18 ideas
| 22070 | Irony is consciousness of abundant chaos [Schlegel,F] |
| Full Idea: Irony is the clear conscousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely abundant chaos. | |
| From: Friedrich Schlegel (works [1798], Vol 2 p.263), quoted by Ernst Behler - Early German Romanticism p.81 | |
| A reaction: [1800, in Athenaum] The interest here is irony as a reaction to chaos, which has made systematic thought impossible. Do romantics necessarily see reality as beyond our grasp, even if not chaotic? This must be situational, not verbal irony. |
| 22069 | Plato has no system. Philosophy is the progression of a mind and development of thoughts [Schlegel,F] |
| Full Idea: Plato had no system, but only a philosophy. The philosophy of a human being is the history, the becoming, the progression of his mind, the gradual formation and development of his thoughts. | |
| From: Friedrich Schlegel (works [1798], Vol.11 p.118), quoted by Ernst Behler - Early German Romanticism | |
| A reaction: [1804] Looks like the first sign of rebellion against the idea of having a 'system' in philosophy, making it a key idea of romanticism. Systems are classical? This looks like an early opposition of a historical dimension to static systems. Big idea. |
| 8250 | So-called 'free logic' operates without existence assumptions [Meinong, by George/Van Evra] |
| Full Idea: Meinong has recently been credited with inspiring 'free logic': a logic without existence assumptions. | |
| From: report of Alexius Meinong (The Theory of Objects [1904]) by George / Van Evra - The Rise of Modern Logic 8 | |
| A reaction: This would appear to be a bold escape from the quandries concerning the existential implications of quantifiers. I immediately find it very appealing. It seems to spell disaster for the Quinean program of deducing ontology from language. |
| 4483 | If abstract terms are sets of tropes, 'being a unicorn' and 'being a griffin' turn out identical [Loux] |
| Full Idea: If trope theorists say abstract singular terms name sets of tropes, what is the referent of 'is a unicorn'? The only candidate is the null set (with no members), but there is just one null set, so 'being a unicorn' and 'being a griffin' will be identical. | |
| From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.86) | |
| A reaction: Not crucial, I would think, given that a unicorn is just a horse with a horn. Hume explains how we do that, combining ideas which arose from actual tropes. |
| 4477 | Universals come in hierarchies of generality [Loux] |
| Full Idea: Universals come in hierarchies of generality. | |
| From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.24) | |
| A reaction: If it is possible to state facts about universals, this obviously encourages a rather Platonic approach to them, as existent things with properties. But maybe the hierarchies are conventional, not natural. |
| 4481 | Austere nominalists insist that the realist's universals lack the requisite independent identifiability [Loux] |
| Full Idea: Austere nominalists insist that the realist's universals lack the requisite independent identifiability. | |
| From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.60) | |
| A reaction: Plato's view seems to be that we don't identify universals independently. We ascend The Line, or think about the shadows in The Cave, and infer the universals from an array of particulars (by dialectic). |
| 4482 | Austere nominalism has to take a host of things (like being red, or human) as primitive [Loux] |
| Full Idea: In return for a one-category ontology (with particulars but no universals), the austere nominalist is forced to take a whole host of things (like being red, or triangular, or human) as unanalysable or primitive. | |
| From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.68) | |
| A reaction: I see that 'red' might have to be primitive, but being human can just be a collection of particulars. It is no ontologically worse to call them 'primitive' than to say they exist. |
| 4478 | Nominalism needs to account for abstract singular terms like 'circularity'. [Loux] |
| Full Idea: Nominalists have been very concerned to provide an account of the role of abstract singular terms (such as 'circularity'). | |
| From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.34) | |
| A reaction: Whether this is a big problem depends on our view of abstraction. If it only consists of selecting one property of an object and reifying it, then we can give a nominalist account of properties, and the problem is solved. |
| 8719 | There can be impossible and contradictory objects, if they can have properties [Meinong, by Friend] |
| Full Idea: Meinong (and Priest) leave room for impossible objects (like a mountain made entirely of gold), and even contradictory objects (such as a round square). This would have a property, of 'being a contradictory object'. | |
| From: report of Alexius Meinong (The Theory of Objects [1904]) by Michèle Friend - Introducing the Philosophy of Mathematics 6.8 | |
| A reaction: This view is only possible with a rather lax view of properties. Personally I don't take 'being a pencil' to be a property of a pencil. It might be safer to just say that 'round squares' are possible linguistic subjects of predication. |
| 8971 | There are objects of which it is true that there are no such objects [Meinong] |
