"More fundamentally, Sen points out that there is more to life than achieving utility. 'Happiness or desire fulfillment represents only one aspect of human existence'. While it is important to take note of utility, there are many other things of intrinsic value... These considerations lead to the conclusion that neither opulence (income, commodity command) nor utility (happiness, desire fulfilment) constitute or adequately represent human well-being and deprivation. Instead what is required is a more direct approach that focuses on human function(ing)s and the capability to achieve valuable function(ing)s..."
-David A. Clark on Amartya Sen's Capability Approach, The Capability Approach: It's Development, Critiques and Recent Advances
"An abstract general idea in the consciousness of the waking self has a particular idea as its basis in the subwaking self... The great contention of nominalism and conceptualism over the nature of abstract general ideas thus may find here its solution. The conceptualists are no doubt right in asserting that a general abstract idea may exist in consciousness apart from the particular idea or perception perceived, but they do not say that this consciousness is that of the waking self. The nominalists, again, are right in asserting that a general abstract idea or concept has a particular idea or percept as its basis; but they do not add that this percept may be totally absent from the waking consciousness and only present in the subwaking consciousness. No general abstract idea without some particular percept as basis."
-Boris Sidis
