Philip Kitcher

I'm very suspicious of the idea of a "final theory" in natural science, and the thought of a complete system of ethical…

— Philip Kitcher

If the research agenda reflects "market forces", the problems of the poor are likely to be even more neglected than they already…

— Philip Kitcher

I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics.

— Philip Kitcher

The expert is a midwife. The expert is not someone who has the authority to pronounce the last word on the subject.

— Philip Kitcher

I believe that the arts make indispensable contributions to our understanding.

— Philip Kitcher

It's not at all a bad idea for scientific questions to be chosen because a democratic deliberation would identify them as important…

— Philip Kitcher

It may be hyperbolic to declare that Shakespeare teaches us more about being human than all the natural scientists combined.

— Philip Kitcher

I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further…

— Philip Kitcher

I'm quite pessimistic about climate change. This is an urgent problem, and much of the world is only now waking up to…

— Philip Kitcher

Any writer who could handle all these different voices would deserve high praise, but to do so without any sense of jarring…

— Philip Kitcher

Was Mann himself fully aware of all the facets of his irony? Probably not - any more than Shakespeare was fully aware…

— Philip Kitcher

Schopenhauer's thought that Will is insatiable, that once satisfied in one form it must be expressed in new desires, is inherited both…

— Philip Kitcher

Think about Mann's own daily routine (ascribed to Aschenbach), read the extant diaries and the letters in which he discusses the novella's…

— Philip Kitcher

In my current work on global warming, I argue that the only apparent solution to the deep problem of climate change would…

— Philip Kitcher

I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read…

— Philip Kitcher

So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with…

— Philip Kitcher

Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are inexhaustible. They are celebrations of the ordinary, compelling reactions to philosophical elitism about "the good life".…

— Philip Kitcher

Mann is widely recognized as a master of irony and ambiguity, yet it's remarkable how quickly people foreclose options he carefully leaves…

— Philip Kitcher

Consider the different narrative styles within the story, and the glee with which the "moralistic narrator" celebrates Aschenbach's fall - maybe, then,…

— Philip Kitcher

There are actually two separate issues here. The first is whether (as ancient philosophers and Nietzsche assume) only the privileged elite can…

— Philip Kitcher

If there are to be appropriate judgments about what questions are significant, you need both the informed views of scientists who know…

— Philip Kitcher

My ethical naturalism sees us as facing the predicament of being social animals without evolved adaptations that make social life easy. The…

— Philip Kitcher

conclude, what Thomas Mann really wanted was a limited physical relationship with beautiful young men: the opportunity to gaze at them, an…

— Philip Kitcher

Sometime during the 1990s, when I was teaching philosophy at UCSD, my friend, colleague, and music teacher, Carol Plantamura, discussed the possibility…

— Philip Kitcher

“Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has probably been more widely read—and more widely misinterpreted—than any other book in the…

— Philip Kitcher

The point of philosophy, as I see it, is to change thinking, and thereby to change the conversation.

— Philip Kitcher

Science literacy consists in the ability and the desire to follow reports of new scientific advances, throughout your whole life.

— Philip Kitcher

Experiments work when, and only when, they call into action cognitive capacities that might reliably deliver the conclusions drawn.

— Philip Kitcher

It's a very bad idea for scientific conclusions to be accepted because they fit with the political values of a group of…

— Philip Kitcher

Refined religion is aimed at realizing ethical values, including the fostering of human lives and human communities.

— Philip Kitcher

One goal of ethical inquiry might be to uncover strategies available for use when values conflict or when rules are incomplete.

— Philip Kitcher

In ethics, we don't make progress by discovering pre-existent truths; we do so by solving problems.

— Philip Kitcher

Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives.

— Philip Kitcher

For a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language…

— Philip Kitcher

The more you read the novella, the more you should wonder, I think, which judgments are to be taken as bedrock.

— Philip Kitcher

So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and…

— Philip Kitcher

In my view, we ought to replace the notion of analytic philosophy by that of synthetic philosophy.

— Philip Kitcher

If the intuition-mongering were abandoned, would that be the end of philosophy? It would be the end of a certain style of…

— Philip Kitcher

Klaus Mann saw very clearly how different was his own (more liberated) form of homosexuality from the same-sex attractions of his father…

— Philip Kitcher

The hardest problem of all is to appreciate the facts that the poor nations are - quite reasonably - not going to…

— Philip Kitcher