"It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do." [Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970)]

"[A]ll deep thought begins and ends in the attempt to grasp whatever touches one most immediately." [Soren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard 98 (1959) quoted in P. Sanborn, Existentialism 21 (1968)]

"[T]here is no neutral starting point from which reflection on the nature of the moral life can begin." [Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics 35 (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983)]