24 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. |
15127 | A categorical basis could hardly explain a disposition if it had no powers of its own [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: The categorical basis would be a poor explanans for the disposition as explanandum, if the categorical basis did not drag any causal powers along with it. | |
From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], 2.4) | |
A reaction: The idea that the world is explained just by some basic stuff having qualities and relations always strikes me as wrong, because the view of nature is too passive. |
15123 | Is the causal profile of a property its essence? [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: We might say that the causal profile of a property is its essence. | |
From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], Intro) | |
A reaction: I associate this view with Shoemaker, and find it sympathetic. We always want to know more. What gives rise to these causal powers? Where does explanation end? He notes that you might say some of the powers are non-essential. |
15122 | Could two different properties have the same causal profile? [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: If there is more to the nature of a property than the causal powers that it confers, then two different internal natures of properties might necessitate the same causal profile. | |
From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], Intro) | |
A reaction: If the causal profiles were identical, it is hard to see how we could even propose, let alone test, their intrinsic difference. ...Unless, perhaps, we knew that the properties arose from different substrata. |
15124 | If properties are more than their powers, we could have two properties with the same power [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: If a property is something over and above its causal profile, we seem to have conceptual space for an electron to have negative charge 1 and negative charge 2, that have exactly the same causal powers. | |
From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], 1.3) |
14590 | If we accept scattered objects such as archipelagos, why not think of cars that way? [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: In being willing to countenance archipelagos, one embraces scattered objects. Why not then embrace the 'archipelago' of my car and the Eiffel Tower? | |
From: John Hawthorne (Three-Dimensionalism v Four-Dimensionalism [2008], 2.1) | |
A reaction: This is a beautifully simple and striking point. Language is full of embracing terms like 'the furniture', but that doesn't mean we assume the furniture is unified. The archipelago is less of an 'object' if you live on one of the islands. |
15128 | We can treat the structure/form of the world differently from the nodes/matter of the world [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: It does not seem altogether arbitrary to treat the structure of the world (the 'form' of the world) in a different way to the nodes in the structure (the 'matter' of the world). | |
From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], 2.5) | |
A reaction: An interesting contemporary spin put on Aristotle's original view. Hawthorne is presenting the Aristotle account as a sort of 'structuralism' about nature. |
15121 | An individual essence is a necessary and sufficient profile for a thing [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: An individual essence is a profile that is necessary and sufficient for some particular thing. | |
From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], Intro) | |
A reaction: By 'for' he presumably means for the thing to have an existence and a distinct identity. If it retained its identity, but didn't function any more, would that be loss of essence? |
14591 | Four-dimensionalists say instantaneous objects are more fundamental than long-lived ones [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: Self-proclaimed four-dimensionalists typically adopt a picture that reckons instantaneous objects (and facts about them) to be more fundamental than long-lived ones. | |
From: John Hawthorne (Three-Dimensionalism v Four-Dimensionalism [2008], 2.2) | |
A reaction: A nice elucidation. As in Idea 14588, this seems motivated by a desire for some sort of foundationalism or atomism. Why shouldn't a metaphysic treat the middle-sized or temporally extended as foundational, and derive the rest that way? |
8970 | Our notion of identical sets involves identical members, which needs absolute identity [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: Our conceptual grip on the notion of a set is founded on the axiom of extensionality: a set x is the same as a set y iff x and y have the same members. But this axiom deploys the notion of absolute identity ('same members'). | |
From: John Hawthorne (Identity [2003], 3.1) | |
A reaction: Identity seems to be a primitive, useful and crucial concept, so don't ask what it is. I suspect that numbers can't get off the ground without it (especially, in view of the above, if you define numbers in terms of sets). |
14589 | A modal can reverse meaning if the context is seen differently, so maybe context is all? [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: One person says 'He can't dig a hole; he hasn't got a spade', and another says 'He can dig a hole; just give him a spade', and both uses of the modal 'can' will be true. So some philosophers say that all modal predications are thus context-dependent. | |
