It is not my place to tell you whether there is indefeasible ignorance of ultimate reality. I am ignorant of whether there is or is not. But you should think of these things because there are no things more important, though there are no questions more difficult or less answerable. But one's whole life may be changed if one changes his mind about these questions.

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Lewis White Beck, " Praise of Ignorance" in Kant's Legacy: Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck. (Predrag Cicovacki, 2001), Introduction p. XXV from the Kearse Distinguished Lecture, Rochester Institute of Technology, May 2, 1983

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If you believe that you are not a machine, but that I am (then) I do not know why you are reading this book".

In order to know and to act, it is necessary both to see and to think.

Lewis White Beck Essays on Kant and Hume (1978)

Whatever plausibility the machine theory has- and it has much plausibility and is a rich model for psychology and neurology- it gains by being associated with a self-exemption clause.

The quest for other, and better, forms of life, society, technology, ethics, and law may not reveal that they are actually elsewhere; but it may in the long run help us to make some of them actual on earth.

Myth, religion and now science-fiction with their tales of benevolent and malevolent extraterrestrial beings are commentaries on the human condition. I believe even responsible scientific speculation and expensive technology of space exploration in search for other life are the peculiarly modern equivalent of angeology and Utopia or of demonology and apocalypse.

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