Simon Blackburn Quotes on Nature
Simon Blackburn’s Spreading the Word (1984) and Truth: A Guide (2005) develop the philosophical extension of the quasi-realist program in metaethics to the broader analysis of human discourse about the natural world. The central commitment is that the apparently realist surface of natural-philosophical discourse — about causation, modal necessity, probability, and the lawlike regularities of nature — is best earned through the projective expressivist machinery rather than the straightforwardly realist positing of metaphysical structures of nature, with the corresponding philosophical work of explaining how such projection nonetheless supports the substantial appearances of objectivity and inquiry. The framework, drawing on Hume and Wittgenstein, shaped contemporary analytic engagement with the philosophy of nature and the broader debate over the metaphysical commitments implicit in natural-scientific practice.
Quotes
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Attributed to Simon Blackburn:
“Mind is not the mirror of nature; mind is one of nature's accomplishments.”
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Attributed to Simon Blackburn:
“An honest naturalism is enough for ethics.”
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“We hope for lives whose story leaves us looking admirable; we like our weaknesses to be hidden and deniable... We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience ... Ethics is disturbing. We are often vaguely uncomfortable when we think of such things as exploitation of the world's resources, or the way our comforts are provided by the miserable labour conditions of the third world ... Racists and sexists, like antebellum slave owners in America, always have to tell themselves a story that justifies their system .”
Simon Blackburn , Being Good (2001) -
“The scientific world is to be less threatening than was feared. It is to be made safe for human beings. And the way to make it safe is to reflect on the foundation of knowledge .”
Chapter One, Knowledge, p. 17 -
“Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there.”
Chapter Two, Mind, p. 78 -
“It can seem an amazing fact that laws of nature keep on holding, that the frame of nature does not fall apart.”
Think(1999) | Chapter Five, God, p. 162