Anthropomorphism Quotes

“The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has shown that the same neural mechanisms mediate the fear response in all sorts of animals, from pigeons and rats to cats and humans. The idea that other animals experience similar emotions to us is not anthropomorphism: it is based on sound scientific evidence.”

“Science, which is only another name for truth, now holds religious charlatans, self-deceivers and God agents in a certain degree of check--agents and employees, I mean, of a mythical, medieval, man-made God, anthropomorphic in constitution.”

“Anthropomorphism originally meant the attribution of human characteristics to God. It is curious that the word is now used almost exclusively to ascribe human characteristics--such as fidelity or altruism or pride, or emotions such as love, embarrassment, or sadness--to the nonhuman animal. One is guilty of anthropomorphism, though it is no longer a sacrilegious word. It is a derogatory, dismissive one that connotes a sort of rampant sentimentality. It’s just another word in the arsenal of the many words used to attack the animal rights movement.”

“Anthropocentrism gave rise to boredom, and when anthropomorphism was replaced by technocentrism, boredom became even more profound.”

“Philosophically literate anthropomorphism is exactly what one would expect of any worldview which affirms that human beings are made in the image o”

“The being called God...bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.”

“I suppose the spiritual trance is harder to break than the religious one because the delusion is more difficult to distinguish. You have a quasi-cloud of ideas that include wonderful concepts of openness and altruism without the blatant anthropomorphism of religion.”

“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.”

“Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.”

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”