Frases de Mary Midgley (42 citas, página 2)

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Mary Midgley: Frases en inglés

“Every age has its pet contradictions. Thirty years ago we used to accept Marx and Freud together, and then wonder, like the chameleon on the turkey carpet, why life was so confusing.”

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Mary Midgley

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 1.

“Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.”

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Mary Midgley

The Myths We Live By (2003).

“Philosophy, like speaking prose, is something have to do all our lives, well or badly, whether we notice it or not.”

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Mary Midgley

Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).

“Many people fail to grasp this point, apparently because they think of "scientific" evidence as only that produced in laboratories by controlled experiments. This leads them to treat field studies, however careful, thorough and well-documented, as "anecdotal"--mere preparation for the real thing, therefore properly ignored till it bears fruit entitled to be considered by learned persons. This attitude was much like that of cavalry generals in the First World War, waiting patiently for the infantry to clear the ground so that they could make the dashing charges that alone they thought entitled the name of warfare. Because these creatures are complex, only a tiny fraction of important truths about them can ever be seen in laboratories of expressed in control experiments. The same, of course, is true of the human race.”

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Mary Midgley

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 224.

“The point cannot be just survival, nor even survival in numbers. Survival is just as well achieved by much less ambitions creatures which go in for sheer number. (In fact a cost-benefit-conscious gene that really understood its business would, no doubt, have remained on board something like the amoeba; it will probably be amoung the last to go.) Nor is it survival-as-society, since many animals achieve this despite a lot of bickering.”

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Mary Midgley

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 148.

“What do we mean when we speak…of higher and lower animals? …What too about communication (a respect in which, Wilson says, we much exceed the insects)? What is so good about communicating? How are we sure that it constitutes and excellence? Is it even clear that in respect we do exceed the corals and the colonial jellyfish? With them, there are no internal barriers; information flow freely from unit to unit wherever it is needed. The unrestrictedness of the communication much exceeds that among people. Why does this fail to impress us?”

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Mary Midgley

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 151.

“If we ask how creatures [bees] that act so elaborately against their private advantage can have evolved, the answer lies in their mode of reproduction. Most workers are sterile. The unit of selection is normally the whole community. Its prosperity depends on the efficiency of the workers. An uncooperative strain would simply revert toward the solitary life these insects started from and in which many would still remain.. So it is natural to understand their evolution, as we would that of a plant, without reference to the plans or wishes of the individual bees.”

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Mary Midgley

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 147.

“Rightly did Darwin pin up a paper warning himself to be careful about using such words as "higher" and "lower." What is downward about the trend that has produced elephants, chimpanzees, wolves, dolphins, and jackdaws by comparison with ants and bees?”

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Mary Midgley

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 148.

“In fact, the whole idea of illusion seems to make sense only if we accept the reality of the illusory experience as an experience and question only what it seems to be telling us about the outside world. Optical illusions do really hapen. What they can’t do is provide accurate measurements of the outside world. The idea of having, so to speak, two successive layers of illusion here is unworkable.”

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Mary Midgley

Are You an Illusion (2014). 27.

“But understanding and explaining motives does not compromise freedom; nor does even predicting acts necessarily do so. A person committed to a political cause may vote predictably, and intelligibly in an election. He does not vote less freely than someone that flips a coin at the last minute. So if we find comparison with animals any help in understanding motives, it will not mean that conduct is not free. And since animals are not (as Descartes supposed) automata, the issue of freedom does not make comparing man with any other species and downgrading irrelevance.”

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Mary Midgley

Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).

“Arguments can always be answered. Moral philosophy, unlike straight moralizing, arises from and trives on plurality of values.”

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Mary Midgley

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 167.

“It would be quite false to say that competition is the only relation that obtains between species. Mutual dependence is in general quite as important. Each kind exists within an ecosystem, and needs the others to keep the system going. Thus, grazing animals on the African plains co-exist because each specializes in eating some particular kind of plant, and needs the others to keep the whole pasture at a balanced level. They depend, too, on each other's specialized capacities to give warning of danger. … each also depends for survival on innumerable others, such as the insects which pollinate the plants, the fauna of their intestines and of course their predators. It is unthinkable that any species should be an island.”

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Mary Midgley

Animals and Why They Matter (1983), ch. 2, 3.

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