More quotes by 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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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
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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
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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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Secular humanists should recognize those forms of religion as allies in the struggle for human advancement. They should also learn from them, as they try to build a fully secular world in which people can have the opportunity to live rich and fulfilling lives.
Philip Kitcher
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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
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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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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
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A different vision of ethics is that of a collection of resources people can use to act better. The resources might be firm rules that could always be relied on. Or they might be ideals that could often be followed without thinking but that sometimes conflicted with one another.
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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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
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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
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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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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
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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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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
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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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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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Klaus Mann saw very clearly how different was his own (more liberated) form of homosexuality from the same-sex attractions of his father - and that is reiterated in TM's diary queries about how two men can sleep together.
Philip Kitcher
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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