Logicians from the United States

"Why should I worry about dying? It's not going to happen in my lifetime!"

"I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!"

"If it is really true that you cannot resist them, then you are not sinning of your own free will and hence (at least according to me) not sinning at all."

"There is nothing like a naturalistic orientation to dispel all these morbid thoughts of "sin" and "free will" and "moral responsibility.""

"Medical opinions differed as to the cause of this "humor" disease."

"From what little was known about the subject, insincerity itself was regarded as another form of psychosis but one which was exceedingly rare."

"Humor could not flourish in a wholly serious and rational atmosphere."

"Metaphysical problems about "mind" versus "matter" arise only from epistemological confusions."

"Of course the falsity of the fact that you believe it is red implies that you don't believe it is red. But this does not mean that you believe it is not red!"

"I believe that either Jupiter has life or it doesn't. But I neither believe that it does, nor do I believe that it doesn't."

"How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard."

"Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor."

"Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes."

"Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism."

"The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings."

"Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space."

"No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole."

"Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?"

"As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience."

"The issue over there being classes seems more a question of convenient conceptual scheme; the issue over there being centaurs, or brick houses on Elm Street, seems more a question of fact. But I have been urging that this difference is only one of degree, and that it turns upon our vaguely pragmatic inclination to adjust one strand of the fabric of science rather than another in accommodating some particular recalcitrant experience. Conservatism figures in such choices, and so does the quest for simplicity."

"Tactically, conceptualism is no doubt the strongest position of the three; for the tired nominalist can lapse into conceptualism and still allay his puritanic conscience with the reflection that he has not quite taken to eating lotus with the Platonists."

"A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news."

"Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind."

"Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar."

"Set theory in sheep's clothing."

""Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation."

"Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about."

"At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too."

"Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it."

"It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described."

"We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language."

"Life is agid. Life is fulgid. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of."

"Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth."

"I regard Quine as one of our most stimulating philosophers."

"I do not agree with Quine, that there is no analytic-synthetic distinction to be drawn at all. But I do believe that his emphasis on the monolithic character of our conceptual system and his negative emphasis on the silliness of regarding mathematics as consisting in some sense of 'rules of language', represent exceedingly important theoretical insights in philosophy. I think that what we have to do now is to settle the relatively trivial question concerning analytic statements properly so called ('All bachelors are unmarried'). We have to take a fresh look at the framework principles so much discussed by philosophers, disabusing ourselves of the idea that they are 'rules of language' in any literal or lexicographic sense; and above all, we have to take a fresh look at the nature of logical and mathematical truths. With Quine's contribution, we have to face two choices: We can ignore it and go on talking about the 'logic' of individual words. In that direction lies sterility and more, much more, of what we have already read. The other alternative is to face and explore the insight achieved by Quine, trying to reconcile the fact that Quine is overwhelmingly right in his critique of what other philosophers have done with the analytic-synthetic distinction with the fact that Quine is wrong in his literal thesis, namely, that the distinction itself does not exist at all. In the latter direction lies philosophic progress. For philosophic progress is nothing if it is not the discovery of new areas for dialectical exploration."

"To every ω-consistent recursive class κ of formulae there correspond recursive class signs r, such that neither v Gen r nor Neg (v Gen r) belongs to Flg (κ) (where v is the free variable of r)."

"The completeness theorem, mathematically, is indeed an almost trivial consequence of Skolem 1923a. However, the fact is that, at that time, nobody (including Skolem himself) drew this conclusion (neither from Skolem 1923a nor, as I did, from similar considerations of his own)."

"But every error is due to extraneous factors (such as emotion and education); reason itself does not err."

"Either mathematics is too big for the human mind, or the human mind is more than a machine."

"The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation]."

"I like Islam, it is a consistent idea of religion and open-minded."

"There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind. The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived."

"Religions are, for the most part, bad-but religion is not."

"Ninety percent of [contemporary philosophers] see their principal task as that of beating religion out of men's heads. … We are far from being able to provide scientific basis for the theological world view."

"The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact. Wish is a force as applied to thinking beings, to realize something. A fulfilled wish is a union of wish and fact. The meaning of the whole world is the separation and the union of fact and wish."

"Secondly, even disregarding the intrinsic necessity of some new axiom, and even in case it has no intrinsic necessity at all, a probable decision about its truth is possible also in another way, namely, inductively by studying its "success." Success here means fruitfulness in consequences, in particular in "verifiable" consequences, i.e. consequences verifiable without the new axiom, whose proofs with the help of the new axiom, however, are considerably simpler and easier to discover, and make it possible to contract into one proof many different proofs. The axioms for the system of real numbers, rejected by the intuitionists, have in this sense been verified to some extent, owing to the fact that analytic number theory frequently allows one to prove number-theoretical theorems which, in a more cumbersome way, can subsequently be verified by elementary methods. A much higher degree of verification than that, however, is conceivable. There might exists axioms so abundant in their verifiable consequences, shedding so much light upon a whole field, and yielding such powerful methods for solving problems, (and even solving them constructively, as far as that is possible) that, no matter whether or not they are intrinsically necessary, they would have to be accepted at least in the same sense as any well-established physical theory."

"The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all."

"If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one."

"Fifty years ago Kurt Gödel... proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible. No finite set of axioms and rules of inference can ever encompass the whole of mathematics. Given any finite set of axioms, we can find meaningful mathematical questions which the axioms leave unanswered. This discovery... came at first as an unwelcome shock to many mathematicians. It destroyed... the hope that they could solve the problem of deciding by a systematic procedure the truth or falsehood of any mathematical statement. ...Gödel's theorem, in denying ...the possibility of a universal algorithm to settle all questions, gave... instead, a guarantee that mathematics can never die. ...there will always be, thanks to Gödel, fresh questions to ask and fresh ideas to discover."

"Gödel published comparatively little, but almost always to maximum effect; his papers are models of precision and incisive presentation."

"In the end we search out the beginnings. Established, beyond comparison, as the most important logician of our times by his remarkable results of the 1930s, Kurt Gödel was also most unusual in the ways of his life and mind. Deeply private and reserved, he had a superb all embracing rationality, which could descend into a maddening attention to detail in matters of everyday life."

"The progenitor of information theory, and perhaps the pivotal figure in the recent history of human thought, was Kurt Gödel, the eccentric Austriac genius and intimate of Einstein who drove determinism from its strongest and most indispensable redoubt; the coherence, consistency, and self-sufficiency of mathematics. Gödel demonstrated that every logical scheme, including mathematics, is dependent upon axioms that it cannot prove and that cannot be reduced to the scheme itself. In an elegant mathematical proof, introduced to the world by the great mathematician and computer scientist John von Neumann in September 1930, Gödel demonstrated that mathematics was intrinsically incomplete. Gödel was reportedly concerned that he might have inadvertently proved the existence of God, a faux pas in his Viennese and Princeton circle. It was one of the famously paranoid Gödel's more reasonable fears."

"After Einstein's death, Gödel's sense of exile must have deepened enormously. When Einstein had been ordered by his doctor to take a rest cure, there had been nobody, as Gödel complained to his mother, for him to speak to. Now there would permanently be nobody."

"Not even mathematics can be considered as a closed and complete system of axioms and theorems. The mathematical world is inexhaustible, no finite set of postulates and deductions will ever be able to give us the answer to all questions. Gödel's theorem, whose statement dates back to about half a century ago, brutally put an end to all attempts to condense mathematics into a list of axioms from which the truth or falsity of each of its assertions should follow. If the same mathematical language that physics uses to describe the world remains intrinsically incomplete, it is not reasonable to expect that the universe can be describable starting from a finite set of natural laws. The incompleteness of mathematics and consequently that of physics is repugnant to many, but it must be said that for the exact sciences, Gödel's theorem is by no means a defeat: on the contrary, it provides us with an intellectual push towards ever broader and more fruitful developments."

"In the 1970s I even got to meet Kurt Gödel a few times. The king of the logicians. Gödel once told me, “The a priori is very powerful.” By this he meant that pure logic can take you farther than you might believe possible."

"... according to what Veblen told me, the association between Einstein and Gödel arose in the following way. Veblen felt that he had to look out for Gödel, and spent quite a lot of time talking with him. And then, he thought that he might perhaps get Einstein to take over part of this responsibility. And that seemed to go so extremely well that Veblen removed himself, essentially, from the picture. Einstein and Gödel remained very close. They tended to come to the Institute together, and leave the Institute together, very often. Of course, Gödel's interest in the theory of relativity theory undoubtedly goes back to this association with Einstein. ... I don't think he had any interest in physics before that. I know he had some philosophical interests, but I think the specific interest in the theory of relativity, in which he did write some papers and create some results of significance, that goes back to that association."

"Toward the end of his life, Gödel feared that he was being poisoned, and he starved himself to death. His theorem is one of the most extraordinary results in mathematics, or in any intellectual field in this century. If ever potential mental instability is detectable by genetic analysis, an embryo of someone with Kurt Gödel's gifts might be aborted."

"The one man who was, during the last years, certainly by far Einstein's best friend, and in some ways strangely resembled him most, was Kurt Gödel, The great logician. They were very different in almost every personal way — Einstein gregarious, happy, full of laughter and common sense, and Gödel extremely solemn, very serious, quite solitary, and distrustful of common sense as a means of arriving at the truth. But they shared a fundamental quality: both went directly and wholeheartedly to the questions at the very center of things."

"This is a long book, not only in pages."

"I am particularly grateful to Nozick for his unfailing help and encouragement during the last stages."

"Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests."

"The concept of justice I take to be defined, then, by the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate division of social advantages. A conception of justice is an interpretation of this role."

"The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance."

"Social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society."

"It may be expedient but it is not just that some should have less in order that others may prosper."

"A conception of justice cannot be deduced from self evident premises or conditions on principles; instead, its justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitted together into one coherent view."

"Indeed, it is tempting to suppose that it is self evident that things should be so arranged so as to lead to the most good."

