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

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

— Philip Kitcher

Many of the greatest works of philosophy seem to me to be valuable not because of their arguments, but because they offer…

— Philip Kitcher

As I read Mann in German for the first time, the full achievement - both literary and philosophical - of Death in…

— Philip Kitcher

Look at Mann's reading habits, his explicit comments on Nietzsche, and his copy of Birth of Tragedy, and it starts to seem…

— 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

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

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

— Philip Kitcher

The balance between literature and philosophy in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is different from that struck in the novella, but, as Mann clearly…

— Philip Kitcher

I don't think that anything of any consequence is known a priori: all our knowledge is built up by modifying the lore…

— Philip Kitcher

Because the problems are objective features of the human situation - social animals without the capacities for making social life come easily…

— Philip Kitcher

I'm very concerned about the increasing distortion of research by the intrusion of the market. Universities are beginning to see science as…

— Philip Kitcher

There's a disciplined erotic component to it, so that the height of sexual contact is the embrace, the modest touch, a relatively…

— Philip Kitcher

The classical allusions and the Platonic disquisitions on beauty are no longer a form of cover, but integral to Aschenbach's complex sexuality.…

— Philip Kitcher

My ideal of conversation that includes wide representation of perspectives, informed by the consensus view of current experts, pursued with an attempt…

— Philip Kitcher

Mann was profoundly influenced by two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who returned to the most ancient of all philosophical questions - "How…

— Philip Kitcher

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

— Philip Kitcher

For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are…

— Philip Kitcher

I use biography, I use literary connections (as with Platen - this seems to me extremely helpful for appreciating the nuances of…

— Philip Kitcher

Sometimes, however, the new synthetic complex proves stable, and even serves as the beginning of a much larger cluster of attitudes that…

— 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

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

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

— Philip Kitcher

When I try to outline the history of ethical life, it's sometimes possible to find evidence for a hypothesis about how important…

— Philip Kitcher