[Q]uien pretenda avanzar en el estudio de la filosofía deberá perfeccionar sin descanso sus conocimientos generales: se ha dicho con razón que “quien sólo sabe filosofía, ni siquiera filosofía sabe”.
Francisco Romero, Qué es la filosofía, Buenos Aires, 1953, p. 61
I find it ironic that vivisectors, and others who exploit animals, call people like me irrational or emotional and then they hold themselves up as rational. They’re not rational. They’re, in fact, defending a world view that is part and parcel of virgin births and holy spirits and all that stuff. Which is fine if they want to believe that. But they hold up the basis of their views as scientific. It’s not scientific at all. It’s based totally on religious views.
Gary Francione, ‘Do Animals Have Rights?’ Interview with Kate Kempton
In one, and the most obvious, way, direct utilitarianism is the paradigm of utilitarianism—it seems, in its blunt insistence on maximizing utility and its refusal to fall back on rules and so forth, of all utilitarian doctrines the most faithful to the spirit of utilitarianism, and to its demand for rational, decidable, empirically based, and unmysterious set of values.
Bernard Williams, ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For and Against, Cambridge, 1973, p. 19
Como no he encontrado en el ejercicio de mi profesión razonamientos lógicos ni menos aún verificaciones empíricas del Derecho, me hallo en tren—bajo sugerencia de Hume—de arrojar sin conmiseración mi diploma a la hoguera, por no contener otra cosa que sofística e ilusión.
Enrique Marí, ‘¿Computadoras jurídicas o jibarismo social?, Nueva Ciencia, mayo, 1973
No es por casualidad que la mayoría de los economistas neoclásicos son profesores, y que en cambio los expertos en administración no usan la economía neoclásica y se inclinan frecuentemente por la escuela institucionalista, la que preconiza la intervención redistribuidora, moderadora y reguladora del Estado.
Mario Bunge, ‘Hayek: ¿economista o ideólogo?, in Elogio de la curiosidad, Buenos Aires, 1998, pp. 75-76
Men were made for higher things, one can’t help wanting to say, even though one knows that men weren’t made for anything, but are the product of natural selection.
J. J. C. Smart, ‘An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics’, in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For and Against, Cambridge, 1973, p. 19
Philosopher kings are hard to come by.
Robert Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory, Chicago, 1956, p. 50
No pocos economistas latinoamericanos se entusiasmaron en su momento con la idea del llamado trickle down effect. En inglés, el sustantivo trickle designa un chorrito de líquido; y el verbo to trickle, eso que denominamos gotear. La idea del trickle down effect seduce por su sencillez: postula que el crecimiento económico, más tarde o más temprano, acaba beneficiando también a los de abajo porque gotea a través de mayores empleos, ingresos y posibilidades de consumo.
No deseo discutir ahora la plausibilidad misma de esta proposición sino el modo en que ha sido utilizada entre nosotros. Es que, obviamente, cuando se respeta su traducción literal, el modesto enunciado del efecto no les podía parecer demasiado cautivante a políticos ansiosos por captar el apoyo de quienes menos tienen en un contexto tan castigado como el de América Latina. Intervinieron entonces propagandistas vernáculos del neoliberalismo que no dudaron en valerse de un truco y simplemente le modificaron el nombre al efecto para volverlo así más atractivo: en vez de goteo pasaron a hablar de derrame. Hay que achicar el Estado, abrir sin retaceos la economía, desregular los mercados y hacer desaparecer el déficit fiscal para que lo demás se solucione por añadidura, gracias a un aumento sostenido del producto bruto que derramará sus mieles sobre la sociedad en su conjunto y hará a todos felices. En el piano retórico, fue una maniobra eficaz; a nivel de los resultados concretos, ya vimos lo que sucedió.
José Nun, Democracia: Gobierno del pueblo o gobierno de los politicos, Buenos Aires, 2000, pp. 140-141
Smith and Glass’s meta-analysis not only presented impressive evidence about the efficacy of psychotherapy; it concluded that three factors that most psychologists believed influenced this efficacy actually did not influence it.
First, they discovered that the therapists’ credentials—Ph.D., M.D., or no advanced degree—and experience were unrelated to the effectiveness of therapy.
Second, they discovered that the type of therapy given was unrelated to its effectiveness, with the possible exception of behavioral techniques, which seemed superior for well-circumscribed behavioral problems. They also discovered that length of therapy was unrelated to its success.
Robyn Dawes, House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth, New York, 1994, p. 52
[L]as diferencias de cantidad hacen a las de calidad.