"An individual who finds that he enjoys seeing others in positions of lesser liberty understands that he has no claim whatever to this enjoyment."

"An intuitionist conception of justice is, one might say, but half a conception."

"We may suppose that everyone has in himself the whole form of a moral conception."

"Intuitionism is not constructive, perfectionism is unacceptable."

"Our concern is solely with the basic structure of society and its major institutions and therefore with the standard cases of social justice."

"The first statement of the two principles reads as follows. First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both(a)reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all."

"In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed. The expectations of those with the same abilities and aspirations should not be affected by their social class."

"A scheme is unjust when the higher expectations, one or more of them, are excessive. If these expectations were decreased, the situation of the less favored would be improved."

"The even larger difference between rich and poor makes the latter even worse off, and this violates the principle of mutual advantage."

"In justice as fairness society is interpreted as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage."

"We may reject the contention that the ordering of institutions is always defective because the distribution of natural talents and the contingencies of social circumstance are unjust, and this injustice must inevitably carry over to human arrangements. Occasionally this reflection is offered as an excuse for ignoring injustice, as if the refusal to acquiesce in injustice is on a par with being unable to accept death. The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts. Aristocratic and caste societies are unjust because they make these contingencies the ascriptive basis for belonging to more or less enclosed and privileged social classes. The basic structure of these societies incorporates the arbitrariness found in nature. But there is no necessity for men to resign themselves to these contingencies. The social system is not an unchangeable order beyond human control but a pattern of human action. In justice as fairness men agree to avail themselves of the accidents of nature and social circumstance only when doing so is for the common benefit. The two principles are a fair way of meeting the arbitrariness of fortune; and while no doubt imperfect in other ways, the institutions which satisfy these principles are just."

"Greater intelligence, wealth and opportunity, for example, allow a person to achieve ends he could not rationally contemplate otherwise."

"The difference principle, for example, requires that the higher expectations of the more advantaged contribute to the prospects of the least advantaged."

"No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society."

"If A were not allowed his better position, B would be even worse off than he is."

"First of all, no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of life, or even the special features of psychology such as his aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism. More than this, I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. That is, they do not know its particular economic or political situation, or the level of civilization and culture it has been able to achieve. The persons in the original position have no information as to which generation they belong."

"There are infinitely many variations of the initial situation and therefore no doubt indefinitely many theorems of moral geometry."

"The circumstances of justice may be described as the normal conditions under which human cooperation is both possible and necessary."

"First of all, principles should be general. That is, it must be possible to formulate them without use of what would be intuitively recognized as proper names, or rigged definite descriptions."

"The claims of existing social arrangements and of self interest have been duly allowed for. We cannot at the end count them a second time because we do not like the result."

"To each according to his threat advantage does not count as a principle of justice."

"I have assumed throughout that the persons in the original position are rational."

"Inequalities are permissible when they maximize, or at least all contribute to, the long term expectations of the least fortunate group in society."

"Yet it seems extraordinary that the justice of increasing the expectations of the better placed by a billion dollars, say, should turn on whether the prospects of the least favored increase or decrease by a penny."

"We must not be enticed by mathematically attractive assumptions into pretending that the contingencies of men's social positions and the asymmetries of their situations somehow even out in the end. Rather we must choose our conception of justice fully recognizing that this is not and cannot be the case."

"When the basic structure of society is publicly known to satisfy its principles for an extended period of time, those subject to these arrangements tend to develop a desire to act in accordance with these principles and to do their part in institutions which exemplify them"

"Justice as fairness provides what we want."

"The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality."

"Ideally a just constitution would be a just procedure arranged to insure a just outcome."

"Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another."

"We must choose for others as we have reason to believe they would choose for themselves if they were at the age of reason and deciding rationally."

"The suppression of liberty is always likely to be irrational."

"Let us now consider whether justice requires the toleration of the intolerant, and if so under what conditions. There are a variety of situations in which this question arises. Some political parties in democratic states hold doctrines that commit them to suppress the constitutional liberties whenever they have the power. Again, there are those who reject intellectual freedom but who nevertheless hold positions in the university. It may appear that toleration in these cases is inconsistent with the principles of justice, or at any rate not required by them."

"An intolerant sect has no right to complain when it is denied an equal liberty. … A person’s right to complain is limited to principles he acknowledges himself."

"Justice does not require that men must stand idly by while others destroy the basis of their existence."

"Essentially the fault lies in the fact that the democratic political process is at best regulated rivalry; it does not even in theory have the desirable properties that price theory ascribes to truly competitive markets."

"The fundamental criterion for judging any procedure is the justice of its likely results."

"Properly understood, then, the desire to act justly derives in part from the desire to express most fully what we are or can be, namely free and equal rational beings with the liberty to choose."

"A just system must generate its own support."

"There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of law and government is to institute the necessary conditions."

"Ideal legislators do not vote their interests."

"Justice is happiness according to virtue."

"The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them."

"Many conservative writers have contended that the tendency to equality in modern social movements is the expression of envy. In this way they seek to discredit this trend, attributing it to collectively harmful impulses."

"That persons have opposing interests and seek to advance their own conception of the good is not at all the same thing as their being moved by envy and jealousy."

"Men resign themselves to their position should it ever occur to them to question it; and since all may view themselves as assigned their vocation, everyone is held to be equally fated and equally noble in the eyes of providence."

"Being happy involves both a certain achievement in action and a rational assurance about the outcome."

"The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed."

"At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions."

"The hazards of the generalized prisoner's dilemma are removed by the match between the right and the good."

"I have tried to set forth a theory that enables us to understand and to assess these feelings about the primacy of justice. Justice as fairness is the outcome: it articulates these opinions and supports their general tendency."

"Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society."

"Why then in Britain has secularism become seen to be hostile to religion? Because neutrality is too often assumed to require the bleaching out of all traces of faith, excluding religious belief and discourse from public life. But it doesn't, and we can see why by appeal to the notion of public reason, articulated most clearly by the late political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls was quite clear that the religious have no obligation at all to keep their faith entirely to themselves. "Reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time," he wrote, "provided that in due course proper political reasons – and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines – are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are said to support.""

"The key innovation in Rawl's scenario, designed to ensure that undue selfishness among the participants in this exercise in reflection cancels itself out, is what he calls the "veil of ignorance". Everyone gets to vote on a favored design of society, but when you decide which society you would be happy to live in and give your allegiance to, you vote without knowing your particular role or niche in it will be. You may be a senator or a surgeon or a street sweeper or a soldier; you don't get to find out until after you have voted. Choosing from behind the veil of ignorance ensures that people will give due consideration to the likely effects, the costs and benefits, for all the citizenry, including those worse off."

"If the basic assumption of the theory of ideology is at all tenable, namely, that the general power relations embodied in our social structures can exert a distorting influence on the formation of our beliefs and preferences without our being aware of it, then we are definitely not going to put that kind of influence out of action by asking the agents in the society to imagine that they didn’t know their position. To think otherwise is to believe in magic: imagine you are “impartial” and you will be. In fact, doing that will be more likely to reinforce the power of these entrenched prejudices because it will explicitly present them as universal, warranted by reason, etc."

"The idea that seems to be presupposed by the doctrine of the veil of ignorance—namely, that one can in some way get a better grasp or understanding of the power relations in society and how they work by covering them up, ignoring them, or simply wishing them away—seems very naïve. … To think that an appropriate point of departure for understanding the political world is our intuitions of what is “just,” without reflecting on where those intuitions come from, how they are maintained, and what interests they might serve, seems to exclude from the beginning the very possibility that these intuitions might themselves be “ideological.”"

"The ultimate merit of Rawls’s work did not lie only in his own theory, but in the extraordinarily broad discussion that it generated. Rawls’s work provided a framework for a flurry of counter-theories, such as G.A. Cohen’s in Rescuing Justice and Equality, which challenged Rawls from the left and advocated a stricter egalitarianism; and Robert Nozick’s sophisticated libertarian response in Anarchy, State, and Utopia; and Michael Walzer’s development, in Spheres of Justice, of a communitarian approach to the problem."

"Rawls challenged the view that utilitarianism, or some variant of social liberalism, was the only way to construct a social order. In A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, he laid out his alternative. Imagine, he postulated, that you have to make a choice about what social order you would want to be born into behind 'a veil of ignorance', in which you don't know beforehand your sex, skin colour, skills or the class of your parents. Your overriding concern would be to ensure that it was fair, because if you drew a short straw you would want to know that, as far as possible, society had structures that would redress the balance."

"This means society should build what Rawls calls an 'infrastructure of justice' that ensures everyone has access to key primary goods - some reasonable level of income and material wellbeing, opportunity and basic rights and liberties - which allow them to consider they have been given a proper chance to achieve full membership of society. Moreover, the rich must recognise that their incomes can only be allowed to reach the level consistent with ensuring that the position of the poor is the best it could possibly be, so that were the positions to be swapped, the rich could accept their reduced position as fair."

"Rawls’ main interest was certainly not religion. It was social justice. He formulated two principles: first, that a just society should guarantee the basic liberties to all, including freedom of conscience; second, that social and economic inequalities are justified only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. For him, the first principle prevailed over the second: it was not admissible to deny the basic liberties to promote social justice. The second principle embodied his criticism of both unregulated capitalism and Marxism. Economic inequalities, he believed, are natural and unavoidable, but they are not against social justice only if they are part of a system where they are made to work to also benefit those at the lower level of the social scale. Actually, the poor may and do benefit from the presence of the rich, who support social welfare with their taxes, create workplaces, and may spend their money to create institutions, including cultural and educational, that benefit everybody. The rich would not do so spontaneously only, Rawls believed, and may need some compulsion by the state. This is why he was after all a philosopher of the left, although calling him a socialist may be an exaggeration. …I was not myself a follower of Rawls and my own political and philosophical ideas were closer to the American conservatives he opposed. Yet, I found it interesting that even in the Democrat and liberal camp the most elegant theorist acknowledged the religious roots of the very idea of social justice and agreed that the American experiment, in all its possible versions, should affirm freedom of religion as fundamental."

