Eliseo Vivas

Eliseo Vivas (13 July 1901 - 1993) was a 20th-century philosopher and literary theorist.

Quotes

• As philosophy becomes academic and tends to repudiate its responsibility to the culture in which it flourishes, the layman in need of wisdom and vision turns to evangelic practicalists, who confirm him in his myopic prejudice that the exclusive end of moral philosophy is actually to direct social activity toward the concrete and immediate improvement of social conditions. But, since there is no way of knowing except by arduous philosophical criticism whether the ends to which a reformer would lead us represent genuine improvement, the practicalist’s impatience with theory is at best hasty.
  • The Moral Life and the Ethical Life (Chicago: 1950), pp. 3-4

• With the hidden hatred of sustained intellectual effort, [the evangelist of practicalism] encourages whose who happen to listen to him in the name of reasonableness to dispense with reason.
  • The Moral Life and the Ethical Life (Chicago: 1950), p. 4