Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads.

The theory of natural selection reduces to a banal truth: if a kind of creature flourishes in a kind of situation, then there must be something about such creatures (or about such situations, or about both) in virtue of which it does so.

To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to become a lawyer. It seems to me, in retrospect, that there was much to be said for their suggestion. On the other hand, many philosophers are quite good company; the arguments they use are generally better than the ones that lawyers use; and we do get to go to as many faculty meetings as we like at no extra charge.

On my bad days, I sometimes wonder what philosophers are for.

The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know.

No doubt, intuitions deserve respect. ...[but] I think that it is always up for grabs what an intuition is an intuition of. At a minimum, it is surely sometimes up for grabs.

There are lots of cases where we know more about how the world works than we do about how we know how it works. That's no paradox. Understanding the structure of galaxies is one thing, understanding how we understand the structure of galaxies is quite another. There isn't the slightest reason why the first should wait on the second and, in point of historical fact, it didn't. This bears a lot of emphasis; it turns up in philosophy practically everywhere you look.