"In the Rawlsian paradigm, such a person is likely to be a northwest European or North American with a certain way of asking and answering questions of this sort, even if deprived of self-knowledge of the more circumstantial kind. The liberalism that predictably results from such a mental experiment has always been vulnerable to the charge that it lacks purchase upon real-world challenges: it neither derives from present circumstances nor responds to past experience. Perhaps this would not matter if the Rawlsian approach to grounding liberal thought were primarily addressed to persons of a liberal predisposition. But that would be pointless. The test of such a theorem is how effective it is at convincing persons not already so disposed. And even then, the question remains of exactly how such liberals should act when dealing with persons and societies that do not correspond to their preferences. On this Rawls is by no means silent, but he is forced to introduce external considerations that cannot be derived from the model itself."

"To make concrete what [Rawls's] theory regards as justice, compare two of our society's worst-off. The first, a mugger who has never held a job, is vicious when he can get away with it and spends his ill-gotten gains on drugs. The second, a mother of three, has been abandoned by her husband; she earns the minimum wage at a menial job and is trying hard to raise her children well. According to what Rawls calls justice, these two are entitled to the same resources from society simply because they are among the worst-off. The mugger's viciousness and lack of effort and the mother's decency and struggle create no morally relevant difference between them. [¶] Now change the scenario a bit. The mugger continues as before, but the mother's efforts have borne fruit. She has found a better job and is doing well at it. Her family now is moderately secure and comfortable but hardly affluent. On Rawls's view, justice requires taking some of the mother's resources in order to give them to the mugger. [¶] in deeming this blatant injustice just, Rawls repudiates the conception—accepted from the Old Testament to recent times—that justice consists in giving people what they deserve: reward for good conduct and punishment for bad. [...] Rawls is explicit about his repudiation..."

"One main problem in Rawl’s defense of “justice as fairness” is that Rawls believes that no one can deserve his or her advantages or assets in life—it’s all a matter of luck. As he puts it, “No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting point in society.” The reason? Because even a person’s character (i.e., the virtues he or she practices that may provide him with ways of getting ahead of others) “depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit”…"

"Rawls' notion of liberty, however, is the impoverished notion of contemporary liberals, for whom liberty consists in the expressive or lifestyle freedom to say what one wants and have sexual relations with the species of one's choice. So, for example, being subject to a 75 percent tax on one's income or being subject to the seizure of 90 percent of one's peacefully acquired property does not count at all as an abridgment of liberty. Indeed, it is not really clear that chaining the talented and energetic to their desks should, for Rawls, count as an infringement of their liberty as long as these individuals are still permitted to express their views, cast their votes, meet with their chosen sexual partners, and, perhaps, are paroled on weekends to travel to their preferred cultural events. In any case, Rawls does not view anything the modern welfare state does in the name of income redistribution as an abridgment of liberty."

"When we make that basic criticism, however, we are not only following Rawls's methodological suggestion - that we search for reflective equilibrium by holding up theoretical alternatives to our own considered judgments, in Socratic fashion. We are also bringing one deep part of Rawls's own conception to bear against another, saying that the contract doctrine may not do full justice to the idea that each person has an inviolability based upon justice. Even in moving away from Rawls, we are fully engaged with him. Surely that is a sign of his work's depth and enduring significance."

"Rawls’s analysis of fairness, justice, institutions and behaviour has illuminated our understanding of justice very profoundly and has played – and is still playing – a hugely constructive part in the development of the theory of justice. But we cannot make the Rawlsian mode of thinking on justice into an intellectual ‘stand-still’. We have to benefit from the richness of the ideas we have got from Rawls – and then move on, rather than taking a ‘vacation’. We do need ‘justitia’, not ‘justitium’."

"Rawls's work, for better or worse, is not inspired by this kind of epic ambition. His very modesty and lack of speculative curiosity are what exclude him from the ranks of the great philosophers. Rawls is not an Isaiah Berlin with his anguished sense of the conflict of goods which besets human life; nor is he a Leo Strauss with his vivid awareness of the forces of persecution with which philosophy has always to contend; nor is he a Michael Oakeshott with his diagnosis of the dangers posed by excessive rationalism to the goals of a free society. Rawls is a philosopher for our time. His desire is to render both theoretically and practically legitimate the redistributivist policies of the prosperous North Atlantic welfare states. There is already more than a whiff of nostalgia about this project. This is by no means a contemptible goal, but it is well to remember that this project of rationalization is one — but only one — way in which philosophy can be practiced."

"When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful."

"Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility."

"Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality. It is by these means that our lives come to more than what they instrumentally yield. And by meaning more, our lives yield more."

"Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?"

"Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited, to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified, but any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right."

"Some anarchists have claimed not merely that we would be better off without a state, but that any state necessarily violates people's moral rights and hence is intrinsically immoral. Our starting point then, though nonpolitical, is by intention far from nonmoral. Moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus."

"Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?"

"There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more."

"1. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding. 2. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding. 3. No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications of 1 and 2."

"A distribution is just if it arises from another just distribution by legitimate means."

"Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just."

"Justice in holdings is historical; it depends upon what actually has happened. We shall return to this point later."

"Some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges. None of these are permissible modes of transition from one situation to another."

"Whoever makes something having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process (transferring some of his holdings for these cooperating factors), is entitled to it. The situation is not one of something’s getting made, and there being an open question of who is to get it. Things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them."

"From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen."

"Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities."

"Lacking much historical information and assuming (1) that victims of injustice generally do worse than they otherwise would and (2) that those from the least well-off group in the society have the highest probabilities of being the (descendants of) victims of the most serious injustice who are owed compensation by those who benefited from the injustices, ... then a rough rule of thumb for rectifying injustices might seem to be the following: organize society so as to maximize the position of whatever group ends up least well-off in the society."

"These issues are very complex and are best left to a full treatment of the principle of rectification. In the absence of such a treatment applied to a particular society, one cannot use the analysis and theory presented here to condemn any particular scheme of transfer payments, unless it is clear that no considerations of rectification of injustice could apply to justify it. Although to introduce socialism as the punishment for our sins would be to go too far, past injustices might seem to be so great as to make necessary in the short run a more extensive state in order to rectify them."

"No state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified."

"Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton, Yogi Berra, Allen Ginsberg, Harry Wolfson, Thoreau, Casey Stengel, The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Picasso, Moses, Einstein, Hugh Hefner, Socrates, Henry Ford, Lenny Bruce, Baba Ram Dass, Gandhi, Sir Edmund Hillary, Raymond Lubitz, Buddha, Frank Sinatra, Columbus, Freud, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Baron Rothschild, Ted Williams, Thomas Edison, H.L. Mencken, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Ellison, Bobby Fischer, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, you, and your parents. Is there really one kind of life which is best for each of these people?"

"There will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others."

"Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably."

"Some communities will be abandoned, others will struggle along, others will split, others will flourish, gain members, and be duplicated elsewhere. Each community must win and hold the voluntary adherence of its members. No pattern is imposed on everyone, and the result will be one pattern if and only if everyone voluntarily chooses to live in accordance with that pattern of community."

"You can't satisfy everybody; especially if there are those who will be dissatisfied unless not everybody is satisfied."

"Though the framework is libertarian and laissez-faire, individual communities within it need not be, and perhaps no community within it will choose to be so. Thus, the characteristics of the framework need not pervade the individual communities. In this laissez-faire system it could turn out that though they are permitted, there are no actually functioning "capitalist" institutions; or that some communities have them and others don't or some communities have some of them, or what you will."

"It goes without saying that any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest."

"In a free system any large, popular, revolutionary movement should be able to bring about its ends by such a voluntary process. As more and more people see how it works more and more will wish to participate in or support it. And so it will grow, without being necessary to force everyone or a majority or anyone into the pattern."

"One persistent strand in utopian thinking, as we have often mentioned, is the feeling that there is some set of principles obvious enough to be accepted by all men of good will, precise enough to give unambiguous guidance in particular situations, clear enough so that all will realize its dictates, and complete enough to cover all problems which actually arise. Since I do not assume that there are such principles, I do not presume that the political realm will whither away. The messiness of the details of a political apparatus and the details of how it is to be controlled and limited do not fit easily into one's hopes for a sleek, simple utopian scheme."

"Is not the minimal state, the framework for utopia, an inspiring vision? The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources; it treats us as persons having individual right with the dignity this constitutes. Treating us with respect by respecting our rights, it allows us, individually or with whom we please, to choose our life and to realize our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity. How dare any state or group of individuals do more. Or less."

"Robert Nozick, the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, always attacks his problems in a disconcertingly original way. … in The Examined Life, he took on nothing less than the meaning of life, a subject that academic philosophers tended to steer clear of — and still do, despite his best efforts. From Mr. Nozick you always expect fireworks, even if some of them go off in their box. His questions, hints, counterarguments and suggestions come so thick and fast that it is next to impossible to appreciate all of them. Start pondering a sentence and you will find yourself led away prematurely by a parenthetical question; think about the question and you will be dragged into a discursive footnote; from the bowels of the footnote, another parenthetical query will leap out at you. If you escape back to the main argument with your concentration intact (unlikely, after a while), the whole wearing business just starts over again. Yet it is worth the effort — certainly for regular readers of philosophy, and often for others."

"No contemporary philosopher possesses a more imaginative mind, broader interests, or greater dialectical abilities than Robert Nozick."

"His learning is enormous and interconnected … His ability to surround a subject, to anticipate objection, to see through weakness and pretense, to exact all the implications of a contention, to ask a huge number of relevant questions about a seemingly settled matter, to enlarge into full significance what has only been sketched by others, is amazing."

"Given the extensive involvement of state violence in the process by which the corporate elite not only achieved its wealth in the past but continues to maintain and augment it in the present, it is clear that the massive inequalities of wealth that characterise present-day ‘capitalist’ society are radically inconsistent with any approach to justice in holdings that is even remotely Nozickian."

