Dale Jamieson Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“[This approach] displays the characteristic philosophical lust to vanquish the skeptic by arguing him out of his skepticism, without appeal to moral and political considerations or to the facts of everyday life. [...] But more often than not, if you give the skeptic everything he wants, then he will be successful in repulsing your attacks and terrorizing your position.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Philosophical #Successful #Giving

“None of us are rational economic men as we're supposed to be portrayed in economic theory where mixes of passions, of desires, of moral principles, of self-deception, of altruism, of concern of others, of concerns for ourselves and an interest in our bank accounts. And social policies have to be responsive to the complexity of who we are as people or else, like the war on drugs, they're simply going to fail.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#War #Passion #Men

“One of the real dangers of our time is people's indifference to history.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Real #People #Indifference

“Philosophy isn't reading Emmanuel Kant. Philosophy is about thinking hard about what the right thing to do is in a situation and approaching that kind of question in an open-minded and open-hearted way, receptive to a broad range of considerations and interests of other people and other things.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Philosophy #Reading #Thinking

“When it comes to climate change it's all the usual barriers: greed, mendacity, ignorance, short-sightedness and so on, manifest in the extreme power of corporations, the weakness of government, and the indifference of citizens.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Ignorance #Government #Greed

“Philosophers (and probably most intellectuals) are more interested in pursuing what they see as the logical implications of their theories than they are in paying attention to the shlumpy diversity of defensible values that people actually have, and then trying to figure out how these might be negotiated in the life of an agent or community.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#People #Diversity #Community

“Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Smart #Unbiased #Philosopher

“Philosophy is not a body of knowledge to impart to someone, that's why reading philosophy books isn't always the best way of learning philosophy. Philosophy is really more the process of rational engagement, rational reflection with a diversity of views and ideas and opinions and trying to sort of reason your way through to a more reflective position. I think if you look at it that way, philosophizing is to some extent some small way a part of almost everyone's lives although they don't recognize it as such and a lot of people are embarrassed about it.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Philosophy #Book #Reading

“Sometimes I say philosophers should be at the table because they're the only people who know that they're not going to walk away with big money to support their research or to fund their crackpot solutions.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#People #Support #Research

“I'm a subjectivist about morality.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Morality

“A common rhetorical strategy of politicians and others is to frame their opponents' views in the worst possible light, tacitly suggesting that all versions of the view must be committed to some particularly deplorable conclusion. Philosophers are not immune to this way of arguing.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Rhetorical Strategies #Light #Views

“Moral revolutions are typically seen retrospectively. Prospectively, the revolutionaries tend to look like crazy people, and sometimes they are.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Crazy #People #Looks

“We're good at noticing sudden movements of middle size objects in our immediate visual field, but what is out of sight is for us is largely out of mind.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Sight #Mind #Movement

“Philosophers are often actively disinterested in what happens between the cup and the lips (after all, that's "non-ideal theory").”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Cups #Lips #Philosopher

“Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as "reduce suffering") and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Distance #Mean #People

“What most forms of Consequentialism cannot do is require us to act in such a way as to make the world worse, yet many of the objections to Consequentialism purport to show that Consequentialism requires us to make the world a stinking, bloody mess. The ubiquity of these kinds of arguments shows you just how unseriously many of the critics take Consequentialism.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Ubiquity #World #Way

“I take seriously the idea that we are African Apes who (at least for the moment) dominate the planet, but our psychology is pretty much what it was when we were living in small groups on the savanna.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Ideas #Psychology #Groups

“Some philosophers have begun writing sympathetically about predator elimination as a way of reducing animal suffering. From an environmental perspective this is somewhere between naïve and potentially disastrous.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Writing #Animal #Perspective

“Increasingly both environmentalists and animal ethicists recognize the enormous destruction caused by animal agriculture.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Animal #Agriculture #Destruction

“People will suffer and so will nature, but life is likely to go on with a great deal of loss and mourning. Human adaptability and resilience will still be alive, and so will that great need and resource of ours called love.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Loss #People #Mourning

“When I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Issues #People #Climate

“Climate scientists think of nothing but climate and then express their concerns in terms of constructs such as global mean surface temperature. But we live in a world in which all sorts of change is happening all the time, and the only way to understand what climate change will bring is to tell stories about how it manifests in people's lives.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Mean #Thinking #People

“We need more science, but what we especially need is science fiction.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Needs #Fiction #Science Fiction

“Every country now has its own domestic political debate about how to respond to climate change. This is where the action is.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Country #Political #Climate

“Many environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Philosophical #Environmental #Way

“Environmental philosophy just is philosophy full stop. It only sprung up as distinct subfield because mainstream philosophy was ignoring some of the most important philosophical challenges of our time.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Philosophy #Philosophical #Sprung Up

“Attitudes are changing very quickly.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Attitude

“I think that by the middle of this century people will still be eating meat (though less), and their meat will mostly be produced in factories through synthetic processes, cell cultures, and so on.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Thinking #Cells #People

“The idea that we would raise billions of sentient animals, treat them horribly, pollute our waterways with their waste, compromise the effectiveness of our antibiotics so that they grow faster, and then slaughter them with little regard to their suffering so that we can feed off their corpses, will seem to most people unthinkably cruel and barbarous - sort of in the way that we think of medieval punishments, or Europeans today think of the death penalty.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Thinking #Animal #Punishment

“I think the challenge of climate change in particular is the challenge for us to create and produce new norms for a new kind of world. And that's why I think as important as the issue of climate change is, it's even more important than it seems because if we can't evolve very quickly, new norms to deal with issues like climate change, we're not going to be able to survive in the kind of world we've created. So I think, really, the whole nature of democracy, of governance, of global community and of solving the kinds of problems of the 21st Century are really at stake.”
-- Dale Jamieson

#Thinking #Community #Challenges