"...conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood."

"...truth as, in James's phrase, 'what is better for us to believe', rather than as 'the accurate representaion of reality'."

"For the edifying philosopher the very idea of being presented with "all of Truth" is absurd, because the Platonic notions of Truth is absurd."

"...there is no danger of philosophy's "coming to an end." Religion did not come to an end in the Enlightenment, nor painting in Impressionism. Even if the period from Plato to Nietzsche is encapsulated and 'distanced' in the way Heidegger suggests, and even if twentieth-century philosophy comes to seem a stage of awkward transitional backing and filling (as sixteenth-century philosophy now seems to us), there will be something called "philosophy" on the other side of the transition."

"We are the heirs of three hundred years of rhetoric about the importance of distinguishing sharply between science and religion, science and politics, science and art, science and philosophy, and so on."

"Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey... Each of the three, in his later work broke free of the Kantian conception of philsophy as foundational, and spent his time warning us against those very temptations to which he himself had once succumbed."

"Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey are in agreement that the notion of knowledge as accurate representation... needs to be abandoned."

"'Analytic' philosophy is one more variant of Kantian philosophy, a variant marked principally by thinking of representation as linguistic rather than mental, and of philosophy of language rather than "transcendental critique" or psychology, as the discipline which exhibits the 'foundations of knowledge'."

"The result was that the more "scientific" and "rigorous" philosophy became, the less it had to do with the rest of culture and the more absurd its traditional pretentions seemed."

"I present Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey as philosophers whose aim is to edify - to help their readers, or sociey as a whole, break free from outworn vocabularies and attitiudes, rather than to provide "grounding" for the intuitions and customs of the present."

On Dewey - "In his ideal society, culture is no longer dominated by the ideal of objective cognition but by that of aesthetic enhancement. In that culture, as he said, the arts and the sciences would be the 'unforced flowers of life'."

Sums up Wallace Matson - "...in Greek there is no way to divide "conscious states" or "states of consciousness" - events in an inner life - from events in an 'external world'." (No duality)

"...there had been no term, even of philosophical art, in the Greek and medieval traditions coextensive with the Descartes-Locke use of 'idea'."

"...once Descarte's own confusion between certainty that something exists and certainty about its nature was dissipated, empiricism began to edge out rationalism."

"Science, rather than living, became philosophy's subject, and epistemology its center."

"The notion that there is a problem about mind and body originated in the seventeenth century's attempt to make 'the mind' a self-contained sphere of inquiry."

"The eventual demarcation of philosophy from science was made possible by the notion that philosophy's core was "theory of knowledge," a theory distinct from the sciences because it was their foundation."

"Locke made Descartes's newly cotrived 'mind' into the subject matter of a "science of man" - moral philosophy as opposed to natural philosohy."

"Kant... talked about inner representations rather than sentances."

"Feyerabend - 'meaning invariance.'

"...hermeneutics is an expression of hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled - that our culture should become one in which the demand for constraint and confrontation is no longer felt."

"The holistic, antifoundationalist, pragmatist treatments of knowledge and meaning which we find in Dewey, Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and Davidson are almost equally offensive to many philosophers, precisely because they abandon the quest for commensuration and thus are 'realitivist'."

"Since the Enlightenment, and in particular since Kant, the physical sciences had been viewed as a paradigm of knowledge, to which the rest of culture had to measure up."

"The trouble with metaphysics, just as the positivists said, is that nobody feels clear about what would count as a satisfactory argument within it, although, of course, the same goes for the 'impure' philosophy of language which the positivists practiced."

"But the confusions among the romantic notion of man as self-creative, the Kantian notion of man as constituting a phenomenal world, and the Cartesian notion of man as containing a special immaterial ingredient need to be examined in some detail. This set of confusions is embodied in much discussion concerning the 'nature of spirit'."

"Our present notions of what it is to be a philosopher are so tied up with the Kantian attempt to render all knowledge-claims commensurable that it is difficult to imagine what philosophy without epistemology could be."

"The utility of the 'existentialist' view is that, by proclaiming that we have no essence, it permits us to see the descriptions of ourselves we find in one of (or in the unity of) the Naturwissenschaften as on a par with the various alternative descriptions offered by poets, novelists, depth psychologists, sculptors, anthropologists, and mystics. The former are not priviledged representations in virtue of the fact that (at the moment) there is more consensus in the sciences than in the arts. They are simply among the repretoire of self-descriptions at our disposal."

"On the periphery of the history of modern philosophy, one finds figures who, without forming a 'tradition', resemble each other in their distrust of the notion that man's essence is to be a knower of essences. Goethe, Kierkegaard, Santayana, William James, Dewey, the later Wittgenstein, and the later Heidegger, are figures of this sort. They are often accused of relativism or cynicism."