"Nozick’s Theory, in spite of its apparent dedication to self-ownership, cannot escape the conclusion that women’s entitlement rights to those they produce must take priority of persons’ rights to themselves at birth. ... There is nothing about a woman’s production of an infant that does not easily fulfill the conditions of the principle of acquisition as Nozick specifies them."

"Hayek and Nozick both think that talk of distributive justice is misleading, because it suggests the presence of a distributing person or mechanism; in a developed economy there is no such thing, and in a free society, the attempt to institute such a thing would destroy all freedom. Hayek, however, supports this view with an account of the computational impossibility of deciding what to produce and distribute in order to achieve justice, while Nozick is more concerned to emphasize that the state has no right to seize the resources of individuals in order to distribute them according to any principle whatever."

"No one, not even a philosopher, is morally obligated to live as if the world were the way he wishes it were. Robert Nozick pays taxes and is entitled to enjoy the government benefits they finance --even benefits he thinks should not exist. Perhaps the libertarian philosopher should not be expected to opt out of rent control voluntarily. But should he be pursuing his landlord through the maze of rent control regulations like a man possessed? And should he be using his ability to make a nuisance of himself under these regulations for simple, if lawful, cash extortion? They say that policeman make the best burglars. After a few years on the job, they know all the tricks. The same thing seems to be true of philosophers. If you're looking for someone to manipulate a rent control ordinance, find an advocate of the free market."

"It is heartening to be able to end a textbook that has no prerequisites with a problem that has not yet been solved."

"In science there are no 'depths'; there is surface everywhere."

"The function of logical analysis is to analyse all knowledge, all assertions of science and of everyday life, in order to make clear the sense of each such assertion and the connections between them. One of the principal tasks of the logical analysis of a given proposition is to find out the method of verification for that proposition."

"When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically … But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation."

"Logic is not concerned with human behavior in the same sense that physiology, psychology, and social sciences are concerned with it. These sciences formulate laws or universal statements which have as their subject matter human activities as processes in time. Logic, on the contrary, is concerned with relations between factual sentences (or thoughts). If logic ever discusses the truth of factual sentences it does so only conditionally, somewhat as follows: if such-and-such a sentence is true, then such-and-such another sentence is true. Logic itself does not decide whether the first sentence is true, but surrenders that question to one or the other of the empirical sciences."

"If we compare. e.g. the systems of classical mathematics and of intuitionistic mathematics, we find that the first is much simpler and technically more efficient, while the second is more safe from surprising occurences, e.g. contradictions. At the present time, any estimation of the degree of safety of the system of classical mathematics, in other words, the degree of plausibility of its principles, is rather subjective. The majority of mathematicians seem to regard this degree as sufficiently high for all practical purposes and therefore prefer the application of classical mathematics to that of intuitionistic mathematics. The latter has not, so far as I know, been seriously applied in physics by anybody."

"Philosophy is to be replaced by the logic of science -- that is to say, by the logical analysis of the concepts and sentences of the sciences, for the logic of science is nothing other than the logical syntax of the language of science."

"By the logical syntax of a language, we mean the formal theory of the linguistic forms of that language -- the systematic statement of the formal rules which govern it together with the development of the consequences which follow from these rules. A theory, a rule, a definition, or the like is to be called formal when no reference is made in it either to the meaning of the symbols (for examples, the words) or to the sense of the expressions (e.g. the sentences), but simply and solely to the kinds and order of the symbols from which the expressions are constructed."

"According to this view, the sentences of metaphysics are pseudo-sentences which on logical analysis are proved to be either empty phrases or phrases which violate the rules of syntax. Of the so-called philosophical problems, the only questions which have any meaning are those of the logic of science. To share this view is to substitute logical syntax for philosophy."

"In order to determine whether or not one sentence is a consequence of another, no reference need be made to the meaning of the sentences. The mere statement of the truth-values is certainly too little; but the statement of the meaning is, on the other hand, too much. It is sufficient that the syntactical design of the sentences be given."

"Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems."

"Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements."

"The main purpose of this book is the development of a new method for the semantical analysis of meaning, that is, a new method for analyzing and describing the meanings of linguistic expressions. This method, called the method of extension and intension, is developed by modifying and extending certain customary concepts, especially those of class and property. The method will be contrasted with various other semantical methods used in traditional philosophy or by contemporary authors."

"The task of making more exact a vague or not quite exact concept used in everyday life or in an earlier stage of scientific or logical development, or rather of replacing it by a newly constructed, more exact concept, belongs among the most important tasks of logical analysis and logical construction. We call this the task of explicating, or of giving an explication for the earlier concept; this earlier concept, or sometimes the term used for it, is called the explicandum; and the new concept, or its term, is called an explicatum of the old one."

"Frege's pair of concepts (nominatum and sense) is compared with our pair (extension and intension). The two pairs coincide in ordinary (extensional) contexts, but not in oblique (nonextensional) contexts."

"A decisive difference between our method and Frege's consists in the fact that our concepts, in distinction to Frege's, are independent of the context."

"If someone wishes to speak in his language about a new kind of entities, he has to introduce a system of new ways of speaking, subject to new rules; we shall call this procedure the construction of a linguistic framework for the new entities in question."

"After the new forms are introduced into the language, it is possible to formulate with their help internal questions and possible answers to them. A question of this kind may be either empirical or logical; accordingly a true answer is either factually true or analytic."

"To be sure, we have to face at this point an important question; but it is a practical, not a theoretical question; it is the question of whether or not to accept the new linguistic forms. The acceptance cannot be judged as being either true or false because it is not an assertion. It can only be judged as being more or less expedient, fruitful, conducive to the aim for which the language is intended. Judgments of this kind supply the motivation for the decision of accepting or rejecting the kind of entities."

"For those who want to develop or use semantical methods, the decisive question is not the alleged ontological question of the existence of abstract entities but rather the question whether the rise of abstract linguistic forms or, in technical terms, the use of variables beyond those for things (or phenomenal data), is expedient and fruitful for the purposes for which semantical analyses are made, viz. the analysis, interpretation, clarification, or construction of languages of communication, especially languages of science."

"For me personally, Wittgenstein was perhaps the philosopher who, besides Russell and Frege, had the greatest influence on my thinking. The most important insight I gained from his work was the conception that the truth of logical statements is based only on their logical structure and on the meaning of the terms. Logical statements are true under all conceivable circumstances; thus their truth is independent of the contingent facts of the world. On the other hand, it follows that these statements do not say anything about the world and thus have no factual content."

"After defining semantical concepts like logical truth and related ones, I proposed to interpret the modalities as those properties of propositions which correspond to certain semantical properties of the sentences expressing the propositions. For example, a proposition is logically necessary if and only if a sentence expressing it is logically true."

"Yes, he is one of my heroes. I took a seminar from him under the GI bill after I got out of the Navy. It was not when I was an undergraduate. That was the only graduate course I ever took. It was on the philosophy of science, and it had a big influence on me. Later, when Carnap was giving the course in California, I persuaded him to have his wife tape record it. She typed it up and sent me the typed version. I edited it into a book called Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. That was the only popular book that Carnap ever did. All I did was edit it into language an average person could understand without knowing any math."

"Put in a nut-shell, my thesis amounts to this. The repeated attempts made by Rudolf Carnap to show that the demarcation between science and metaphysics coincides with that between sense and nonsense have failed. The reason is that the positivistic concept of 'meaning' or 'sense' (or of verifiability, or of inductive confirmability, etc.) is inappropriate for achieving this demarcation — simply because metaphysics need not be meaningless even though it is not science. In all its variations demarcation by meaninglessness has tended to be at the same time too narrow and too wide: as against all intentions and all claims, it has tended to exclude scientific theories as meaningless, while failing to exclude even that part of metaphysics which is known as 'rational theology'."

"It was Rudolf Carnap’s dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project."

"The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding."

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data that the agreement decrees. We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated"

"Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages. The verb tunatya contains in its idea of hope something of our words 'thought,' 'desire,' and 'cause,' which sometimes must be used to translate it."

"We are thus able to distinguish thinking as the function which is to a large extent linguistic."

"Western culture has made, through language, a provisional analysis of reality and, without correctives, holds resolutely to that analysis as final. The only correctives lie in all those other tongues which by aeons of independent evolution have arrived at different, but equally logical, provisional analyses."

"It needs but half an eye to see in these latter days that science, the Grand Revelator of modern Western culture, has reached, without having intended to, a frontier. Either it must bury its dead, close its ranks, and go forward into a landscape of increasing strangeness, replete with things shocking to a culture-trammeled understanding, or it must become, in Claude Houghton's expressive phrase, the plagiarist of its own past. The frontier was foreseen in principle very long ago, and given a name that has descended to our day clouded with myth. That name is Babel. For science's long and heroic effort to be strictly factual has at last brought it into entanglement with the unsuspected facts of the linguistic order. These facts the older classical science had never admitted, confronted, or understood as facts. Instead they had entered its house by the back door and had been taken for the substance of Reason itself."

"Speech is the best show a man puts on."

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language."

"Thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language--shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in a language—in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness."

"Whorf became increasingly concerned about the supposed conflict between science and religion... He wrote a 130,000-word manuscript on the subject, described as a book of religious philosophy in the form of a novel... Completed in 1925, [it] was submitted to several publishers and as promptly rejected by them... Another, briefer manuscript prepared about this time [was]... “Why I have discarded evolution.” An eminent geneticist to whom it was submitted for comment made a very courteous reply, starting with the admission that, although the manuscript at first appeared to be the work of a crank, its skill and perceptiveness soon marked it as otherwise, but continuing with a point-by-point rebuttal of Whorf’s arguments... Whorf’s reading led him to believe that the key to the apparent discrepancy between the Biblical and the scientific accounts of cosmology and evolution might lie in a penetrating linguistic exegesis of the Old Testament. For this reason, in 1924 he turned his mind to the study of Hebrew."

