display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
2 ideas
| 18980 | If there is a 'greatest knower', it doesn't follow that they know absolutely everything [James] |
| Full Idea: The greatest knower of them all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know what he does know at one single stroke: - he may be liable to forget. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 4) | |
| A reaction: And that's before you get to the problem of how the greatest knower could possibly know whether or not they knew absolutely everything, or whether there might be some fact which was irremediably hidden from them. |
| 18978 | It is hard to grasp a cosmic mind which produces such a mixture of goods and evils [James] |
| Full Idea: We can with difficulty comprehend the character of a cosmic mind whose purposes are fully revealed by the strange mixture of good and evils that we find in this actual world's particulars. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 3) | |
| A reaction: And, of course, what counts as 'goods' or 'evils' seems to have a highly relative aspect to it. To claim that really it is all good is massive hope based on flimsy evidence. |