Philosophers From The United States

"The first lesson about affect’s role in moral epistemology, then, is that from the valorized position of dispassionate detachment we are often actually less likely to pick up on what is morally salient. Emotional distance does not always clarify; disengagement is not always the most revealing stance. To see clearly what is before us, we need to cultivate certain desires, such as the desire to see justice done, and the desire to see humans flourish, but we must also, more particularly, work at developing our capacities for loving and caring about people."

"Possession of various emotions and desires—care, concern, love, but also anger, revulsion, indignation—is not just immensely useful to seeing the moral landscape, it is a necessary condition of doing so. The idea of dispassion as the paradigmatic epistemic stance seems to me a dangerous one, for there are some truths, I want to argue, that can be apprehended only from a stance of affective engagement. The claim is an important one, for, if correct, it means we must reject the “bureaucratic model” of morality that is implicit in so many ethical theories."

"It is true, of course, that most of us have very little knowledge of our psychological makeup and that we are likely to accept oversimplified and false accounts of why it is we think and act as we do. But this fact is quite consistent with what we have said about self-presenting properties. For, although these properties may mislead us about other things, they are not a source of error about themselves."

"To see the point of such a hierarchy, let us turn back to the concept of the evident. An evident proposition is one that is justified. But there are many justified propositions that are not evident. Indeed many propositions that may be said to have a very high degree of justification are not evident. For example, it may be evident to you now that you have walked today and that you also walked yesterday and the day before that. You may have very good grounds for accepting the proposition that you will walk tomorrow and the day after that: the proposition may be strongly supported by induction. But it is not now evident to you or to anyone else that you will walk tomorrow, for no one now knows that you will walk tomorrow. The proposition that you will walk tomorrow may be beyond reasonable doubt for you, but nothing that you can find out today can make it evident for you today that you will walk tomorrow."

"Strictly speaking, "The wine tastes sour to me," and "something looks red to me," do not express what is self-presenting in our sense of this term. For the first statement implies that there is a certain thing—namely, the wine— that I am tasting, and the second statement implies that there is a certain external thing that is appearing red to me. But, "I am tasting wine," and, "There is a certain external thing that is appearing red to me," do not express what is self-presenting. What justifies me in thinking that I am tasting wine is not simply the fact that I am tasting wine, and what justifies me in thinking that a certain thing is appearing red to me (and that I am not, say, merely suffering from a hallucination) is not simply the fact that a certain thing is appearing red to me. To arrive at what is self-presenting in these cases, we must remove the reference to the external thing—to the wine in, "The wine tastes sour to me," and to the appearing thing in, "That thing appears red to me." This, however, is very difficult to do, since our language was not developed for any such philosophical purpose."

"Our second "anti-Pyrrhonian" principle is this: (A4) If anything is probable for S, then something is certain for S"

"It is sometimes said that playing it safe is always more reasonable than taking any chances. And this would seem to be the attitude of the Pyrrhonist with respect to what it is reasonable for us to believe. But the following principle is "anti-Pyrrhonian": (A3) If the conjunction p&q is beyond reasonable doubt for S, then believing p&q is more justified for S than believing p while withholding q"

"The objectivity principle tells us what kind of justification we can have for beliefs about justification: (A5) If S knows that p, then, if S believes that he knows that p, then S knows that he knows that p"

"It has been suggested that the sentences giving rise to the problem of the synthetic a priori are really "postulates about the meanings of words" ar»d, therefore, that they do not express what is synthetic a priori. But if the suggestion is intended literally, then it would seem to betray the confusion between use and mention that we encountered earlier. A postulate about the meaning of the word "red," for example, or a sentence expressing such a postulate, would presumably mention the word "red." It might read, "The word 'red' may be taken to refer to a certain color," or perhaps, "Let the word 'red' be taken to refer to a certain color." But, "Everything that is red is colored," although it uses the words "red" and "colored," does not mention them at all. It is not the case, therefore, that, "Red is a color," refers only to words and the ways in which they are used."