"During a lecture, the Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin made the claim that although a in English implies a positive meaning, there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. Morgenbesser responded in a dismissive tone, "Yeah, yeah.""

"Morgenbesser in response to B.F. Skinner: "Are you telling me it's wrong to anthropomorphize people?" (quoted by Daniel Dennett)"

"Morgenbesser was leaving a subway station in New York City and put his pipe in his mouth as he was ascending the steps. A police officer told him that there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser pointed out that he was leaving the subway, not entering it, and hadn't lit up yet anyway. The cop again said that smoking was not allowed in the subway, and Morgenbesser repeated his comment. The cop said, "If I let you do it, I'd have to let everyone do it." To which Morgenbesser, in a much misunderstood line, retorted: "Who do you think you are, Kant?" He was then hauled off to the police station, where The Categorical Imperative had to be explained to the police officers. (Kant, as pronounced in American English, sounds similar to cunt, which is what he was mistaken for having said)."

"On the : Morgenbesser, ordering dessert, is told by the waitress that he can choose between apple pie and blueberry pie. He orders the apple pie. Shortly thereafter, the waitress comes back and says that cherry pie is also an option; Morgenbesser says "In that case I'll have the blueberry pie.""

"Morgenbesser said the following of George Santayana: “There’s a guy who asserted both p and not-p, and then drew out all the consequences…”"

"Interrogated by a student whether he agreed with Chairman Mao’s view that a statement can be both true and false at the same time, Morgenbesser replied “Well, I do and I don’t.”"

"During campus protests of the 1960s, Sidney Morgenbesser was hit over the head by police. When asked whether he had been treated unfairly or unjustly, he responded that it was "unfair but not unjust. It was unfair because they hit me over the head, but not unjust because they hit everyone else over the head.”"

"Morgenbesser described ethics as entailing “ought implies can” while in Jewish ethics “can implies don’t.”"

"When challenged why he had written so little, he fired back: "Moses wrote one book. Then what did he do?""

"When asked his opinion of pragmatism, Morgenbesser replied "It's all very well in theory but it doesn't work in practice.""

"A proposed response to Heidegger's ontological query "Why is there something rather than nothing?" – "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!""

"A few weeks before his death, he asked another Columbia philosopher, David Albert, about God. "Why is God making me suffer so much?" he asked. "Just because I don't believe in him?""

"Asked to prove a questioner's existence, Morgenbesser shot back, "Who's asking?""

"A student once interrupted him and said, "I just don't understand." He responded, "Why should you have the advantage over me?""

"Of Hilary Putnam – "He’s a quantum philosopher. I can’t understand him and his position at the same time.""

"Grace is not opposed to effort. It is opposed to earning. Effort is action. Earning is attitude. You have never seen people more active than those who have been set on fire by the grace of God."

"...Once you entomb mathematics in an artificial language à la Hilbert, once you set up a completely formal axiomatic system, then you can forget that it has any meaning and just look at it as a game that you play with marks on paper that enable you to deduce theorems from axioms. You can forget about the meaning of the game, the game of mathematical reasoning, it's just combinatorial play with symbols! There are certain rules, and you can study these rules and forget that they have any meaning!"

"At first it might seem that quantum mechanics (QM), which began with Einstein's photon as the explanation for the photoelectric effect in 1905, goes further in the direction of discreteness. But the wave-particle duality discovered by de Broglie in 1925 is at the heart of QM, which means that this theory is profoundly ambiguous regarding the question of discreteness vs. continuity. QM can have its cake and eat it too, because discreteness is modeled via standing waves (eigenfunctions) in a continuous medium."

"Are there mathematical propositions for which there is a considerable amount of computational evidence, evidence that is so persuasive that a physicist would regard them as experimentally verified?"

"Why do I think that Turing's paper "On computable numbers" is so important? Well, in my opinion it's a paper on epistemology, because we only understand something if we can program it, as I will explain in more detail later. And it's a paper on physics, because what we can actually compute depends on the laws of physics in our particular universe and distinguishes it from other possible universes. And it's a paper on ontology, because it shows that some real numbers are uncomputable, which I shall argue calls into question their very existence, their mathematical and physical existence."

"I'm interested in the computer as a new idea, a new and fundamental philosophical concept that changes mathematics, that solves old problems better and suggests new problems, that changes our way of thinking and helps us to understand things better, that gives us radically new insights..."

"[A]ccording to Weyl, complexity is essential in understanding the concept of a law of nature. If laws of nature may be arbitrarily complex, he argued, the very concept... becomes vacuous. What difference would remain... if the laws meant to explain them were as complex as the phenomena they are meant to explain? Laws of nature must be simple."

"Mathematicians are coming up with s that they use in their actual mathematical research. And these, like , I think is the name of one of them ... these are actually like s that have been engineered in a way that they can actually be used by working mathematicians to check the work they're doing."

"Problem: Name a book that combines mathematical history, philosophy, more than a whiff of theology, personal palaver, and brilliant insights, along with evidence of a Borges-like imagination, eyebrow-raising mathematical constructions, breathtaking excitement, grandiose ruminations, and some bosh. Solution: The book under review. ...Ω leads me to turn 180 degrees away from these classical philosophical questions—discussed ad nauseam and with diminishing profit—of why mathematics is true, whether its objects and constructs have ontological validity, whether it is the only mode of inference, what its limitations are, whether it is the unique language in which theoretical physics must be formulated. If we could focus instead on mathematical pragmatics—why mathematics throughout the millennia has been useful or deleterious to society—then I believe that we might be able to illuminate an aspect of mathematics that is often ignored: mathematics as a enterprise, for that is surely what it is."

"To the average mathematician who merely wants to know that his work is securely based, the most appealing choice is to avoid difficulties by means of Hilbert's program. Here one regards mathematics as a formal game and one is only concerned with the question of consistency."

"However, in all honesty, I must say that one must essentially forget that all proofs are transcribed in this formal language. In order to think productively, one must use all the intuitive and informal methods of reasoning at one's disposal. At the very end one must check that no errors have been committed; but in practice set theory is treated as any other branch of mathematics. The reason that we can do this is that we will never speak about proofs but only about models."

"The theorem of Löwenheim–Skolem was the first truly important discovery about formal systems in general, and it remains probably the most basic. It is not a negative result at all, but plays an important role in many situations. For example, in Gödel's proof of the consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis, the fact that the hypothesis holds in the universe of constructible sets is essentially an application of the theorem."

"It is now known that the truth or falsity of the continuum hypothesis and other related conjectures cannot be determined by set theory as we know it today. This state of affairs regarding a classical and presumably well-posed problem must certainly appear rather unsatisfactory to the average mathematician. One is tempted to look more closely and perhaps more critically at the foundations of mathematics. Although our present "Cantorian" mathematics is highly successful in its treatment of abstractions, one must not overlook the fact that from the very beginning the use of infinite processes was regarded with suspicion by many people."

"The object of mathematics is to discover "true" theorems. We shall use the term "valid" to describe statements formed according to certain rules and then shall discuss how this notion compares with the intuitive idea of "true"."

"When the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem is applied to particular formal systems, we obtain as special cases: Every group, field, ordered field, etc., has a countable subsystem of the same type. A more spectacular result follows from applying the theorem to set theory (a system which we shall later formalize): There is a countable collection of sets, such that if restrict the membership relation to these sets alone, they form a model for set theory (more precisely all the true statements of set theory are true in this model). In particular, within this model which we may denote by M, there must be an uncountable set. This paradox, that a countable model can contain an uncountable set, is explained by noting that to say a set is uncountable merely asserts the nonexistence of a one-one mapping of the set with the set of integers. The "uncountable" set in M set actually has only countably many members in M, but there is no one-one correspondence \underline {within} M of this set with the set of integers."

"In 1963 P. J. Cohen completed Gödel's linguistic attack on set theory by introducing the immensely valuable, syntactic notion of forcing, and by using it to demonstrate that the axioms of set theory were not powerful enough to prove Cantor's continuum hypothesis. Thus the presently existing axioms of set theory leave the most celebrated hypothesis of set theory shrouded in uncertainty."

"To him mathematics was a unified subject that one could master broadly. He had a deep understanding of most areas, and he taught advanced courses in logic, analysis, differential equations, algebra, topology, Lie theory, and number theory on a regular basis. He felt that good mathematics should be easy to understand and that it is always based on simple ideas once you get to the bottom of the issue. This attitude extended to a strong belief that the well-recognized unsolved problems in mathematics are the heart of the subject and have clear and transparent solutions once the right new ideas and viewpoints are found. This belief gave him the courage to work on notoriously difficult problems throughout his career."

"My thought is that if some art is imitation and some art is not, neither term belongs to the definition of art as philosophically understood. A property is part of the definition only if it belongs to every work of art there is."

"It is true that art today is pluralistic. Pluralism was noticed by certain followers of Ludwig Wittgenstein. What makes art so powerful a force as it appears to be in song and story is due to what makes it art to begin with. There is really nothing like it when it comes to stirring the spirit."

"There were limits to what art—composed of such genres as portraiture, landscape, still life, and historical painting (the latter of which, in royal academies, enjoyed the highest esteem)—could do to show movement."

"Thanks to Descartes and Plato, I will define art as “wakeful dreams.” One wants to explain the universality of art. My sense is that everyone, everywhere, dreams. Usually this requires that we sleep. But wakeful dreams require of us that we be awake. Dreams are made up of appearances, but they have to be appearances of things in their world. True, the different arts in the encyclopedic museum are made by different cultures."

"Any movement can be a dance movement and hence achieve the dreamlike. The same may be true of acting, as when, for example, an actress serves cocktails that are actually glasses filled with just water. To taste the tasteless is a kind of bad dream. It is not possible to catalog all the different ways artists have found to dream-ify. I’ll take a flier at Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the great decoration of the Sistine Chapel’s vault, with the scenes of a narrative in which, when I first saw it, figures move in and out of an enveloping dark."

