Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.
Thomas NagelRead
A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that human behavior can be influenced by a strong will, regardless of one's personal flaws.
Thomas Nagel's quote reflects the complexity of human nature, highlighting that despite possessing negative traits such as greed or envy, individuals can still harness their willpower to act nobly. It suggests that actions are a product of conscious choice and awareness, indicating that the potential for good exists within everyone, even if their character has shortcomings.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming personal flaws.
Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.
To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.
It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naΓ―ve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.
There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
Altruism itself depends on a recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.
Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.
We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.
A proud man is satisfied with his own good opinion, and does not seek to make converts to it.
Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.
The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me--
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