Blogs > Cliopatria > Second Best Known Philosophical Sentence?

Jul 26, 2004

Second Best Known Philosophical Sentence?




I was reading David Lodge's Thinks... (Viking, 2001. Capsule Review: not a comedy of academic manners, but a serious consideration of questions of morality and existence set in one of his amusingly dysfunctional university settings. Compelling, though some of the later plot choices seemed more convenient than convincing.) and came across a passage that was like a little pop quiz (stream of consciousness style and ellipsis in original):

I think therefore I am true enough in that sense . . . Must be the best-known sentence in the history of philosophy. What's the second best I wonder? (p. 4)
My first thought was one of my personal favorites, Ockham's Razor: The successful proof with the smallest number of necessary postulates is preferable. But when you say Ockham's Razor, most people think of Sherlock Holmes':"When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth" (Which isn't actually the same thing). At best, they think"the simplest explanation is most likely to be true."

In field of ethical/moral philosophy, of course, some version of the Golden Rule certainly is in the running. Pascal's Wager is another one.

Fifty-five pages later Lodge provides his answer (again in stream-of-consciousness style):

is that perhaps the second best known sentence in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche's 'God is dead' . . .? (p. 59)
I thought they were an interesting juxtaposition: Descarte's statement equating independent existence with thought was the first step in his proof that the world, including God, exists; Nietzsche, of course, argued that the existence of the thinking human proved that God does not, in fact, order the universe in a meaningful manner.

Of course, that's all mainstream Western philosophy. The Confucian version of the Golden Rule is pretty widely cited

Tzu Kung asked:"Is there any one word that can serve as a principle for the conduct of life?" Confucius said:"Perhaps the word 'reciprocity': Do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you." [XV:23]
as is the Great Learning (the core of which is all Confucianism in two paragraphs), though my single favorite line of Confucius remains
"Learning without thinking is labor lost; thinking without learning is perilous" [II:15]
Pontius Pilate's"What is truth?" has got to be on any philosophical top ten list.

In the spirit of the opening of convention season, what's your nomination?



comments powered by Disqus

More Comments:


Oscar Chamberlain - 7/28/2004

God does not play dice with the universe."
-- Albert Einstein

I don't have the exact quote, but I believe Niels Bohr responded, "Albert, stop telling God what to do."


Adam Kotsko - 7/27/2004

Hegel said it first.


Richard Henry Morgan - 7/26/2004

Not exactly a single sentence, but encapsulating an idea of enormous importance and influence:

1. In name there is sweet; in name there is bitter; in name there is warm and in name there is cold; in name there is color. But really there are atoms and the void. (Democritus)

Pithy, if not exactly accurate:

2. All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato (Whitehead)


Richard Henry Morgan - 7/26/2004

I like that. Here's two more, though more famous among philosophers than the general public:

1. esse est percepi -- to be is to be perceived (Berkeley)

2. to be is to be the value of a variable (Quine)


W. Caleb McDaniel - 7/26/2004

How about "The unexamined life is not worth living"? --Socrates.


Richard Henry Morgan - 7/26/2004

Ockham's razor has an interesting history. It is best known in its Latin form: "pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" -- or, in English, "entities should not be multiplied unneccesarily". It started out as a principle of ontological parsimony, and has achieved the broader methodological interpretation that Jon relates. It seems to go back to Aristotle, and isn't anything Ockham actually ever said or wrote. It is simply that he was the most uncompromising nominalist of his time, so the expression got attached to his name.