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.
Sin has been pardoned at such a price that we cannot henceforth trifle with it.
Every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition, has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food
I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.
Oh, I'd love to wear a rainbow everyday, _x000D_ And tell the world that everything's okay, _x000D_ But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back, _x000D_ Till things are brighter, I'm the Man in Black.
You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.
I'm not religious, but I'm very spiritual.
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