Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whether we want to be there or not, science has put us in the position of having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position-and no end to it is in sight-is that of having to philosophise without 'foundations'.

It was Rudolf Carnap's dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.

I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!

... causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour).

No sane person should believe that something is subjective merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.

I can only please one person per day. Today isn't your day, tomorrow doesn't look good either.

The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.