I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.
Interpretation
Philosophers often challenge conventional wisdom and do not accept common answers without question.
In this quote, Richard Dawkins highlights the essence of philosophical inquiry, which is to question and critically examine what is often taken for granted in everyday thinking. He argues that philosophers are characterized by their reluctance to accept common sense as the ultimate answer, suggesting that true understanding requires deeper investigation and skepticism about widely held beliefs.
In practice
A professor might use this quote to illustrate the nature of philosophical thought in a class discussion.
No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
The bitter hatreds that now poison Middle Eastern politics are rooted in the real or perceived wrong of the setting up of a Jewish State in an Islamic region. In view of all that the Jews had been through, it must have seemed a fair and humane solution. Probably deep familiarity with the Old Testament had given the European and American decision-makers some sort of idea that this really was the historic homeland of the Jews.
I don't get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. I see them as symbols, and I leave them to the symbol-minded.
At the heart of racism is the religious assertion that God made a creative mistake when He brought some people into being
She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.
I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society.
We are all living in cages with the door wide open.
Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.