"What we have been saying, of course, is not likely to convince the skeptics and we can hardly claim to have "refuted" them. But our question was not, "Can we refute the skeptics?" Our question was: "Are there positive reasons for being skeptical about the possibility of succeeding in the epistemic enterprise?" The answer seems to be that there are no such reasons. And therefore it is not unreasonable for us to continue."

"In making their assumptions, epistemologists presuppose that they are rational, beings. This means, in part, that they have certain properties which are such that, if they ask themselves, with respect to any one of these properties, whether or not they have that property, then it will be evident to them that they have it. It means further that they are able to know what they think and believe and that they can recognize inconsistencies."

"The category of being beyond reasonable doubt is illustrated by the proposition that the building in which I now find myself will be here tomorrow. The proposition is not evident. But for me—and I hope that for others— the proposition is such that believing it is more justified than withholding it. Obviously there are some true propositions which are such that we are more justified in believing them than in withholding them. Are there also false propositions which we are more justified in believing than in withholding? We will find that this may well be true. Or, more exactly, we will find that, if philosophical skepticism is false, and if, as a matter of fact, we do know many of the things about the world that we now think we know, then it is quite possible that some false propositions are such that it is more reasonable for us to believe those propositions than it is for us to withhold them."

"You may have knowledge, then, without having any insight into the epistemic status of what you know. In other words, you may know a proposition h to be true without having any beliefs at all about the fact that h is evident or about what makes h evident for you. You will have some degree of insight into your knowledge of h if you have a true belief about what makes h evident for you. You will have a greater degree of insight if, moreover, you have no false belief to the effect that some other proposition makes h evident for you. And you will have an even greater degree of insight into the status of your knowledge of h, if you also know that e makes h evident for you. But our ordinary knowledge about such things as ships, trees, and houses does not require that we have any beliefs about our epistemic situation."

"The Church therefore requires that the priest practice custody of the eyes, an integral part of modesty: we should never let our eyes fall on anything that would distract us from God or lead us into sin."

"It’s not unreasonable that people are becoming angry because they’re seeing that the bishops are overreacting in certain circumstances, but what they need to do, they need to see, instead of being angry, that this is a sign that God’s calling us to pray for them, because being angry with them isn’t going to help them. Praying will."

"The idea found embedded in European thought, particularly in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries that Africans were inferior socially and behaviorally has tainted most of what passes for social science in the West, definitionally and conceptually. Few have been able to escape Alexander Pope's dictum in the Essay on Man (1733) "some are, and must be, greater than the rest" and its implication for European contact and interpretation of that contact with the rest of the world."

"A common expression among African Americans relates the good to the beautiful, "beauty is as beauty does" or "she's beautiful because she's good." The first statement places emphasis on what a person does, that is, how a person "walks" among others in the society. The second statement identifies the beautiful by action. If a person's actions are not good, it does not matter how the person looks physically. Doing good is equivalent to being beautiful."

"The process of establishing in Muslim society is neither simple nor straightforward. There is not one strategy, one method or one process. What works today may be unsuccessful tomorrow."

"In this connection, the rules for debate in the academic realm differ significantly from other realms, such as this virtual one. There are, for example, rules about evidence, and about how evidence is presented. If a participant violates these rules then s/he may be excluded from further conversations. In this sense, in the academic world, there is an intolerance of those who do not follow the rules for debate. These rules of rhetoric are themselves debatable. Lest there be an infinite regress of sorts (that is, how do we argue about how we argue?) they ought to be upheld stipulatively."

"In women, if there is a greater arrest of individual growth than in men, the difference begins in the fœtal life; their comparative weight and size at birth are the same as at maturity; and, if the former finish their growth earlier, it must be because relatively they grow more rapidly."

"The warlike duty of defense is also borne chiefly by males, and must often be an immense tax on the energies."

"When Elizabeth Blackwell studied medicine and put up her sign in New York, she was regarded as fair game, and was called a "she doctor." The college that had admitted her closed its doors afterward against other women; and supposed they were shut out forever. But Dr. Blackwell was a woman of fine intellect, of great personal worth and a level head. How good it was that such a woman was the first doctor! She was well equipped by study at home and abroad, and prepared to contend with prejudice and every opposing thing."

