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The Princeton graduate students pride themselves in never reading “anyone who takes philosophy personally or confuses philosophy with things that matter in their little lives.” But being ignorant, apparently, of how they (and their professors, presumably) have come to hold such a view, they have no idea of how it might be criticized, or who they are who hold it.

— Bruce Wilshire Fashionable Nihilism (2002)

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More quotes by Bruce Wilshire

Not to know how one has become what one is, means one has a grossly inadequate idea of what one is.

Fashionable Nihilism (2002)

Philosophers conclude that they need no longer participate personally in what Socrates called “the tendance of the soul.”

Fashionable Nihilism (2002)

Philosophers who function within analytic traditions tend to reflect on the self in a way that unwittingly impoverishes and objectifies self.

Fashionable Nihilism (2002)

… our countless addictions, distractions, dissipations of passion that might have served as the core of self.

Fashionable Nihilism (2002)

[According to John Locke] the enlightened philosopher is to accept a subordinate position: he must be, says Locke, an “underlaborer” to the empirical scientist.

Fashionable Nihilism (2002)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Bruce Wilshire (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.