A priori Logical propositions are such as can be known a priori without study of the actual world.
Interpretation
A priori propositions are those that can be understood without empirical evidence or experience.
The quote by Bertrand Russell discusses the nature of a priori logical propositions, which are inherent truths or knowledge that can be known independently of experience in the physical world. This highlights a critical distinction in philosophy between what can be deduced through reason alone and what must be verified through observation and empirical study, emphasizing the value and limitations of different types of knowledge.
In practice
This quote can be used in a philosophy class discussion about the nature of knowledge.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
The worldwide financial and economic crisis seems to highlight their distortions and above all the gravely deficient human perspective, which reduces man to one of his needs alone, namely, consumption. Worse yet, human beings themselves are nowadays considered as consumer goods which can be used and thrown away.
The great enemy of the life of faith in God is not sin, but the good which is not good enough. The good is always the enemy of the best.
Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death!
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