Luis Alberto Romero, La crisis argentina: una mirada al siglo XX, Buenos Aires, 2003, p. 78
[L]os tiempos [actuales] […] no sólo son alarmantes, sino también, y sobre todo, deprimentes.
José Ferrater Mora, ‘Lecturas matinales’, in El hombre y su medio y otros ensayos, Madrid, 1971, p. 128
[I]t cannot be precisely known how any thing is good or bad, till it is precisely known what it is.
James Mill, ‘Government’, in Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, London, 1825
One summer more than ten years ago, when I taught at Princeton, a large spider appeared in the urinal of the men’s room in 1879 Hall, a building that houses the Philosophy Department. When the urinal wasn’t in use, he would perch on the metal drain at its base, and when it was, he would try to scramble out of the way, sometimes managing to climb an inch or two up the porcelain wall at a point that wasn’t too wet. But sometimes he was caught, tumbled and drenched by the flushing torrent. He didn’t seem to like it, and always got out of the way if he could. But it was a floor-length urinal with a sunken base and a smooth overhanging lip: he was below flöor level and couldn’t get out.
Somehow he survived, presumably feeding on tiny insects attracted to the site, and was still there when the fall term began. The urinal must have been used more than a hundred times a day, and always it was the same desperate scramble to get out of the way. His life seemed miserable and exhausting.
Gradually our encounters began to oppress me. Of course it might be his natural habitat, but because he was trapped by the smooth porcelain overhang, there was no way for him to get out even if he wanted to, and no way to tell whether he wanted to. None of the other regulars did anything to alter the situation, but as the months wore on and fall turned to winter I arrived with much uncertainty and hesitation at the decision to liberate him.
Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, New York, 1986, pp. 208-209
One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there’s been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost—and the reason we know that socialism lost is because the Soviet Union disintegrated. So you have big cover stories in The Nation about “The End of Socialism,” and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying, “Yes, it’s true, socialism has lost because Russia failed.” I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you’re not supposed to do in our culture, but let’s try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why do people like the editors at The Nation say that “socialism” failed, why don’t they say that “democracy” failed?—and the proof that “democracy” failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries also called themselves “democratic”—in fact, they called themselves “People’s Democracies,” real advanced forms of democracy. So why don’t we conclude that “democracy” failed, not just that “socialism” failed? Well, I haven’t seen any articles anywhere saying, “Look, democracy failed, let’s forget about democracy.” And it’s obvious why: the fact that they called themselves democratic doesn’t mean that they were democratic. Pretty obvious, right?
Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, New York, 2002, p. 145
[Y]o no sé si el fenómeno comunista ruso fue alguna vez comunista, sino más bien la reproducción del capitalismo. Porque de última terminó siendo tan gorila y tan hijo de puta como el propio capitalismo. Porque cuando hay alguien que piensa por vos, se está reproduciendo el capitalismo. Es un verso más, aunque le pongas el título que le pongas. Porque estás cambiando el nombre de “capitalismo”, nada más.
MTD de Solano y Colectivo Situaciones, La hipótesis 891: más allá de los piquetes, Buenos Aires, 2002, p. 76
[L]o que se presenta hoy como post sólo es un pre. Jurgen Habermans […] sostiene que los posmodernos no hacen sino renovar los viejos ataques del prerromanticismo y del romanticismo del siglo XIX a la Ilustración y al Iluminismo.
Es curioso que esta corriente de pensamiento tenga su centro de difusión en París y sus principales representantes se consideren pensadores de avanzada, de izquierda, rebeldes y hasta revolucionarios, pero su fuente de inspiración es la vieja filosofía alemana de la derecha no tradicional. También Habermas observó la paradoja de que, cuando, por primera vez y como consecuencia de la derrota del nazismo, el pensamiento alemán abandonó sus tendencias antioccidentales y aceptó abiertamente el racionalismo y la modernidad, le llegó desde París, presentado como la última novedad, el retorno de las ideas autóctonas de las que trataba de alejarse. Los alemanes debían ahora volver a Nietzsche y a Heidegger, traducidos del francés.
Juan José Sebreli, El asedio a la modernidad, Buenos Aires, 1991, p. 14
To all th[e] champions of the oppressed he set an example of courage, humanity, and single-mindedness. When public issues were involved, he forgot personal prudence. The world decided, as it usually does in such cases, to punish him for his lack of self-seeking; to this day his fame is less than it would have been if his character had been less generous.
Bertrand Russell, ‘The Fate of Thomas Paine’, in Why I am not a Christian, London, 1957, p. 147