"As a philosopher, I would cherish an argument which demonstrates that the mind cannot be mapped onto the brain any better than the Sistine ceiling can be mapped onto the brushstrokes—and that Eliminativists are as misled as Colalucci. It would be great if the analogy itself were accepted, even if we did not know where to go from there."

"The body that feels thirst and hunger, passion, desire, and love. The body that we understand when we read the ancients describing men in battle, men and women in love and in grief. The body, I would say, that our artistic tradition dealt with so gloriously for so many centuries, and somewhat less gloriously in a certain kind of performance art today."

"It struck me only recently that nineteenth century painters must have believed that visual truth was defined by photography, however alien to human vision what the camera reproduced often was. A good example of this would have been Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of horses in motion. Painters decided that Muybridge’s images showed what horses really look like when they run, and in effect copied Muybridge’s photographs in their paintings of horses, even though that is not at all the way we see horses when they run. We really don’t see animals move the way Muybridge shows them moving, or else there would have been no need for the photographs in the first place: Muybridge hit upon his awkward but seemingly authoritative experiments that were really designed to answer such questions as whether all four of a horse’s hooves ever touch the ground at the same time—in other words, phenomena the human eye could not perceive."

"The great thing about the sixties was the dawning recognition that anything could be a work of art, which was something evident in all the main movements of the time—in Pop art, Minimalism, Fluxus, Conceptual art, and so on. What accounted for the difference? The big mantra in the art world was Frank Stella’s sullen “What you see is what you see.” But there was not a lot of difference between what you see when you see a Brillo Box by Warhol and the Brillo boxes designed by James Harvey for the Brillo people to use for moving their products about. So: why weren’t they artworks if Andy’s Factory-produced boxes were? I have answered this in my first chapter, so what I want to do now instead is to marvel at the way in which the camera helped give form to the philosophical question that had been kicking around for a few millennia, “What is art?,” and to explain why the photography-painting paragone had to be the last paragone. By the time Duchamp and Warhol had left the scene, everything in the concept of art had been changed. We had entered the second phase in the history of art, broadly considered."

"What impresses me is that Kant’s highly compressed discussion of spirit is capable of addressing the logic of artworks invariantly as to time, place, and culture, and of explaining why Formalism is so impoverished a philosophy of art. The irony is that Kant’s Critique of Judgment is so often cited as the foundational text for Formalistic analysis. What Modernist Formalism did achieve, on the other hand—and Greenberg recognizes this—was the enfranchisement of a great deal of art that the Victorians, say, would have found “primitive,” meaning that the artists who made it would have carved or painted like nineteenth century Europeans if they only knew how. African sculpture came to be appreciated for its “expressive form” by Roger Fry, and by the severe Bloomsbury Formalist Clive Bell in his book Art. That meant that it was ornamentalized, in effect, like the tattoo, according to Kant. I often wonder if those who celebrated Kant aesthetics read as far as section forty-nine of his book, where he introduces his exceedingly condensed view of what makes art humanly important."

"My sense, in bringing to art the double criteria of meaning and embodiment, is to bring to art a connection with cognizance: to what is possible and, to the faithful, to the actual. Gregory the Great spoke of the carved capitals in the Romanesque basilica as the Bible of the Illiterate: they show what the Bible tells us took place. They tell the uneducated what they are supposed to know. That is, they tell them what they are to believe as true. Beauty has nothing to do with it, though the capable carver presents the Queen of Sheba as the great beauty she was. It is possible that she looked that way. But it can be art without being beautiful at all. Beauty was an eighteenth century value."

"A partially computable function may be thought of as one for which we possess an algorithm which enables us to compute its value for elements of its domain, but which will have us computing forever in attempting to obtain a functional value for an element not in its domain, without ever assuring us that no value is forthcoming. In other words, when an answer is forthcoming, the algorithm provides it; when no answer is forthcoming, the algorithm has one spend an infinite amount of time in a vain search for an answer."

"Nonstandard analysis is a technique rather a subject. Aside from theorems that tell us that nonstandard notions are equivalent to corresponding standard notions, all the results we obtain can be proved by standard methods. Therefore, the subject can only be claimed to be of importance insofar as it leads to simpler, more accessible expositions, or (more important) to mathematical discoveries."

"Takeuti has studied models of axiomatic set theory in which the “truth values” are elements of a complete Boolean algebra of projections on closed subspaces of a Hilbert space, and has found that the real numbers of such a model can be taken to be self-adjoint operators which can be resolved in terms of projections belonging to the Boolean algebra. It is suggested that this is the mathematical source of the replacement of real quantities by operators in quantizing a classical description, and that quantum theory involves a relativity principle with Takeuti's Boolean algebras serving as reference “frames.”"

"The analysis of algorithmic process that emerged from the work of Gödel, Church, Turing, and Post has been of great importance not only for theoretical investigations but also for practice, by providing an expansive framework for computer science. The discussion of computation-like processes that transcend the limits imposed by the Church–Turing thesis can likewise be framed either in terms of theory or of practice."

"Davis became one of the earliest computer programmers when he began programming on the ORDVAC computer at the University of Illinois in the early 1950s. His book Computability and Unsolvability ... first appeared in 1958 and has become a classic in theoretical computer science."

"In this paper, we shall show the validity of an iterative procedure suggested by George W. Brown ... This method corresponds to each player choosing in turn the best pure strategy against the accumulated mixed strategy of his opponent up to then."

"We say a mathematical theory is decidable if there is an effective method of determining the validity of each statement of the theory. If there is no such method, the theory is undecidable. It is clear that if there is a mechanical way of transforming each statement of an undecidable theory into an equivalent statement of another theory, the second theory is also undecidable. This principle, together with the fact that the arithmetic of natural numbers is undecidable, enables us to solve the decision problem for fields of finite degree over the rationals."

"And I continued to struggle with the Tenth Problem. In 1961 Martin Davis, Hilary Putnam, and I published a joint paper, "The undecidability of exponential diophantine equations," which used ideas from the papers Martin and I had presented at the International Congress along with various new results. The paper contains what is sometimes referred to as the Robinson hypothesis (or, as Martin calls it, "J.R.") to the effect that if there were some diophantine relation that grew faster than an exponential but not too terribly fast—less than some function could be expressed in exponentials—then we would be able to define exponentiation. It would follow from the definition that exponential diophantine equations would be equivalent to diophantine equations and that, therefore, the solution to Hilbert's tenth problem would be negative. At the time many people told Martin that this approach was misguided, to say the least. They were more polite to me."

"Notices: Can you tell me your memories of Julia Robinson, what she was like as a person? Davis: Very nice, very straightforward. Broad in her interests, mathematical and otherwise. And great power—there is no question in my mind that she was a much more powerful mathematician than I. We worked together on a problem on which we didn’t get anywhere. We were trying to prove the unsolvability of the decision problem for word equations. It turned out that we wouldn’t have been able to do that because the problem is solvable. Makanin solved it positively."

"In Julia Robinson we find a mathematician who was a heroine in her own time and a role model for all time. It is a story of childhood, illness, love, marriage, disappointment, obsession, and triumph."

"[About what to do to counter hypocrisy in academia:] The first order of business, if a stream is being polluted, you have to stop the pollution at the source. The wrong way to think about it is 'Let's clean up the stream.' The right way to think about it is 'Let's stop polluting the stream.' You have to stop donating to your alma mater. First order of business. [...] This should be the easiest ask on planet Earth. [...] Give it to anybody, but don't give it to university. Because when you give it to your university, you're supporting an indoctrination mill, you're supporting an institution whose very values are antithetical to Western liberal democracy, so you have to stop."

"[About homelessness:] Some people on the far left don't want that problem solved because they look at the manifestation of homelessness as indicative of a problem with the system. And as long as we can keep homelessness there, we can see that the system is corrupt and then we can incentivize people to rip down the system because we want social justice. [...] We want to remediate these larger economic problems that we know the source of these are the capitalist structure."

"I'm worried about 33 trillion in debt. [...] I'm worried about the fact that one third of the taxes collected last year went to pay the interest on the debt. I'm worried that nobody really gives a hoot about it. I'm worried about the national divorce talk. I'm worried about wide-scale ideological capture of our institutions, particularly legacy media and legacy institutions. I'm worried about the geopolitical situation. [...] I'm worried about the Israeli Palestinian problem [...]. I'm worried about Chinese militarization of Taiwan, the semiconductor industry. I'm not worried about rogue [artificial intelligence] [...], but I'm worried that we have lost an understanding of what makes America great. [...] I'm worried that we have forgotten why freedom matters, why it's important, that's what I'm worried about. And unless we start to care about those things then we can't reconstruct reason; we can't reconstruct a civil society."

"Faith taints or at worst removes our curiosity about the world, what we should value, and what type of life we should lead. [...] Faith immutably alters the starting conditions for inquiry by uprooting a hunger to know and sowing a warrantless confidence."

"Inquiry and wonder must replace dogmatism and certainty. The long-term goal is to create conditions that turn the dispositions of inquiring and wondering into culturally trumpeted values."

"The thrust of our message must be that there are things we don't know and it's okay not to know— even in death. Not claiming to know something you don't know isn't a character flaw, it is a virtue."

"To argue that people need faith is to abandon hope, and to condescend and accuse the faithful of being incapable of understanding the importance of reason and rationality. There are better and worse ways to come to terms with death, to find strength during times of crisis, to make meaning and purpose in our lives, to interpret our sense of awe and wonder, and to contribute to human well-being— and the faithful are completely capable of understanding and achieving this."

"A criticism of an idea is not the same as a criticism of a person. [...] Ideas don't deserve dignity; people deserve dignity."

"Give faith-based justifications no countenance. [...] Let the utterer know that faith is not an acceptable basis from which to draw a conclusion that can be relied upon."

"Don't complain, apologize, or mumble in the defense of reason. [...] Tell people exactly what you think and why you think it."

"Most basic elements of civil discussion, especially over matters of substantive disagreement, come down to a single theme: making the other person in a conversation a partner, not an adversary. To accomplish this, you need to understand what you want from the conversation, make charitable assumptions about others' intentions, listen, and seek back-and-forth interaction (as opposed to delivering a message)."

