"What do you do philosophy?"

 Steve Pyke for a quarter century makes portraits of philosophers and gives them the same question:

Derek Parfait

"What interests me is the metaphysical questions, the answers to which affect our emotions. Why is there a universe? That allows each of us consider ourselves to the same person throughout life? Do we have free will? Illusory if over time? "
 

Alfred Ayer

"To say that authority - whether secular or religious - can in no way justify the morality is not to deny the obvious fact that he somehow determines our choice." 

John McDowell

"I am interested in the effects of the metaphysical position, which we so easily slips, it can be called scientism or naturalism. I am sure that it distorts our ideas about the place of consciousness in the world. The task of philosophy, as I see it - to correct this distortion..

 Noam Chomsky

"The main questions of philosophy can, I think, productively reformulated overridden from the standpoint of science, which kept the momentum early Modern Times. Initially I was interested in exactly that - especially in regard to language and consciousness, the biological basis of human thought and speech as a way to express the thought. " 

 

John Rawls

"From that moment as a teenager I began to study philosophy, I am concerned about issues of morality and the religious and philosophical foundations that allow us to answer these questions. Three years in the U.S. Army during the Second World - and I began to worry about policy issues. Around 1950, I began writing a book about justice. Eventually, I finished it. '' 

 

Herbert Lionel Hart

"To tell you frankly, I think the idea of a summary of 50-100 words - it's an absurd idea ... I advise you to renounce it. "

 

Sir Karl Raimund Popper

"I believe in science - and the time for that matter in philosophy - there's only one way: to find the problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with her, then marry her and live happily and die in one day - unless, of course You will not find another, more beautiful, or a problem, contrary to expectation, did not find the solution. But even if you actually find a solution to your problem, you'll find a whole family of problems, offspring. " 

 

Willard Van Orman Quine

"The world around us drumming our nerve endings in the rays of light and a hail of molecules, causing us to feel. Growing up in a talkative society, we gradually learn to relate these feelings with certain words and reach the age when we can talk about the objects of the external world - animals, plants, planets, galaxies, the nerve endings, the rays of light and molecules. We also talked about intangible objects - numbers, for example. I would like to have a clearer view of the connection - logical and causal - between the original stimuli from the outside world, caused by their feelings and language, which purport to describe the outside world. " 

 

Raymond Klibansky