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1 " virtue is indeed teachable, "
― Anthony Kenny , A New History of Western Philosophy
2 " In exile in Lampsacus, Anaxagoras made his final benefaction to humanity: the invention of the school holiday. "
3 " I count myself among those who owe a great debt to The Concept of Mind. When it was published I was an undergraduate student of philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome. The book was drawn to my attention by Dr (now Bishop) Alan Clark, then Ripetitore in philosophy at the Venerable English College in Rome. I found its style exhilaratingly different from that of the scholastic textbooks which were prescribed in the courses of my Pontifical University; yet I came gradually to realize that the philosophical content of the book bore some surprising resemblances to the doctrines of Aristotle and Aquinas who were in theory the standard bearers of the philosophy in which my Jesuit mentors were striving to instruct me. "
― Anthony Kenny , The Metaphysics of Mind
4 " Philosophy is not a matter of knowledge; it is a matter of understanding, that is to say, of organizing what is known. "
5 " In the period between Homer and Socrates most philosophers wrote in verse, and Plato, writing in the great age of Athenian tragedy and comedy, composed dramatic dialogue. Aristotle, an exact contemporary of the greatest Greek orator Demosthenes, preferred to write in prose monologue. "
― Anthony Kenny , Ancient Philosophy
6 " Like the positivists, Wittgenstein was hostile to metaphysics. But he attacked metaphysics not with a blunt instrument like the verification principle, but by the careful drawing of distinctions that enable him to disentangle the mixture of truism and nonsense within metaphysical systems. ‘When philosophers use a word—‘‘knowledge’’, ‘‘being’’, ‘‘object’’, ‘‘I’’, ‘‘proposition’’, ‘‘name’’—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language which is its original home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ (PI I, 116). "
― Anthony Kenny , Philosophy in the Modern World (New History of Western Philosophy, vol. 4)
7 " Philosophy is linguistic’ may mean at least six different things.(1) The study of language is a useful philosophical tool. (2) It is the only philosophical tool. (3) Language is the only subject matter of philosophy. (4) Necessary truths are established by linguistic convention. (5) Man is fundamentally a language using animal. (6) Everyday language has a status of privilege over technical and formal systems. These six propositions areindependent of each other. (1) has been accepted in practice by every philosopher since Plato. Concerning the other five, philosophers have been and are divided, including philosophers within the analytic tradition. In my own opinion (1) and (5) are true, and the other four false. But I do not argue for this sweeping generalization anywhere in the present book. "
8 " [I]nternalized experiences of selfhood are linked to autobiographical narratives, which are linked to biographies, legal testimonies, and medical case histories, which are linked to forms of therapy and theories of the subject. . . "
― Anthony Kenny
