Knowledge, Reality, and Value Quotes

“The same goes for such nonsense sentences as “Time is a concept”, “Infinity is a concept”, and “God is a concept”. Those are all category errors.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“Irrationality and bias can support any ideology, including your opponents’. Nazis, Marxists, flat-Earthers, and partisans of any other crazy or evil view can base their beliefs on irrational biases, and there is no way to reason them out of it if you’ve rejected rationality and objectivity. So don’t attack objectivity and rationality. Unless you’re an asshole and you just want intellectual chaos.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“The main failures of objectivity are cases where your beliefs are overly influenced by your personal interests, emotions, or desires, or by how the phenomenon in the world is related to you, as opposed to how the external world is independent of you.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“Having feelings does not make you irrational. Believing that the world must be a certain way because of your feelings does.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“​Aside: I know, it often doesn’t seem as if people are trying to learn from each other when they trade arguments! It might seem they are just trying to win some kind of personal contest, or score points for “their side”. When that happens, you’re doing it wrong. Now, maybe people almost always do it wrong. You should still try to do it right.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“By studying philosophy, one gradually wakes up and stops saying the things that make no sense.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

“​I would like to insist, however, that we should not define God in some completely different way that doesn’t even refer to a conscious being. For instance, please don’t say that God is love, or God is nature, or God is goodness in general. Those statements are category errors or abuses of language. If I define “God” to refer to my couch, then we can easily prove that “God exists”, but this definition would be unhelpful, because it bears no relation to how the word “God” is normally understood, it doesn’t help to illuminate anything, and it only serves to sow confusion. Similar problems beset the attempts to define God as love, nature, goodness, etc.”
― Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy