Most philosophers of science would argue that theory should be backed by the evidence, and not vice versa.
Or consider the explanations for religious belief proposed by evolutionary psychologists, now recognised by
most philosophers of biology as involving more theoretical assumptions than empirical evidence.
Not exact matches
The Unemployed
Philosopher's Guild makes the
most fun mugs
of all time.
However, beyond what many
of us were exposed to in high school, and as
most are generally familiar, Physics actually branches out expansively, into numerous realms, many
of which
philosophers have played around with for ages.
We sit down with one
of the sector's
most prolific and successful
philosopher - investors: Venrock's Bryan Roberts.
The political
philosophers Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson reject not only Tutu's invocation
of religion and charged that, by seeking to transform the attitudes, emotions, and moral judgments
of citizens, he improperly imports soulcraft into statecraft and transgresses the autonomy
of citizens — contemporary liberalism's
most sacrosanct value.
How will you grasp what Gadamer is saying if you are resolutely unprepared (as
most philosophers are) to acknowledge the ontological mystery
of a Being that speaks directly to us» that is, to our troubles, our innermost issues
of identity and value?
He is surely correct in this, and his identification
of Wilhelm Reich as the key ideologue is important, as is his use
of Augusto Del Noce, perhaps the
most important modern
philosopher whom Protestants have never heard
of.
What, for example, can the life
of the fellow with the wool ties and Teutonic humor tell us about what was
most vital and central to Hans - Georg Gadamer, the German
philosopher who died almost two years ago, on March 14, 2002, at the remarkable age
of 102.
And, not coincidentally,
most enlightened
philosophers have ultimately come to similar conclusions, for the good
of society and mankind, as well as the individual.
The Canadian thinker Charles Taylor, in any case, is gaining status as the world's premier
philosopher of modernity, the
most judicious, the one who makes the
most apt and discerning distinctions, the one who best sees both modernity's grandeur and its misery.
Clearly the best collection
of essays from a Kentucky farmer -
philosopher, this book demonstrates the breadth
of Wendell Berry's work, as well as his status as one
of the
most important commentators
of our time on matters
of community, land and ecology.
Since
most modern thinkers began with the premise that God exists, these
philosophers have used their great philosophic arguments for the existence
of God.
Throughout
most of recorded history, theologians and
philosophers have extolled propriety and correct social behavior as virtues akin to morality.
In the preface to Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, Hartshorne celebrates «our English inheritance
of critical caution and concern for clarity»; he seeks to learn more from Leibniz, «the
most lucid metaphysician in the early modern period,» as well as from Bergson, Peirce, James, Dewey, and Whitehead, «five
philosophers of process
of great genius and immense knowledge
of the intellectual and spiritual resources
of this century.
Do you reject the philosophical teachings
of most of the
most influential
philosophers of all time - Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, etc.?
The first is relatively uncontroversial to
most believers except, perhaps, to evangelical
philosophers and fundamentalists
of various types — namely, that laypeople are in no position to adjudicate disputes among experts in New Testament scholarship because the scholars have an expertise in languages and ancient history that laypeople lack.
The book
of Job has served as a philosophical Rorschach blot for its
most outspoken interpreters, from the Talmudic rabbis and Church Fathers through their medieval philosophical successors and down to modern
philosophers, theologians, and creative writers.
Most philosophers have done so, and this kind
of thinking has dominated the West.
But
most modern
philosophers have supposed that when we analyze these events fully, we can explain them in terms
of the activities
of subjects or the motions
of objects.
You don't have to be the
most educated person in Laodicea to know that the Greek
philosophers were rather insistent upon the importance
of maintaining a household in which the man exercises unilateral authority over his wives, children, and slaves.
But my basic convictions about them were derived not from these
philosophers but partly from my being surrounded from birth with the reality in question; partly from Emerson's essays and the works
of James and Royce; partly from the poems
of Shelley and Wordsworth (which similarly influenced Whitehead); and
most of all from my own experience, reflected upon especially during my two years in the army medical corps, when I had considerable leisure to think about life and death and other fundamental questions.
And what
of Nietzsche, the
philosopher who, with the exception
of Plato and Rousseau,
most influenced Bloom as teacher and thinker?
He also possessed the works
of most major post-scholastic
philosophers - Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Bergson, Sartre et al - and modern
philosophers of science like Heisenberg.
The
philosopher who did
most to shape this vision
of the world, Rene Descartes, regarded the human mind as wholly different in nature.
In his introduction, Oden throws down a «gauntlet»: He challenges the reader to assemble a collection
of passages from any ten major
philosophers as funny as those he has compiled from Kierkegaard's writings; furthermore, he makes bold provisionally — until this challenge is met — to declare Kierkegaard «as, among
philosophers, the
most amusing.»
The Danish
philosopher was particularly hard on religious professionals, and claimed that inconsistent behaviors
most often accompany exorbitant professions
of good intentions:
The larger problem that I have with this type
of argument is that the evidentiary issues re: God have been very thoroughly argued out by 2500 years
of philosophers, some
of whom must have been the
most intelligent people ever to occupy the Earth.
The rejection
of metaphysics by
most modern
philosophers and theologians has seen the gap filled by influential scientists, often with little philosophical training but with the credibility that their status as scientists confers on them.