From: John Hawthorne (Three-Dimensionalism v Four-Dimensionalism [2008], 1.2) | |
A reaction: Quine is the guru for this view of modality. Hawthorne's example seems to me to rely too much on the linguistic feature of contrasting 'can' and 'can't'. The underlying assertion in the propositions says something real about the possibilities. |
19553 | Commitment to 'I have a hand' only makes sense in a context where it has been doubted [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: If I utter 'I know I have a hand' then I can only be reckoned a cooperative conversant by my interlocutors on the assumption that there was a real question as to whether I have a hand. | |
From: John Hawthorne (The Case for Closure [2005], 2) | |
A reaction: This seems to point to the contextualist approach to global scepticism, which concerns whether we are setting the bar high or low for 'knowledge'. |
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). |
19551 | How can we know the heavyweight implications of normal knowledge? Must we distort 'knowledge'? [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: Those who deny skepticism but accept closure will have to explain how we know the various 'heavyweight' skeptical hypotheses to be false. Do we then twist the concept of knowledge to fit the twin desiderata of closue and anti-skepticism? | |
From: John Hawthorne (The Case for Closure [2005], Intro) | |
A reaction: [He is giving Dretske's view; Dretske says we do twist knowledge] Thus if I remember yesterday, that has the heavyweight implication that the past is real. Hawthorne nicely summarises why closure produces a philosophical problem. |
19552 | We wouldn't know the logical implications of our knowledge if small risks added up to big risks [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: Maybe one cannot know the logical consequences of the proposition that one knows, on account of the fact that small risks add up to big risks. | |
From: John Hawthorne (The Case for Closure [2005], 1) | |
A reaction: The idea of closure is that the new knowledge has the certainty of logic, and each step is accepted. An array of receding propositions can lose reliability, but that shouldn't apply to logic implications. Assuming monotonic logic, of course. |
19554 | Denying closure is denying we know P when we know P and Q, which is absurd in simple cases [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: How could we know that P and Q but not be in a position to know that P (as deniers of closure must say)? If my glass is full of wine, we know 'g is full of wine, and not full of non-wine'. How can we deny that we know it is not full of non-wine? | |
From: John Hawthorne (The Case for Closure [2005], 2) | |
A reaction: Hawthorne merely raises this doubt. Dretske is concerned with heavyweight implications, but how do you accept lightweight implications like this one, and then suddenly reject them when they become too heavy? [see p.49] |
20653 | Six reduction levels: groups, lives, cells, molecules, atoms, particles [Putnam/Oppenheim, by Watson] |
Full Idea: There are six 'reductive levels' in science: social groups, (multicellular) living things, cells, molecules, atoms, and elementary particles. | |
From: report of H.Putnam/P.Oppenheim (Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis [1958]) by Peter Watson - Convergence 10 'Intro' | |
A reaction: I have the impression that fields are seen as more fundamental that elementary particles. What is the status of the 'laws' that are supposed to govern these things? What is the status of space and time within this picture? |
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. |
15126 | Maybe scientific causation is just generalisation about the patterns [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: Perhaps science doesn't need a robust conception of causation, and can get by with thinking of causal laws in a Humean way, as the simplest generalization over the mosaic. | |
From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], 1.5) | |
A reaction: The Humean view he is referring to is held by David Lewis. That seems a council of defeat. We observe from a distance, but make no attempt to explain. |
15125 | We only know the mathematical laws, but not much else [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: We know the laws of the physical world, in so far as they are mathematical, pretty well, but we know nothing else about it. | |
From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], Ch.25) | |
A reaction: Lovely remark [spotted by Hawthorne]. This sums up exactly what I take to be the most pressing issue in philosophy of science - that we develop a view of science that has space for the next step in explanation. |
14588 | Modern metaphysicians tend to think space-time points are more fundamental than space-time regions [Hawthorne] |
Full Idea: Nowadays it is common for metaphysicians to hold both that space-time regions are less fundamental than the space-time points that compose them, and that facts about the regions are less fundamental than facts about the points and their arrangements. | |
From: John Hawthorne (Three-Dimensionalism v Four-Dimensionalism [2008], 1) | |
A reaction: I'm not quite sure what a physicist would make of this. It seems to be motivated by some a priori preference for atomism, and for system-building from minimal foundations. |