#empiricism

An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us. We cannot achieve recovery of primitive naïveté. But there is attainable a cultivated naïveté of eye, ear and thought. ↗

— John Dewey

#empiricism #habit #pragmatism #experience

Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and re-experience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart. ↗

— Buckminster Fuller

#discerning #discovery #empiricism #experience #experiment

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. ↗

— William James

#any #constructions #directly #element #empiricism

Personally, I've always found the study of life incredibly boring – I much prefer to just live it. I do enjoy speculating on life, though. But to go and ruin that speculation by checking it against facts, it's terribly disappointing. I'm afraid it would turn me into a cynic. ↗

— Bauvard

#cynicism #empiricism #funny #humor #life

Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy. ↗

— Sun Tzu

#empiricism #epistemology #military-philosophy #philosophy #war