One
of the creative process
philosophers, Charles Hartshorne, states in the beginning
of Man's Vision
of God his conviction that «a magnificent intellectual content — far surpassing that
of such systems as Thomism, Spinozism, German idealism, positivism (old or new) is implicit in the religious faith
most briefly expressed in the three words, God is love».1 If this be true what is needed is not the discarding
of metaphysics but the exploration
of this new possibility in the doctrine
of God's being.
«The
most positive effect
of the Pope's visit was one that even the BBC could not prevent - and that was the public display
of Roman Catholic ritual at its
most gorgeous and replete,» wrote British
philosopher Roger Scruton perceptively.
Many disagree, including
most of Singer's fellow
philosophers.
Unlike
most contemporary
philosophers, who restrict their examination
of induction to the modern sense
of the term, in which it is construed as a method
of inference which permits some prediction
of future events on the basis
of past events, Whitehead also recognizes the importance
of the ancient meaning
of induction.
Recently many environmental
philosophers in the West have come to agree.6 One
of the
most influential among them is J. Baird Callicott, professor
of philosophy and natural resources at the University
of Wisconsin, author
of numerous influential works on environmental ethics and foremost interpreter
of the pioneer
of Western environmental philosophy, Aldo Leopold.
John Warwick Montgomery, a lawyer and
philosopher as well as theologian, provides perhaps the
most comprehensive argument by a conservative in his recent book Human Rights and Human Dignity: An Apologetic for the Transcendent Perspective (Zondervan, 1986) He concludes that rights derived from the inerrant teachings
of the Bible give authority to the rights set forth in the Universal Declaration, even exceeding its claims in significant ways.
In his review article
of Hartshorne's Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (PS 2:49 - 67), Robert Neville remarks that «one
of Hartshorne's
most important contributions» has been his concern to deal «with problems as formulated by public discussion, usually that
of analytical
philosophers.»
With Kant and
most philosophers since Kant, Rolston argues that our experience
of nature is inevitably interpretive.
It reminds us that our
most pressing constitutional questions (on slavery and secession) were settled out
of court; that it took more than a wiser judge to reverse our
most villainous chief justice (Roger Taney); and that our Constitution's
most consequential interpreter wasn't a robed
philosopher - king but a self - taught lawyer from Kentucky by way
of Illinois.
Like
most modern thinkers, Rousseau has an enormous amount
of confidence in the ability
of the «moral law within» (to quote another Rousseauian
philosopher) to point each
of us in the right direction.
Dewey, who died in 1952 after reigning for more than fifty years as America's
most influential public
philosopher and educator, appreciated that the churches had not gone out
of business, and that they could even be useful in promoting peace, fighting economic injustice, and, more generally, in «stimulating action» for what he called «a divine kingdom on earth.»
I would add, following the example
of the best American Catholic «public
philosophers» John Courtney Murray and Orestes Brownson, that we should, as loyal Americans [we Porchers and REM fans are all about standing for the place where we live], actually explain why our Fathers built better than they knew — which means criticizing their thinking and affirming [
most of] their practice with a theory that at least wasn't completely their own.
First, as I note at Public Discourse today in» Kermit Gosnell and the Logic
of «Pro-Choice,»» the
most up - to - the - minute
philosophers in bioethics are dispensing with any «sharp distinction,» as Jon puts it, between the unborn child and the one who has been born.
Thus we find examples
of the just war tradition in theorists
of the law
of nations and in positive international law; we have a form
of this tradition in modern military codes, rules
of engagement, and praxis; and two
of the
most important theorists
of just war over the past forty years have been the Protestant theologian Paul Ramsey and the political
philosopher Michael Walzer.
Philosophy's recognition
of itself as religion is neither achieved nor admitted by all
philosophers, but among these who have recognized the identity
of philosophy and religion are Socrates, Plotinus, Erigena, Spinoza, Hegel — in short, and in general,
most of the speculative, «Platonic» tradition, in opposition to the mainstream
of the analytic, «Aristotalian» tradition (if the reader will forgive such a gross oversimplification
of a very complex history
of thought).
Richard Swinburne, Oxford Professor
of Philosophy, One
of the
Most Influential Theistic
Philosophers
Voltaire French
Philosopher and Historian, One
of the
Most Influential Thinkers
of the Enlightenment raised in Jansenism
With regard to justice, I can only agree that the vision
of subjective immortality is absurd or selfish if in fact all persons are as privileged as
most philosophers and theologians.
I ask you now not to forget this notion; for although
most philosophers seem either to forget it or to disdain it too much ever to mention it, I believe that we shall have to admit it ourselves in the end as containing an element
of truth.
Unlike
most other
philosophers of science, he does not immediately cast scorn on the likes
of William Dembski and Michael Behe, who have focused on the apparent design
of cells and organisms.
Along the way to proving his thesis, Jenkins rewrites the book on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics (his reading, and his devastating criticisms
of Oxford's influential Jonathan Barnes, set the standard for such scholarship) and he shows how even the
most decorated
of contemporary «
philosophers of religion» (Plantinga, Stump, Penelhaum, et al.) grossly misread Aquinas.