Life May Be Not Only

Once We See An Aspect Of What We Or Someone Else Does As Something That Happens, We Lose Our Grip On The Idea That It Has Been Done And That We Can Judge The Doer And Not Just The Happening.

Altruism Itself Depends On A Recognition Of The Reality Of Other Persons, And On The Equivalent Capacity To Regard Oneself As Merely One Individual Among Many.

A Theory Of Motivation Is Defective If It Renders Intelligible Behaviour Which Is Not Intelligible.

What We Take Ourselves To Be Doing When We Think About What Is The Case Or How We Should Act Is Something That Cannot Be Reconciled With A Reductive Naturalism, For Reasons Distinct From Those That Entail The Irreducibility Of Consciousness. It Is Not Merely The Subjectivity Of Thought But Its Capacity To Transcend Subjectivity And To Discover What Is Objectively The Case That Presents A Problem....thought And Reasoning Are Correct Or Incorrect In Virtue Of Something Independent Of The Thinker's Beliefs, And Even Independent Of The Community Of Thinkers To Which He Belongs. (p. 71)

Once We Have Taken The Backward Step To An Abstract View Of Our Whole System Of Beliefs, Evidence, And Justification, And Seen That It Works Only, Despite Its Pretensions, By Taking The World Largely For Granted, We Are Not In A Position To Contrast All These Appearances With An Alternative Reality. We Cannot Shed Our Ordinary Responses, And If We Could It Would Leave Us With No Means Of Conceiving A Reality Of Any Kind.