Philosophy of Science Quotes

“To deny the necessity or value of metaphysics is to assert a metaphysical principle, just as to say a religion must be without dogmas is to assert a dogma.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“The soul cannot be seen in a biological laboratory, any more than pain can be seen on an operating table.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“Facts in our day are not the same as the facts in the time of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. But the principles by which these facts are interpreted have not changed, for common sense remains essentially the same throughout the ages.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“If you know where you are, you do not know how fast you are moving, and if you know how fast you are moving, you do not know where you are.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“The conclusion is that the physical theory and the mathematical theory of science are valid methods but not valid philosophies. Facts need interpretation the physical theory forgets that it has no such principles of interpretation with its own bosom.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“The term science means something quite different for our generation than it did not so many generations ago.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“The assumption that numbers and mathematical or logical laws are mental is due to the even more widespread notion that only particular sensible entities exist in nature, and that relations abstractions, or universals cannot have any such objective existence - hence they are given a shadowy existence in the mind.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“These are but a few specimens of philosophy which is no longer conscious of its own intrinsic worth, and which sees no higher mission in life for itself than applying the categories of the material to the spiritual, of the physical to the mental, and the spatio-temporal to the eternal.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“We simply cannot put a man into a crucible to see if he will give off unmistakable green fumes of envy.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“Since evil is nothing positive, there can be no principle of evil. It has no meaning expect in reference to something good.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“Abstraction is the condition of the science of metaphysics, but in no way is its content.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“For if we understood or said that colour is not in a coloured body, or that it is separated from it, there would be error in this opinion or assertion. But if we consider colour and its properties, without reference to the apple which is coloured; or if we express in words what we thus understand, there is no error in such an opinion or assertion, because an apple is not essential to colour, and therefore, colour can be understood independently of the apple.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“This is a very imperfect analogy, because the nature of a thing is not a core but a principle.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“For the Angelic Doctor, the reason of conceptual knowledge is just the contrary! It is not his distance from the animal that renders abstraction necessary; it is his distance from God. Abstraction is not a condition of a push from below; it is a result of a fall from above. Abstraction is necessary because our intellect is imperfect. This is the fundamental reason.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“Any event or group of events may be viewed from different degrees of abstraction. A man jumps from a bridge. The psychologists make abstraction from everything except the mental state which prompted the suicide; the biologists abstract from everything except the dying organism; while the physicists are interested in the man, not as mind, or as organism, but as a falling body.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“Even in the realm of pure mathematics, the mathematician may use any set of symbols he desires within any given region of space-time; he may even go so far as to maintain that any one set of symbols fits the scheme as well as any other, but to erect this method into a philosophy and confuse independence of any one special meaning with independence of all meaning is unjustified and unwarranted.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“Facts themselves do not give knowledge”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“Gaston Milhaud, like many of his contemporaries, sought to overthrow empirical positivism by insisting on the fundamental reality of the mind, but mind conceived in the Kantian sense. The knowledge of nature is symbolic, and there is no necessary connection between the phenomena and our fictions.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“Philosophy, like science, is only a collection of hypotheses, introduced for the usefulness of the ensemble, or for economy of thought.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“The first part, or the Æsthetics, which has nothing in common with art, disengages the a priori forms of sensible knowledge, namely, the forms of space and time, which furnish mathematics with their object. Æsthetics thus divorced mathematics from reality, for it makes the condition of mathematics not the real, but a mental form of space and time.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“Like all great divorces, whether they be marital or epistemological, it had its antecedents in history.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“The physical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts there is no higher knowledge than the empirical knowledge of scientific phenomena. The mathematical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts that some higher knowledge is needed to explain scientific facts, and that higher knowledge is mathematics.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“The sciences need philosophy; philosophy, in turn, needs the sciences. On both sides, certain naive minds, too confident in their own forces and satisfied with ideas entirely too superficial, believed in the universal value of a single method. On both side a severe critique must lead each method back to its just limits, and teach them to ask aid of the other methods and manners of approach which, by their convergence, will permit the mind to embrace the diverse aspects of reality”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“There are fads ion science, just as there are fads in clothes”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“When experimental psychology limits itself to rats and kittens, squabs and eyelids, philosophy of nature has little opportunity for formation. But when experimental psychology delivers over its findings concerning phenomenal manifestations of the mind, then the philosophy of nature may apply his philosophical principles.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“The physical theory suffers from the same affect as humanism; it attempts to live on its own fat and breathe the very air which it has already exhaled from its scientific lungs.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“It is the forgetfulness of these principles which as made for the anarchy in thinking in so much of the anemic philosophy of our day.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“I study philosophy after my dinner, but the dinner is not the cause o my studying philosophy.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“The mind has three operations: the formation of ideas, judgements and reasoning.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science

“Being is the soul of every concept, of every judgment and of every reasoning.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science