Some time ago, I asked for your help in collecting “smoking guns”: i.e. alleged quotes that are used to quickly dismiss a philosopher’s views. I gave Derrida’s “There is nothing outside the text” as an example. A good number of you replied – for which many thanks. Here is a summary. It is important to remember concerning the list below that it consists of “smoking guns” my correspondents have heard others invoke in discussions. There is no guarantee that the quotes are accurate or even remotely close to things the alleged original authors have actually written or said. Thus quotation-marks do not mean that this is what the alleged original authors said or wrote. The quotation marks signal the use of these expressions in the discourse of later authors or critics. (Of course, in some cases the quotations are accurate.) I admit feeling a bit conflicted about sending my collection out to the whole list. I feel obliged to do so since I promised I would. But I also feel uncomfortable since it involves me in spreading word concerning alleged smoking guns that sometimes are grossly unfair to their alleged originators. (It reminds me of the moral dilemma when discussing slurs; citing the slurs can be insulting, too). Aristotle: “a female is an incomplete male … as it were, a deformity.” Barth: “Sin is … this impossible possibility.” Baudrillard: "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place". Bentham: "quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry." Berkeley: “esse est percipi” Bloor, Barnes and SSK: “All scientific theories - both true and false - can be explained by sociological rather than evidential factors.” Camus: “There is only one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Davidson: "there is no such thing as a language..." Descartes: "… it is possible to arrive at knowledge that would be very useful in life [...] and thus render ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature". "… animals are mindless automata". Dworkin, Andrea: "violation is a synonym for intercourse", “all sex is rape” "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." Feminist philosophy (generally): "the personal is political" Gadamer: "being that can be understood is language" Goodman: "We make the stars." Harman: “Just say ‘No’ to history of philosophy”. Hegel: “What is rational is real and what is real is rational", Hegel: "If the facts don’t fit the theory, all the worse for the theory.” Heidegger: “Das Nichts selbst nichtet.” ''Being is the house of language''. “Die Welt weltet.” Heidegger: “Strictly speaking, we cannot say, what happened before Dasein existed? Neither can we say that the Alps existed, nor can we say that they did not.” “Non-human animals don't have a world.” "Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry – in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps." Hermeneutics: “culture is a text” Hobbes: “human life is solitary poor nasty brutish and short” Hume: “Reason is a slave to the passions.” Hutchinson, Read, Sharrock: “There is No Such Thing as a Social Science” Kierkegaard: "subjectivity is truth." "subjectivity is untruth." Kuhn: "after a revolution scientists work in a different world" "The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience” Lacan: “There is no sexual relation.” Latour: "The attribution of tuberculosis and Koch’s bacillus to Ramses II should strike us as an anachronism of the same caliber as if we had diagnosed his death as having been caused by a Marxist upheaval, or a machine gun, or a Wall Street crash" Marx: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." Meinong: "... es gibt Gegenstände, von denen gilt, daß es dergleichen Gegenstände nicht gibt” Nagarjuna: "nothing exists” Nietzsche: “God is dead” … "Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy." "There are no facts, only interpretations!” Peirce: truth is “the opinion that is fated to be agreed to by all who investigate.” Plato: “Philosopher are kings.” Pragmatism: “true equal usefulness”, “true is what works” Quine: "Epistemology falls into place as a chapter of psychology." Rorty: "the truth is what your peers will let you get away with" Ryle: “ghost in the machine” Schelling: A diamond is a "quartz which has achieved self-consciousness.” Whitehead: “All of Western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato.” “Geography is half of character.” Wittgenstein: "Ontology is the shadow of grammar." “Philosophy is therapy.” “What has to be accepted, the given, is - one might say - forms of life” -- Prof. Martin Kusch (he or they); University of Vienna Department of Philosophy and Institute Vienna Circle http://homepage.univie.ac.at/martin.kusch/index.html Philos-L "The Liverpool List" is run by the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/ Messages to the list are archived at http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html. 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