Random accumulated thoughts and quotations

Below are some thoughts and quotes that have accumulated in my sticky note widget over the last week or two... the newest are up top, so the order may be clearer if it is read from the bottom. The quotations that are not cited are taken out of context from Daniel Hutto's Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy.

"Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. - Since Everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no use to us." -Ludwig Wittgenstein

"The first step is to free ourselves from philosophical myths, the second is not to create new ones."

"...the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think." -Johannes Climacus (one of Søren Kierkegaard's pseudonyms)

"For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday." -Ludwig Wittgenstein

--In my view, a fair reason for rejecting purely secular humanistic ethical systems is that they are anthropocentric. A desire to transcend this (esp. the claim that value arises due to human need) and to value being in totality is what may lead one to search for God (i.e. a leap from subjectivity to objectivity), even if that is without the assurance of validation. --Epistemological barriers become irrelevant in such cases. That something cannot be known does not make the possibilites of that something irrelevant.

"When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it." -Ludwig Wittgenstein

"All theology is anthropology" -Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach

Objectivity and subjectivity: the world and the subject are both elements of the same narrative.

Action and inaction are equally active activities, inaction does not remove the aspect of participation.

"Philosophy can at best clarify and make perspicuous that which is already known to us."

Freedom only exists from an internal perspective–-from an external perspective a polyvalent web of propensities and circumstances ultimately determines the conduct of the individual; although from an internal perspective the individual is still responsible for decision-making (even if it is influenced by external phenomena).