For Margaret Macdonald, philosophical theories are akin to stories, meant to enlarge certain aspects of human life
A discussion is not an exchange or a confrontation of ideas, as if each formed his own, showed them to the others, looked at theirs, and returned to correct them with his own … Whether he speaks up or hardly whispers, each one speaks with all that he is, with his ‘ideas’, but also with his obsessions, his secret history.
Sarah Bakewell • At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others
Weil instead asserts that values and sensations are coterminous. As Peter Winch notes, “our concepts, which give the world its shape, are unintelligible except as concepts exercised by beings whose common life exhibits certain aspirations and values.”8 This interpretation—one where the epistemological is the ethical—seems to pull the rug out from u
... See moreRobert Zaretsky • The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas
With sufficient care, that wheelbarrow full of things could become an entire system of meaning, saying truthful things about our world, some of which might have been impossible to say via a more conventionally realistic approach. That system would mean, not by the plausibility or acuity of its initial premise, but by the way it reacts to that premi
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
There are certain perennial problems to which all interesting philosophy returns again and again; but there are no such things as logical discoveries that consign any of the older answers to obsolescence.