"If women normally have equal appropriative powers with men, the surplus nutriment not needed for their smaller physiques may be constitutionally handed over to reproduction. Natural selection has originated an admirably complete system of related provisions to this distinct end. This fact must lead us to the conclusion that the aggregate of feminine force is the full and fair equivalent of all masculine force, physical or psychical."

"Nature's sturdiest buds and her best-fed butterflies belong to this sex; her female spiders are large enough to eat up a score of her little males; some of her mother-fishes might parody the nursery-song, "I have a little husband no bigger than my thumb.""

"Whenever man does not interfere, monogamy seems to be the general order of Nature with all higher organisms."

"Lucretia Mott has been a preacher for years; her right to do so is not questioned among Friends. But when Antoinette Brown felt that she was commanded to preach, and to arrest the progress of thousands that were on the road to hell; why, when she applied for ordination they acted as though they had rather the whole world should go to hell, than that Antoinette should be allowed to tell them how to keep out of it. She is now ordained over a parish in the state of New York, but when she meets on the Temperance platform the Rev. John Chambers, or your own Gen. Carey, they greet her with hisses. Theodore Parker said; “The acorn that the school-boy carries in his pocket and the squirrel stows in his cheek, has in it the possibility of an oak, able to withstand, for ages, the cold winter and the driving blast.” I have seen the acorn men and women, but never the perfect oak; all are but abortions. The young mother, when first the newborn babe nestles in her bosom, and a heretofore unknown love springs up in her heart, finds herself unprepared for this new relation in life, and she sends forth the child scarred and dwarfed by her own weakness and imbecility, as no stream can rise higher than its fountain."

"Every action, physical or psychical, involves either integration or disintegration; every use of faculty belongs to the latter class. There is no more antagonism between growth and reproduction than between growth and thought, growth and muscular activity, growth and breathing."

"If it could be shown that men or women who are the parents of many children have thereby lost something of individual power, we might then be forced to admit that the greater cost related to the reproductive system in women must be at their personal expense, not at the expense of the nutriment which they assimilate and eliminate."

"Other things being equal, the law seems to be directly reversed."

"There is no more antagonism between growth and reproduction than between growth and thought, growth and muscular activity, growth and breathing."

"Every action, physical or psychical, involves either integration or disintegration."

"The antagonism is only that of action and reaction, which are but two phases of the same process—opposing phases which exist everywhere, and which must exist, or action itself cease, and death reign universally."

"One activity initiates another; the largest individual force maintains those more active adjustments, "simultaneous and successive," between the internal and external, which indicate the most vigorous life. We must look, then, to something more than a direct antagonism, between growth and reproduction, to account for unlikeness's of the sexes in plant or animal."

"If it should be shown further that this difference cuts through all the mental activities of the human being, progress would have been made in the difficult matter of the classification of mental types."

"Writing with attention preoccupied or distracted results variously in the enlargement or dwarfing of characters, an alternative result that seems to depend upon deep-seated tendencies of the individual."

"The relation of the inner word to the outer visible one has long interested psychologists."

"In any case it is evident that there is a psychology as well as a sociology of handwriting. Tremendously complicated as the problem of diagnosis of individual traits from those tiny strokes of the pen appears, it is yet a legitimate problem of science; for the more progress psychology makes, the more evident it becomes that there is not a mode of expression which is not rooted to its finest detail in the complex psycho-physical organism. Meanwhile, it is fortunate that the task of identifying graphic signs should not be left wholly to the intuitions of the graphologist. Experimental work that seeks to induce variation in writing through a control of outer conditions must in time correlate certain definite variations in conditions with variation in such aspects of writing as size, speed, accuracy in alignment, inequality of control and the like."

"We are here brought face to face with the old question that has confronted all investigators of sex-differences. It is evident, however, that the question of the social environment is, in this instance, a controlling one not merely in the discussion of the revelation of sex in handwriting, but also in that of the revelation of intelligence; for there exists a peculiar environment for talent as well as for sex. Indeed, it appears that the investigation of handwriting must be socio-psychological in nature. Unconscious imitation, social suggestibility doubtless play an important, if not all-important, part in determining writing characteristics. On the whole, therefore, it is not surprising that the experts were more successful in distinguishing marked differences in intelligence than in determining the nature of the individual superiority. They perceived the class characteristic, as it were."

