Philosophers From The United States

"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?""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"[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."

"Although market socialist theory will remain seriously incomplete until appropriate theories of bureaucratic, managerial, and worker motivation are developed, market socialism is clearly an alternative to private ownership which must be taken seriously, even if we restrict our view to considerations of efficiency alone."

"Philosophy of science can bring a strong array of analytical and synthetic tools to questions of ultimate causation, ultimate reality and “the whole of reality” because these questions are both physical and metaphysical—entailing methodological procedures from both science and philosophy."

"I’ll just simply say we haven’t done any apologetics in a concerted fashion since Vatican II. I don’t know why. I’m still trying to figure this out myself—why did apologetics became a bad word, why did it become a reflection of some kind of inauthenticity of faith? We’ve somehow drifted into a Kierkegaardianism—we have to take a leap of faith across an infinite chasm. But I’ve never thought that at all! I luckily had great teachers who believed reason and faith came from the same source, with God never intending us to jump over an infinite chasm."

"What the mathematically-oriented methods of modern physics do is to focus on those aspects of nature which can be strictly predicted and controlled and to ignore anything that doesn’t fit that method. As a result, physics tends brilliantly to uncover those aspects of reality that fit that method, and which can therefore be exploited technologically. But it simply does not follow that there are no other aspects of reality. To think otherwise is like the drunk’s fallacy of assuming that his lost car keys must be under the street lamp somewhere, because that is where the light is."

"It took a very considerable time for education in art to be regarded as a legitimate part of school training and even many celebrated universities until the last generation had no such thing as a department of fine arts. Even the departments of literature were suspicious of the plastic arts, for men of letters with some notable exceptions have never been at home in the realm of the visual or of the tangible. When art education did finally achieve recognition, it failed to be considered even in unharassed times as being quite on a level of seriousness with even the other liberal arts, or with the physical sciences or with the new and educationally fashionable social studies."

"... Perhaps Faith and Hope and Love will build the City of God among us. Along with Works. And the works will keep us too busy for mere irony or rebellion or despair."

"... In the vocabulary of medieval thinking all knowledge and science were identical. The end of man was blessedness, and knowledge guided by faith was the avenue to eternal felicity."

"... Given a problem, a difficulty, a maladjustment between the individual and his environment, thinking occurs. If every instinctive act brought satisfaction, thinking would be much less necessary and much less frequently practised."

"Meditation is just gently coming back again and again to what's right here."

"The principle of nowness is very important to any effort to establish an enlightened society."

"But the Buddhist teachings are not only about removing the symptoms of suffering, they’re about actually removing the cause, or the root, of suffering."

"Through meditation, we’re able to see clearly what’s going on with our thoughts and emotions, and we can also let them go."

"This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are."

"The natural quality of mind is clear, awake, alert, and knowing. Free from fixation. By training in being present, we come to know the nature of our mind. So the more you train in being present - being right here - the more you begin to feel like your mind is sharpening up. The mind that can come back to the present is clearer and more refreshed, and it can better weather all the ambiguities, pains, and paradoxes of life."

"When we multitask and split up our mind into a million directions, we are actually creating our own suffering, because these habits strengthen strong emotional reactivity and discursive thought."

"From this point of view, the only time we ever know what’s really going on is when the rug’s been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep."

"The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable."

"When anyone asks me how I got involved in Buddhism, I always say it was because I was so angry with my husband... When that marriage fell apart, I tried hard—very, very hard—to go back to some kind of comfort, some kind of security, some kind of familiar resting place... I knew that annihilation of my old dependent, clinging self was the only way to go."

"In fact, anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness."

"The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought... Nothing is what we thought."

"We all need to be reminded and encouraged to relax with whatever arises and bring whatever we encounter to the path."

"Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it."

"We can't control what's going to happen but we can grow in awareness of what is happening."

"But there is that feeling. And there’s always another challenge, and that keeps us humble. Life knocks you off your pedestal."

"The experience of a sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness."

"Meditation is an invitation to notice when we reach our limit and to not get carried away by hope and fear."

"Meditation helps you to meet your edge; it’s where you actually come up against it and you start to lose it."

"This is a standard meditation instruction that you can embody in the entirety of your life: do not act out and do not repress. See what happens if you don’t do either of those things."

"Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth."

"Impermanence becomes vivid in the present moment; so do compassion and wonder and courage. And so does fear."

"Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion—not what we thought. Love. Buddha nature. Courage."

"When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize."

"Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly."

"The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last — that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security."

"Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, “Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?”"

"Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors — people who have a certain hunger to know what is true — feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that... teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away."

"As a basic reason for action, we first need to figure out what the truth about God is to then be in harmony with him. This explains the intelligibility of the non-believer who is a seeker, seeking out the truth about God — is there a God? Is there only one God? Who is God? What does he demand of me? Even before arriving at answers to these questions, the pursuit makes sense because the religious good or end of our nature is there. As we discover more truths about God, we’re able to act more, or more fully, in harmony with him and thus flourish more completely with respect to religion. And, of course, the full flourishing of this aspect of our life will only come in the kingdom."

"When you don’t grow up in a bubble, it makes talking to people outside of various bubbles that much easier, and more natural. I know from first-hand experience that most people are just badly misinformed; they’re not evil, they just don’t know what they don’t know. And so you can’t take any of their vitriol all that personally, or that seriously. All you can do is try to speak the truth in tones and terms that they can understand."