| Full Idea: There are objects of which it is true that there are no such objects. | |
| From: Alexius Meinong (The Theory of Objects [1904]), quoted by Peter van Inwagen - Existence,Ontological Commitment and Fictions p.131 | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen say this idea is 'infamous', but Meinong is undergoing a revival, and commitment to non-existent objects may be the best explanation of some ways of talking. |
| 8718 | Meinong says an object need not exist, but must only have properties [Meinong, by Friend] |
| Full Idea: Meinong distinguished between 'existing objects' and 'subsisting objects', and being an object does not imply existence, but only 'having properties'. | |
| From: report of Alexius Meinong (The Theory of Objects [1904]) by Michèle Friend - Introducing the Philosophy of Mathematics 6.8 | |
| A reaction: Meinong is treated as a joke (thanks to Russell), but this is good. "Father Christmas does not exist, but he has a red coat". He'd better have some sort of existy aspect if he is going to have a property. So he's 'an object'. 'Insubstantial'? |
| 7756 | Meinong said all objects of thought (even self-contradictions) have some sort of being [Meinong, by Lycan] |
| Full Idea: Meinong insisted (à la Anselm) that any possible object of thought - even a self-contradictory one - has being of a sort even though only a few such things are so lucky as to exist in reality as well. | |
| From: report of Alexius Meinong (The Theory of Objects [1904]) by William Lycan - Philosophy of Language Ch.1 | |
| A reaction: ['This idea gave Russell fits' says Lycan]. In the English-speaking world this is virtually the only idea for which Meinong is remembered. Russell (Idea 5409) was happy for some things to merely 'subsist' as well as others which could 'exist'. |
| 15781 | The objects of knowledge are far more numerous than objects which exist [Meinong] |
| Full Idea: The totality of what exists, including what has existed and what will exist, is infinitely small in comparison with the totality of Objects of knowledge. | |
| From: Alexius Meinong (The Theory of Objects [1904]), quoted by William Lycan - The Trouble with Possible Worlds 01 | |
| A reaction: This is rather profound, but the word 'object' doesn't help. I would say 'What we know concerns far more than what merely exists'. |
| 4480 | Times and places are identified by objects, so cannot be used in a theory of object-identity [Loux] |
| Full Idea: Any account of the identity of material objects which turns on the identity of places and times must face the objection that the identity of places and times depends, in turn, on the identities of the objects located at them. | |
| From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.56) | |
| A reaction: This may be a benign circle, in which we concede that there are two basic interdependent concepts of objects and space-time. If you want to define identity - in terms of what? |
| 22068 | Poetry is transcendental when it connects the ideal to the real [Schlegel,F] |
| Full Idea: There is a kind of poetry whose essence lies in the relation between the ideal and the real, and which therefore, by analogy with philosophical jargon, should be called transcendental poetry. | |
| From: Friedrich Schlegel (works [1798], Vol 2 p.204), quoted by Ernst Behler - Early German Romanticism p.78 | |
| A reaction: I think the basic idea is that the imaginative creation of poetry has the power to bridge the gap between the transcendental (presupposed) ideal in Fichte, and nature (which Fichte seems to have excluded from his system). |
| 22030 | For poets free choice is supreme [Schlegel,F] |
| Full Idea: Romantic poetry recognises as its first commandment that the free choice [Wilkür] of the poet can tolerate no law above itself. | |
| From: Friedrich Schlegel (works [1798], Frag 116 p.32), quoted by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 06 | |
| A reaction: This leads to Shelley's 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the race'. We should also take it as a response to Kant's categorical imperative, which leads to the Gauguin Problem (wickedness justified by the art it leads to). |
| 22071 | True love is ironic, in the contrast between finite limitations and the infinity of love [Schlegel,F] |
| Full Idea: True irony is the irony of love. It arises from the feeling of finitude and one's own limitation, and the apparent contradiction of these feelings with the concept of infinity inherent in all true love. | |
| From: Friedrich Schlegel (works [1798], Vol.10 p.357), quoted by Ernst Behler - Early German Romanticism | |
| A reaction: [c.1827] This is more about idealist philosophy and its yearning for the Absolute than it is about the actual nature of love. Love is the door to the Absolute. The irony is our inability to pass through it. |
| 22029 | Irony is the response to conflicts of involvement and attachment [Schlegel,F, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Irony is thus the appropriate stance to feeling that is both inescapably committed and inescapably detached at the same time. | |
| From: report of Friedrich Schlegel (works [1798]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 06 | |
| A reaction: This is the epitome of romanticism, which carries over into the dilemmas of existentialism. Striking the right balance between caring and not caring seems to me to be the main focus of modern British people. |