"Know when to walk away, even when the conversation is going well. Putting pressure on your partner to continue a discussion beyond their comfort level shuts down listening, encourages defensiveness, and turns the conversation into a frustrated rehearsal of why one of you is correct and the other dense."

"What it means to hold a belief based on evidence is, by definition, that one is open to the possibility that evidence might be discovered that would change one's mind. If no evidence would change one's mind, then one is not forming one's beliefs on the basis of evidence."

"The most difficult thing to accept for people who work hard at forming their beliefs on the basis of evidence is that not everyone forms their beliefs in that way. [...] Many people believe what and how they do precisely because they do not formulate their beliefs on the basis of evidence-- not because they're lacking evidence."

"Here's a heresy: "How do you know that?" is a powerful question for helping people think, but it's not the best question. The best question is, "How could that belief be wrong?""

"When your conversation partner is getting angry, the single best thing you can do in most circumstances is to stop whatever else you're doing and listen. It's very difficult to remain angry with someone who is patiently and earnestly listening, and if you break the cycle of frustrating dialogue early by switching to listening and learning, you can halt a great deal of your partner's mounting anger before it starts."

"Seemingly impossible conversations typically have one thing in common: they're about moral beliefs rooted in one's sense of identity, but they play out on the level of facts (or assertions, name-calling, grandstanding, threats, etc.). [...] The most difficult conversations, then, masquerade as discussions about something other than morality, but they are actually about what qualities, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors individuals believe make them good people or bad people and why it is important to hold the right views among those."

"Peter Boghossian's techniques of friendly persuasion are not mine, and maybe I'd be more effective if they were. They are undoubtedly very persuasive — and very much needed."

"Metaphysics is ontology. Ontology is the most generic study of what exists. Evidence for what exists, at least in the physical world, is provided solely by empirical research. Hence the proper object of most metaphysics is the careful analysis of our best scientific theories (and especially of fundamental physical theories) with the goal of determining what they imply about the constitution of the physical world."

"I believe that it is a fundamental, irreducible fact about the spatio-temporal structure of the world that time passes. ...The passage of time is an intrinsic asymmetry in the temporal structure of the world, an asymmetry that has no spatial counterpart. ...The belief that time passes ...has no bearing on the question of the 'reality' of the past or of the future. I believe that the past is real: there are facts about what happened in the past that are independent of the present state of the world and independent of all knowledge or beliefs about the past. I similarly believe that there is (i.e. will be) a single unique future. I know what it would be to believe that the past is unreal (i.e. nothing ever happened, everything was just created ex nihilo) and to believe that the future is unreal (i.e. all will end, I will not exist tomorrow, I have no future). I do not believe these things... Insofar as belief in the reality of the past and the future constitutes a belief in a 'block universe', I believe in a block universe. But I also believe that time passes, and see no contradiction or tension between these views."

"I have often felt that whatever is of value in this book could be found in Bell's "The Theory of Local Beables" (1987, Ch. 7)... this book will have served a great purpose if it does no more than encourage people to read Bell with the care and attention that he deserves."

"The sparks which fly when quantum theory collides with Relativity ignite conceptual brushfires of particular interest... problems about causation, time, and holism. Unfortunately much of the work... presupposes a considerable amount of familiarity with the physics. This is particularly sad since the physics is not, in most cases, very complicated."

"The presentation of Bell's inequality needs no more than some algebra... Understanding Relativity also requires no more than algebraic manipulation... but would tax the patience of the average reader. So I have tried to present Relativity pictorially..."

"Pictures of space-time look misleadingly like pictures of space, and the novice must unlearn some of the conventions..."

"Quantum theory... formalism... uses no more than linear algebra and vector spaces. ...A particularly nice and accessible presentation of the requisite mathematics can be found in 's Quantum Mechanics and Experience (1992, Ch. 2)."

"[M]ost clear philosophical ideas can be presented intuitively, shorn of the manifold qualifications, appendices and terminological innovations that grow like weeds in academic soil."

"At its most fundamental level, physics tells us about what there is, about the categories of being. And modern physics tells us that what there is ain't nothing like what we thought there is."

"Perhaps the most vexing question confronting any study of Bell's inequality, and the experimental observation of violations of that... would never have been discovered if not for the existence of quantum formalism. On the other hand, the inequality... is derived without any mention of quantum theory and the violations are matters of plain experimental fact. So the explication and analysis of the importance of Bell's work can in principle proceed without mentioning quantum mechanics at all. Should an account of Bell's inequality emphasize its historical roots... or... sever those ties in the interest of clarity? ...I chose the second option ...the interpretation of quantum theory is troublesome enough ...to overshadow and confuse the relatively straightforward proof on non-locality."

"Non-locality appears at exactly the point where the "measurement problem" which infects standard quantum theory is resolved."

"If one resolves the measurement problem by allowing a real physical process of wave collapse, it is the collapse dynamics which manifests the non-locality, and which resists the fully Relativistic formulation."

"If one resolves the measurement problem by postulating additional variables beside the wave function, it is the dynamics of these variables which manifests the non-locality and which resists a fully Relativistic formulation."

"The regrettably widespread opinion that there is no real non-locality inherent in the quantum theory is therefore deeply intertwined with the regrettably widespread opinion that the measurement problem can be painlessly solved without postulating either additional variables or any real collapse process."

"Although this book is not the place to thrash out those issues, I have thrashed them... in other places."

"Fundamental conceptual changes occur, but they are always modifications of a previously existing structure. ...[T]actical adjustments are made in order to render the whole consistent. The ad hoc nature of this procedure may leave us with lingering doubts as to whether the whole really is consistent."

"The Theory of Relativity has overthrown classical presumptions about the structure of space and time. The quantum theory has provided us with intimations of a new conception of physical reality. Classical notions of causality, of actuality, and of the role of the observer... have all come under attack."

"[P]roblems about the fundamental consistency of our two fundamental physical theories may appear. ...It arises from the remarkable results derived by John Stewart Bell in 1964 ...[C]ertain pairs of particles that are governed by quantum laws... appear to remain "connected" or "in communication" no matter how distantly separated... [T]he connection exists even when the observations carried out occupy positions... which cannot be connected by light rays. The particles communicate faster than light."

"Relativity is commonly taken to prohibit anything from traveling faster than light. ...[H]ow can the particles continue to display the... correlations..? The two pillars of modern physics seem to contradict one other."

"Many... would agree that Relativity prohibits something from going faster than light but disagree over just what something is."

"[A]nother interpretation holds that Relativity requires only thatTheories be Lorentz invarient."

"Any book which attempts to deal with quantum theory, Special Relativity and General Relativity courts various forms of disaster."

"[T]he experimental verification of Bell's inequality constitutes the most significant event of the last half-century. ...[O]ur basic picture of space, time, and physical reality must change. These results, and the mysteries they engender, should be the common property of all who contemplate with wonder the universe we inhabit."

"I hope... to have provided a framework sturdy enough and correct enough to serve both professional and amateur naval architects who propose to redesign the craft which carries us on our journey."

"[T]he most general question we can ask about matter is what sort of thing it is. ...[W]e might hold that matter is made of point-like particles, or of fields, or of one-dimensional strings, or of some combination of these, or of something else altogether. Given any of these ...there are further, more specific questions ...We will be concerned with the most general questions, rather than the more specific ones."

"[T]he science of thermodynamics... initially aimed at providing a precise account of how heat spreads through an object and from one object to another. But we can discover... detailed equations governing heat flow and still not have an account of what heat is. ...It is a characteristic of contemporary physics education that much more time is spent learning how to solve the equation and get a practical answer... than in... the nature of heat, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of matter. Physics students... fascinated by these foundational questions can find themselves frustrated by... classes that refuse to address them. This volume is dedicated to them as much as it is to philosophers..."

"[T]he need for a completely physical account of "measurement" procedures—are addressed in both volumes..."

"[S]pace and time... do not appear to our senses: they have no color or flavor or sound or smell or tangible shape. ...[They] seem rather to have is a geometrical structure."

"The Theory of Relativity is presented, first and foremost, as a theory of the geometry of space-time. Special Relativity is explained in enough detail to solve specific problems about the behavior of clocks and rigid objects in a relativistic world. General Relativity is presented less rigorously. My aim... make the conceptual foundations of these theories absolutely clear..."

"Newton's First Law, the... Law of Inertia, refers only to bodies that are subject to no external forces. It is tempting to say that Newton postulates that such bodies "continue in the same state of motion," but such... would miss the revolutionary aspect... the First Law specifies exactly what counts as "the same state of motion." For Aristotle... a piece of aether in uniform circular motion about [earth,] the center of the universe is always in "the same state of motion," and so there would be no reason to seek out external causes... In Aristotle's physics, external causes are responsible for unnatural motion, such as a rock moving upward instead of down. So for Aristotle, the falling of a stone... requires no external cause, and the continued rotation of a sphere of fixed stars requires no external cause: this what these sorts of matter do by nature."

"[P]rior to Newton, Galileo sought to specify the "intertial" motion of terrestrial objects—...the motion they would display if subject to no forces—and he concluded that such motion would be uniform circular motion. He arrived at this conclusion from his experimental work with inclined planes."

"Unlike space-time theory, where there is substantial agreement about how to understand the best physics we have (General Relativity), quantum theory has always been a battleground of contention. Nothing one can say would command the assent of most physicists and philosophers."

"The central problem facing attempts to understand a quantum theory is how it manages to model empirical phenomena in a principled way. This is often referred to as "the measurement problem"..."

"John Stewart Bell made a proposal... which he called the theory of local beables. "Beables" refers to the ontology of a theory: what it postulates to exist. "Local" indicates a beable that exists in a small region of space-time... What one needs... is an inventory of local beables and an account of their dynamics: how they get distributed in space-time."

"If the correct solution to the measurement problem does not involve local beables, or if those beables have no nonrelativistic analogs, then starting with nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is counterproductive. But one has to start somewhere..."

