It Started With Copernicus Quotes

“What happens when we die? Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Amateur armchair theorizing, which philosophers have committed too often before, should definitely be a thing of the past. Philosophy should be done only by those who really know the relevant science. Those who specialize in the philosophy of mind, for instance, should really know their neuroscience. Those who do philosophy of science should have additional degrees in a particular science or in the history of science. Without a solid grasp of the relevant science, philosophers consign themselves to irrelevance by asking the wrong questions and giving answers that go nowhere”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Some people are intensely competitive in seeking social status; others show little interest in the game. Some people dote on children; others take the attitude of W. C. Fields. Still, it is hard indeed to imagine anyone happy who had achieved none or only a few of those natural goods. Someone without health or wealth or family or social standing or friendship or a sense of purpose would seem to be in a very bad way, perhaps suicidally depressed”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“As I have heard it put, a critical thinker is good at distinguishing gold from bullshit”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“In his stimulating book Knowledge and Its Place in Nature (2002), Kornblith addresses the claim that epistemic norms must appeal to a priori intuitions. The standard practice of philosophical”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“popular book by skeptical activist Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain, reports the really bad news about how we form and hold our beliefs. Early in the book, Shermer summarizes his claims:”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“On the contrary, we seem to be strongly disposed to irrationality, as examples below will illustrate. Therefore, the idea that we can understand how beliefs should be formed by looking indiscriminately at how they are formed is a hopeless task. Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds (1994), by cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini sums up much of this evidence”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“In that case, that is, given the past failure and poor prospects of analytic epistemology, Quine recommends that epistemology simply be replaced by psychology”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Such a concept of morality sounds noble and high-minded; the supreme importance of morality means that it must be based on the highest authority, and this is the authority of reason itself. However, as MacIntyre and other critics of Kant have noted, the grandeur of the structure of Kant's ethics is matched by the emptiness of its content”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“. One book was Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The other was Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. Both created quite a sensation at the time, becoming”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“There are several excellent general histories of scientific method. One of the most popular introductory-level books is A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, by John Losee, third edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Of course, in meeting Hume's challenge, we do have to concede that he was right in that no degree of evidence can confirm a universal generalization. However, it does not follow that we are slobbering dogs.”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Such, then, are the basics of Popper's methodology for science: You make bold guesses and try your best to show that they are wrong”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Mill's Methods, as they are called, have indeed proven useful in the conduct of science. Journals such as Nature and Science, and popular magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American regularly report studies based on versions of these methods”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“The human understanding, once it has adopted opinions, either because they were already accepted or believed, or because it likes them, draws everything else to support and agree with them. And though it may meet a greater number and weight of contrary instances, it will, with great and harmful prejudice, ignore or condemn or exclude them by introducing some distinction, in order that those earlier assumptions may remain intact and unharmed”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Quite a few of these know nothing about quantum mechanics; others understand the physics but put a highly tendentious spin on it. A good corrective for these is Victor J. Stenger's The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“A work I failed to mention earlier that gives an excellent overview of the history of evolution, including evolutionary synthesis, is Peter J. Bowler's Evolution: The History of an Idea, third edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“The Web of Belief, second edition, coauthored with J. S. Ullian (New York: Random House, 1978)”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“A very clear and succinct statement is in the introduction to his Methods of Logic, fourth edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“An authoritative and highly readable history of atomism is Bernard Pullman's The Atom in the History of Human Thought, translated by Axel Reisinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Pullman traces the ups and downs of atomic theory through the centuries and shows how it finally triumphed only at the beginning of the twentieth century.”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Among the writers of science for the general public, some, like Carl Sagan, could compose beautiful, resonant prose that conveyed the wonder and majesty of the cosmos. Others, like Stephen Jay Gould, produced writings that were masterpieces of the essayist's art. But nobody could match Isaac Asimov in sheer expository skill. Asimov had the very rare, perhaps unique, ability to take the most difficult ideas of science and present them so clearly and engagingly that any interested person could read about them with pleasure and profit”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“On the other hand, the Santa Claus hypothesis is highly empirically successful for five-year-olds, but, of course, five-year-olds are very limited in their ability to test hypotheses”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“The only way to argue this in a comprehensive way would be to adopt a universal skepticism about method. The most famous case for such skepticism is the 1975 book Against Method by maverick philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend. Feyerabend appeals to the history of science to argue that no methodological prescription has ever been consistently followed in science”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Why, then, did Boyle win? Shapin and Schaffer answer that Boyle won because he played the political game much better than Hobbes, and because Hobbes was swimming against the tide of history. They argue that the emergence of a new way of organizing science was an integral part of the emergence of the new social order of Restoration society”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Perhaps the best-known example of social-constructivist history of science is the 1985 book Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. Shapin and Schaffer's book focused on an important controversy from the mid-seventeenth century, the nasty dispute between scientist Robert Boyle and irascible philosopher Thomas Hobbes”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Another very clear and helpful overview of the topic of explanation is in An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, third edition, by Karel Lambert and Gordon G. Brittan Jr. (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1987)”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“. I think that for most readers the best critique of Johnson's view and the claims of intelligent-design creationism is Robert T. Pennock's Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999)”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“A superbly written, insightful, and beautifully illustrated history of evolution is David Young's The Discovery of Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Colin Patterson's Evolution, second edition (make sure you get the second edition, it is much better than the first) (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing, 1999).”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“John Hedley Brooke's Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution