No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might...

Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be required. There must not be even a hint that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on...

After some cogitation, it is difficult not to agree with Herman Bondi (1919 – 2005), who in his book ‘Relativity and Common Sense’ says:… The surprising thing, surely, is that molecules in a gas behave...

True, the initial ideas are in general those of an individual, but the establishment of the reality and truth is in general the work of more than one person.

Metagapism is the belief that love is the ultimate reality, literally god and the one shared soul, and the source, nature and destiny of all.

That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.

I do not think there is a demonstrative proof (like Euclid) of Christianity, nor of the existence of matter, nor of the good will and honesty of my best and oldest friends. I think all...

I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and...

If Relativity Theory kills our deepest convictions, why not start by finding out why we believed in them for millennia?

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

Truth is, something exists, and everything exists for a reason. Regardless if the reason is known or unknown, knowable or unknowable, reason exists and can be named.

Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

There is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them. The communications media of the late...

Without causality in the world, there is no point in educating people, or making any moral or political appeal.

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation...

Comprehending and knowing better and deeper are the best guarantees we can have to attain ideas and criteria of our own; i.e. to stop depending on what other people say. In summary, to be freer...

Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We...

Knowledge is a social construct, a consensus among the members of a community of knowledgeable peers.

Is numerical equality (forced by the use of specific physical units) the same as conceptual equality? Of course NOT!

The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing...

We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things that are not...

But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change… and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you...

A theologian’s epistemology controls his interpretation of the Bible. If his epistemology is not Christian, his exegesis will be systematically distorted. If he has no epistemology at all, his exegesis will be unsystematically distorted.

Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.

Although some of her passages seek to persuade the reader of the meaninglessness and marginalization of the mathematics, Hayles is content to use mathematics as a means for understanding Borges, perhaps in the same way...

And although I have seen nothing but black crows in my life, it doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as a white crow. Both for a philosopher and for a scientist it can be...

The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.

Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.

A prepared mind is always made up; it knows what it thinks and why it thinks that. When it’s time to change, it just makes itself up a different way. A really made-up mind–made up...

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

Show me slowly what I onlyknow the limits ofDance me to the end of love

Why is it so difficult for us to think in relative terms? Well, for the good reason that human nature loves absoluteness, and erroneously considers it as a state of higher knowledge.

People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life...

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour an serious...

knowledge depends on the mode of the knower; for what is known is in the knower according to the measure of his mode

Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

A great truth wants to be criticized not idolized

The command of our language is crucial to focusing our thoughts and communicating them with precision to others.

Knowledge is not discovery, but recognition.

The final discovery is the discovery of knowledge.

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of...

Erudition is the crude residue of wilted harvests; wit: the meddlesome weed that wilts them.

The best ship, the best culture, the best knowledge, is the one which allows us to go farther, explore more territories or oceans of reality, and have the least damaging leaks possible.

To believe in nothing is as ridiculous as to believe in everything. Reason and factual evidence may convert a belief into knowledge.

The most crucial problem with intellectual learning is that it receives the unknown on the grounds of the known.

Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessarycondition for knowledge.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

The…act of surrender—or devotion, as the case may be—was, to him, a kind of lifeline for those who sought a quick answer and didn’t want to stick around long enough to see their doubt through...