F. C. S. Schiller Quotes on Knowledge
F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937), the principal British exponent of the pragmatist philosophy associated with William James and John Dewey, defended in Humanism (1903), Studies in Humanism (1907), and Riddles of the Sphinx (1891) a version of the pragmatist programme he preferred to call humanism. The framework presses the Protagorean thesis that man is the measure of all things into a comprehensive theory of knowledge in which truth is what works in the practical and intellectual life of human beings, against both the Hegelian absolute idealism of his Oxford colleagues and the developing realist alternatives of Russell and Moore. Schiller's polemics against the Oxford idealists made him one of the principal early-twentieth-century British anti-idealists.
Quotes
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Attributed to F. C. S. Schiller:
“Truth is what works in the long run.”
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Attributed to F. C. S. Schiller:
“Pragmatism is humanism.”
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Attributed to F. C. S. Schiller:
“Logic must be human if it is to be useful.”
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Attributed to F. C. S. Schiller:
“Reality is what answers our questions.”
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Attributed to F. C. S. Schiller:
“Knowledge is a human achievement, not a mirror of the eternal.”
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“Formal Logic: A Scientific and Social Problem (London: Macmillan & Co, Ltd, 1912) Preface (p. x)”
When Science at last escaped from the clutches of medieval Scholasticism (which was itself a hybrid between theology and Formal Logic), it happened that ‘Logic’ remained in the old curriculum. So the students of Science were not taught it, and consequently were not paralysed by its technicalities and ineptitudes. They could therefore go ahead, and advance their subjects by the light of nature, wit