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Thinking Quotes by Allen W. Wood

38 Thinking quotes by Allen W. Wood

All Thinking quotes Allen W. Wood’s page

Allen W. Wood points out that many people misread Kant, seeing him as heartless or rigid. He notes that Kant’s ideas about free will and moral law share ground with Aristotle and can guide scientists linking metaphysics to experiments. He also mentions that Kantian constructivism applies to math but not to ethics.

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Kant thinks of judgment as a special faculty or talent of the mind, not reducible to discursive reasoning but cultivated through experience…

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Fichte thinks that the mutual recognition of one another as free beings belongs among the transcendental conditions of self-consciousness itself.

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Kant can provide, and has provided, a good model for philosophers to think about the relation of metaphysics to science and scientific…

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The moral law is simply the way we think our own freedom as self-determination.

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I think the contribution people make is not proportionate to their fame or success. In fact, I think the relation is often…

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Philosophy is about getting the facts right, but it is also about thinking rightly about them. Philosophy is more about the latter…

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It would be nice, wouldn't it? if we could get comfortable about the problem of freedom. Kant thinks that we can't.

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The relation of the law to the self is only a helpful way of thinking about the law, that helps us better…

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Kant has been famous for his rejection of eudaimonism, but I think Kantian ethics has a great deal in common with Aristotle,…

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It is often difficult to know about one's own era which philosophers in it will be remembered as the most important ones,…

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Kant did think he had a moral route back to rational faith in God, for those who need it, and he thought…

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Kant does not think that the silly commandment "universalize your maxims" is the be-all and end-all of ethics or that it provides…

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I think Fichte did take it further than Kant by arguing that we can regard the moral law as objectively valid only…

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I don't think Kant's theory looks bad to people except insofar as they have misunderstood it (for instance, as heartless and ironheaded,…

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I think it is clear that what we ought to do has to be independent of our decisions about what to do,…

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I don't think Kant's approach to religion is any longer viable in its original form. But that does not mean it is…

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Kant does not think there is anything wrong with being beneficent from sympathy. He thinks we have a duty to cultivate sympathetic…

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It is absurd for anyone to think that Soviet "Marxism" is a correct application of the thought of Karl Marx. No doubt…

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As with many metaphysical and religious questions, Kant thinks they lie beyond our power to answer them. If you can't stand the…

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Marx's own illusion was to think that the working class movement, which he devoted his life to creating and strengthening, would both…

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Kant does not think that along with choice of an action we also choose in each case the motive from which we…

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Kant's treatments of rational theology and metaphysics were aimed primarily at theoretical questions. His attitude toward the pseudo-sciences of "special metaphysics" in…

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There is no author or legislator of the moral law. It is simply valid in itself in the nature or essence of…

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It is actually a nice question how far Descartes himself endorses the monological and metaphysically dualistic theory of mind associated with his…

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I think the term "Kantian constructivism" as an oxymoron. Kant was a constructivist about mathematics, but not about ethics.

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Kant thinks we can show that there is no contradiction in supposing we are free.

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The problem I see with utilitarianism, or any form of consequentialism, is not that it gets the wrong answers to moral questions.…

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What are we to think of the shortsightedness of the great mass of people who are content to do nothing about it,…

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Utilitarians are usually empiricists who think they can solve every problem by accumulating enough empirical facts. They do not realize that thinking…

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Kant thinks that a free will is a will under moral laws and that freedom and the moral law are distinct thoughts…

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I think that both Mill and Sidgwick are great and admirable philosophers, from whom we still have a lot to learn. I…

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In fact, if you read what Kant has to say about feeling, desire and emotion, you see that he is not at…

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In my view, there was a long period in which analytical philosophy had little to say about ethics. I think their intellectual…

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When people think that moral problems can be solved by some simple strategy of calculation, that sets them up for ghastly overreaching.…

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In my acquaintance with John Rawls, I found him to be a simple and honest man, who just by chance also happened…

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Both Kant and Fichte thought of traditions of revealed religion as ways of symbolically (that is, with aesthetic emotional power) thinking about…

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Kant regards the universalizability test for maxims as focused on a very special sort of situation: one where the agent is tempted…

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I think if there were to be a solution to the problem of free will, it would have to be a compatibilist…

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More by Allen W. Wood

For the utilitarian, there is a fact of the matter about the good (the general happiness, or whatever conception of the good the utilitarian…

No theory about our bodies as mere objects of observation and calculation (as distinct from partners in communicative interaction, assumed to be free) can…

Kantian ethical theory distinguishes three levels: First, that of a fundamental principle (the categorical imperative, formulated in three main ways in Kant's Groundwork); second,…

Some empirical feelings, such as sympathy, are indispensable parts of certain moral virtues.

We commit not only theoretical error but also moral wrong in objectifying ourselves or other rational beings, ignoring their capacities for free action and…

Kant certainly was sympathetic with the metaphysical tradition of rational theology that he criticized.

That Hegel's theory is derivative from Fichte's does not prevent it from being strikingly original and of independent value.

It is sad to witness the persistence in our society of the racism and xenophobia that seems to be a permanent part of our…

It is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn…

We can never prove that we are free or integrate our freedom in any way into our objective conception of the causal order of…

Kant regards the universalizability test for maxims as focused on a very special sort of situation: one where the agent is tempted to make…

My own view is that Kant's conception of the duality of the good (morality and happiness, the good of our person and the good…

It is actually a nice question how far Descartes himself endorses the monological and metaphysically dualistic theory of mind associated with his name and…

In fact people do not know enough about themselves and what is good for them to form a sufficiently definite conception of the general…

Empiricist philosophy always tends to be anti-philosophy (and is often proud of it).