I illustrate with a quotation from the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who died recently and is, I suspect, … - Richard Rorty

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Narrative is so important for building the sexual tension. Can you imagine a horror movie that only shows the blood, with no context? I think women need to get to know the characters before they start stripping.

Richard Rorty

I illustrate with a quotation from the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who died recently and is, I suspect, now having a lengthy conversation with his maker. Rorty argued that secular professors ought “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.

Atheist, College, Homophobic, Religious, Richard, Views

Same Author Quotes

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

Cares, Civilization, Down, Foundation, Good, Intellectual

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

Able, Close, Fear, Heidegger, Prose, Wish

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have. . . an ambition of transcendence.

Ambition, Belief, Lives, Motive, Sense, Transcendence

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

Conditioned, Philosophical, Philosophy, Pumped, Swings, Tiresome

Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.

Christian, Fraternal, Idea, Ideas, Plato, Time