"Starting from what we understand and seeing clearly its inadequacies can provide a path to conceptual progress."

"A physical theory should clearly and forthrightly address two... questions: what there is, and what it does. The answer to the first... the ontology... to the second... its dynamics. The ontology should have a sharp mathematical description, and the dynamics... implemented by precise equations describing how the ontology... evolve[s]. ...All three of the theories we will examine meet these demands."

"Sometimes, accepting the Copenhagen Interpretation is understood... to use the quantum recipe without... question: Shut up and calculate. Such rejects the aspiration... defined above. Hence it is not even in the running..."

"It has become almost de rigueur in quantum foundations literature to misuse the terms "realist," "realistic," "antirealist," and "antirealistic." These terms have a precise meaning in the philosophy of science... that seems to be... unfamiliar to most physicists. ...[T]hey simply toss them around with no attached meaning ...[with] terrible consequences in foundations of quantum theory."

"[P]hysical theories are neither realist nor antirealist. That is... a . It is a person's attitude toward a physical theory that is either realist or antirealist. ...[[Copernican heliocentrism|[T]he theory]] toward which Osiander was antirealist and Galileo realist is one and the same theory. The theory itself is neither."

"The scientific realist maintains that in at least some cases, we have good evidential reasons to accept theories or theoretical claims as true, or approximately true, or on-the-road-to-truth. The scientific antirealist denies this. These attitudes come in degrees... [T]his is a question addressed by epistemology and confirmation theory..."

"Physics aspires to a sort of universality that is unique among empirical sciences and holds, in that sense, a foundational position among them."

"Present physics elucidates the "motion" of an object as its trajectory through space-time. A precise understanding... requires a precise account of the structure of space-time. The nature of space-time itself... is the topic of the companion volume... Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time. The present volume addresses the question: What is matter? ...Our main task is to understand just what quantum theory claims about the nature of the material constituents of the world."

"General Relativity is... completely clear and precise. ...[W]hat the theory says is unambiguous. The more one works with it, the clearer it becomes, and there are no great debates... about how to use it. (The only bit of unclarity... to represent the distribution of matter... using the . Einstein remarked that that part... "is low grade wood," while the part describing the space-time structure... is "fine marble.")"

"[N]o consensus... exists among physicists about how to understand quantum theory. There... is no precise, exact physical theory... Instead there is raging controversy. ...How can the manifest and overwhelming success ...be reconciled with complete uncertainty about what the theory claims about the nature of matter?"

"I have never bumped into Tim Maudlin, but I have felt his gravitational tug. A Reddit discussion... called Maudlin "probably the most influential person in philosophy of physics." Someone chimed in that Maudlin... is "without a doubt an intellectual beast." Maudlin impresses even... Jim Holt... When I asked Holt "What’s your utopia?," he replied "arguing eternally about gauge theory" with Maudlin and a few other pals. ...Maudlin's ..."The Defeat of Reason"... ends by suggesting that we "shorten the dignified designation Homo sapiens to the pithier and more accurate Homo sap." Ouch."

"Maudlin's book is likely to upset many physicists and metaphysicians, but in a positive, thought provoking way. Moreover, its plain presentation style makes it a good introductory book for students and non-specialists. In short, it is highly recommended for anybody interested in quantum theory, and especially in what "happens in between.""

"...Maudlin takes up the conceptual and ontological foundations of classical and modern physics and explains in a lucid manner how Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity emerged from Newtonian mechanics and Galilean relativity. ...revealing the foundations of physics to those with more interest in understanding the general philosophical concepts rather than merely understanding how to solve the equations."

"We are horrified by the fantasy of a subtle use of violence that could change us without our knowing it. This would be the ultimate weapon of offense or defense. But whether this pure power appears in its positive role as The Method for finding truth, or in its negative role as the Sophistic power of persuasion, the same mistake occurs."

"Today we have techniques of manipulation on a scale that would have done Callicles proud. They are not playful transgressions; we do well to fear the link between such power and what passes for knowledge. If there is only persuasion, Plato warns us, there is no discourse except the confrontation of power and propaganda. If we cannot draw the line, he says, all means of persuasion will be acceptable. Violence may be done to us, in crude or subtle ways and we will not be able to stop it. Even worse, we may not be aware of it."

"Dress from the waist up."

"Ignore bureaucrats and they will ignore you."

"Next to Mozart, other kinds of music are not music at all."

"[Depression is] common to all people with an excessively logical education who work in applied mathematics: It is a kind of pessimism resulting from an inability to believe in what people call the Principle of Induction, or the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Since one cannot prove, or even render probable a priori, that the sun should rise tomorrow, we cannot really believe it shall."

"Walter Pitts, who was companion, protege, and friend to Warren, had, for a long time, been convinced that the only way of understanding nature was by logic and logic alone .... Pitts had committed himself to logic as the key to the structure of the world in a way that no other person that [ know had ever done."

"The movie Forrest Gump made the point that the greatest, most heroic Americans are people of extraordinary character who flicker briefly into public consciousness and are quickly forgotten... while his contemporaries Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John von Neumann entered the pantheon of fame, Pitts remains a shadowy folk hero. Stories about Pitts have circulated among the cognescenti for years, but almost nothing has been written about him."

"“What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain”... devastated Pitts because it showed that retinal ganglion cells were not simply acting as logical devices, thus appearing to shatter his dream that logic could be used to explain the nervous system."

"At about the time of the break with Wiener, and arguably because of it, Pitts destroyed his thesis and all of his papers, felt unable to become interested in anything new, and began a long, slow decline. He did not simply begin to drink—as befitting a man of his talents, he synthesized novel analogues of barbituates and opiates in the laboratory and experimented on himself by ingesting long-chain alcohols."

"The story is told that, at age 12, Pitts ran into the public library to hide from some bullies, found a copy of Principia Mathematica by the 20th-century philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, and proceeded to read it cover to cover in the next few weeks. Pitts experienced a metaphysical insight that logic rules the universe, and as a corollary he felt that ego—and his ego in particular— needed to be erased in order to achieve an understanding of the world."

"Pitts was married to abstract thought... We never knew anything about his family or his feelings about us. He died mysterious, sad and remote, and not once did I find out, or even want to find out more about how he felt or what he hoped. To be interested in him as a person was to lose him as a friend. One was to be interested only in what he knew."

"He read incessantly and omnivorously, but stayed away from everyone. He read like someone waiting to die but willing to be distracted during the last hours."

"[Pitts] was in no uncertain terms the genius of our group. He was absolutely incomparable in the scholarship of chemistry, physics, of everything you could talk about history, botany, etc. When you asked him a question, you would get back a whole textbook … To him, the world was connected in a very complex and wonderful fashion."

"It was apparent to him after we had done the frog’s eye that even if logic played a part, it didn’t play the important or central part that one would have expected. It disappointed him. He would never admit it, but it seemed to add to his despair at the loss of Wiener’s friendship."

"He is the most omniverous of scientists and scholars. He has become an excellent dye chemist, a good mammalogist, he knows the sedges, mushrooms and the birds of New England. He knows neuroanatomy and neurophysiology from their original sources in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German for he learns any language he needs as soon as he needs it. Things like electrical circuit theory and the practical soldering in of power, lighting, and radio circuits he does himself. In my long life, I have never seen a man so erudite or so really practical."

"I shall adopt the convention by which particular propositions are taken as implying the existence of their subjects, and universal propositions as not implying the existence of their subjects. would infer that the two propositions The sea-serpent is not found in the water, The sea-serpent is not found out of the water, are contradictory; bur , , and would infer that the sea-serpent does not exist. With this convention, contradiction can never exist between universal propositions nor between particular propositions taken by themselves. A universal proportion can be contradicted only by a particular proposition, and a particular only by a universal. The above premises are inconsistent with The sea-serpent has (at least once) has been found. With this convention, hypothetical and categorical propositions receive the same formal treatment. If a, then b = all a is b = a implies b. (Peirce.)"

"The whole field of Deductive Logic, even when thought of merely in the terms of common language, has acquired, for the student of , a symmetry and a completeness and a simplicity which it is, apparently, far from possessing in the minds of its usual exponents. The natural repugnance which the ordinary logician felt, at first, to seeing processes of deductive reasoning made the subject of a great development by a purely mechanical process, has in great part passed away; it would have been hard for it to survive the eloquent persuasiveness of 's Symbolic Logic. It seems, therefore, to be time for the simplified ways of looking at things which prevail in Symbolic Logic to begin to sink into the elementary expositions of the subject."

"What gives significance and value to truths is that they permit of interesting predictions."

"… was of the brooding type. He sat when he addressed his handful of students (who turned out afterwards, however, to be a not unimportant handful) and he had all the air, as has been noted by , of the typical philosopher who is engaged, at the moment, in bringing fresh truth by divination out of some inexhaustible well. He got his effect not by anything that could be called an inspiring personality, in the usual sense of the term, but rather by creating the impression that we had before us a profound, original, dispassionate and impassioned seeker of truth. No effort was made to create a connected and not inconsistent whole out of the matter of each lecture. In fact, so devious and unpredictable was his course that he once, to the delight of his students, proposed at the end of his lecture, that we should form (for greater freedom of discussion) a Metaphysical Club, though he had begun the lecture by defining metaphysics to be the “science of unclear thinking.”"

"In their attempts to get around these artificial barriers and inconsistencies, early women scientists developed a great many strategies. These tended to be of two sorts. One was the idealistic, liberal-to-radical, and often confrontational strategy of demanding that society reject all stereotypes and work for the feminist goal of full equality. This involved writing angry letters and otherwise documenting the "unfairness" of the unequal opportunities open to men and women. The most prominent and successful strategist of this school was Christine Ladd-Franklin, a graduate of the 1860s, would-be physicist turned mathematician, psychologist, and logician, who for fifty years, worked shrewdly and tirelessly for educated women. Her greatest triumph was in opening graduate schools to women in the 1890s, and thus allowing women to earn the same doctorates as men."