Charles Sanders Peirce
I seriously believe that a bit of fun helps thought and tends to keep it pragmatical. (CP 5.71)
Charles Sanders Peirce
It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty. (CP 5.393)
Charles Sanders Peirce:
I can imagine a consciousness whose whole life, alike when wide awake and when drowsy or dreaming, should consist in nothing at all but a violet color or a stink of rotten cabbage. It is purely a question of what I can imagine and not of what psychological laws permit. (CP 1.304)
Charles Sanders Peirce
I hear you say: "All that is not fact; it is poetry." Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for. (CP 1.315)
Charles Sanders Peirce
It is the instinct, the sentiments, that make the substance of the soul. Cognition is only its surface, its locus of contact with what is external to it. (CP 1.628)
John Dewey
Instead of there being no disputing about tastes, they are the one thing worth disputing about, if by “dispute” is signified discussion involving reflective inquiry. Taste, if we use the word in its best sense, is the outcome of experience brought cumulatively to bear on the intelligent appreciation of the real worth of likings and enjoyments. There is nothing in which a person so completely reveals himself as in the things which he judges enjoyable and desirable. (The Quest for Certainty: 209)
Hilary Putnam
If I agree with Derrida on anything it is on this: that philosophy is writing, and that it must learn now to be a writing whose authority is always to be won anew, not inherited or awarded because it is philosophy. (Realism with a Human Face: 118)
Charles Sanders Peirce
Owing to the necessity of making theories far more simple than the real facts, we are obliged to be cautious in accepting any extreme consequences of them, and to be also upon our guard against apparent refutations of them based upon such extreme consequences. (CP 7.96)
John Dewey
Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful. That things should be able to pass from the plane of external pushing and pulling to that of revealing themselves to man, and thereby to themselves; and that the fruit of communication should be participation, sharing, is a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales. (Experience and Nature: 133)