"Variation in the amplitude of written characters involves doubtless many important considerations relative to the facilitation and inhibition of movement."

"Variation in expression under emotional disturbance has long been a special subject of experiment. Little attempt, however, has been made to compare the results so obtained with the appearance of writing under emotional tension. To be sure, the graphologists cite a tendency to elevate progressively the line of writing as an evidence of mental exaltation, of joy or ambition, while a fall in the alignment is indicative of the depressive emotions, self-distrust, sadness, melancholy. Again, a strongly marked tendency toward centrifugal or centripetal movements is held to indicate, on the one hand, ardor, simplicity, activity, uprightness, and, on the other hand, slowness, lack of spontaneity, egoism."

"Handwriting, bearing as it does the cachet of individuality, has always interested those to whom things human make their intimate appeal. Curious observations relative to it have long been current, the existence, for instance, of national as well as family and personal chirographics; the perversions of it that take form as mirror writing or even—it is said—as inverted writing; the whimsy shown by the bizarre characters, by the tendency to irrelevant and extravagant flourishes in the writing of those suffering from certain forms of mental disorder. Attention has been called to the similarity existing between a man's handwriting and the manner in which he walks or gesticulates. It has been claimed that age and sex and profession leave their impress upon writing, that the pen craft of the painter mirrors minutely the grace and distinction that marks the sweep of his brush across the canvas."

"Doubtless the day is far in the future when we shall be able to solve such historical enigmas."

"The handwriting of any individual would be found to resemble the characteristic tracings shown by his pulse and respiration and fatigue curves. Nor is the interest in the variational aspect of handwriting restricted to recording the diversities in penmanship from individual to individual; it is also engaged in noting variations from day to day in the handwriting of any given person under the influence of fatigue or emotion or disease. But, however numerous, such observations and however legitimate the speculations they engender, it remains for the physiologist and the psychologist, with the aid perhaps of the sociologist, to compass the scientific study of the variational factor in handwriting."

"A resume of the work that has already been done has perhaps its value at the present time."

"Speculation must wait upon the facts."

"Growth and eating are antagonistic."

"An experience must be a universal across times as well as across brains. This experience of being you, here now, would be numerically the same whenever, as well as wherever, it was realized."

"In all conscious life there is only one person—I—whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience—its quality of being mine, the simple immediacy of it for whatever is having experience. One powerful argument for this is statistical: on the ordinary view of personhood it is an incredible coincidence for you (though not for others) that out of 200,000,000 sperm cells the very one required on each occasion for your future existence was first to the egg in each of the begettings of yourself and all your ancestors. The only view that does not make your existence incredible, and that is not therefore (from your perspective) an incredible view, is that any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway. It is a consequence that self-interest should extend to all conscious organisms."

"Think about what you ordinarily would recognize to be 'these experiences', 'mine'. What makes them 'mine' for you? Is it the detail of their content? If the colours you were seeing had been different, would the experiences have failed to be these, yours? Think of all the features of this experience that could be varied while its character of being 'mine' remained untouched. If you had fallen asleep and were now in the midst of a wild dream that had little in common with any of the usual content of your experience, would that experience have therein failed to be experienced as 'mine'? If you had eaten different particular items of food over the past years (as you might so easily have done), so that all the particular atoms in the structure of the body were different in numerical identity from those in your body now, would the experience have failed to have that character of being 'mine'? Must you take care with the particularity of the food that you eat because it is determining the identity of an experiencer, of the subject of self-interest? If the experience were had in a different location, if it were at a different time, would the experience not still have had that same character within it of being this and being mine?"

"We must see that all places, times and conscious organisms are equally "this one". For a failure to see this must distort our view by forcing us to accommodate in it what seems to be our own special objective status; and that awkward accommodation must then ruin any prospect of discovering the truly objective universal principles that govern the world."