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. |
12772 | Philosophy is a value- and attitude-driven enterprise [Fraassen] |
Full Idea: Philosophy is a value- and attitude-driven enterprise; philosophy is in false consciousness when it sees itself otherwise. | |
From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
A reaction: It is one thing to be permeated with values, and another to be value-driven. Truth, reason and logic are (I take it) granted a high value in philosophy, just as the offside rule is in football. I am trying to place reality in charge, not humanity. |
12771 | Is it likely that a successful, coherent, explanatory ontological hypothesis is true? [Fraassen] |
Full Idea: How likely is it that a truly successful, coherent, explanatory ontological hypothesis is true? | |
From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
A reaction: Van Fraassen announces "I reject metaphysic" (p.3), so we know where he stands. Anything becomes less certain as it moves to a higher level of generality. Should we abandon generalisation? There is much illumination in metaphysics. |
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. |
12773 | Analytic philosophy has an exceptional arsenal of critical tools [Fraassen] |
Full Idea: Analytical philosophy can rightly pride itself on having produced the greatest critical arsenal the world has ever known. | |
From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.6) | |
A reaction: This is, of course, in the context of a scathing attack on the desire to use analytical methods to do speculative metaphysics. I say that if these are the best tools, then we should push forward with them to see how far we can get. |
12770 | We may end up with a huge theory of carefully constructed falsehoods [Fraassen] |
Full Idea: The specter that faces us is that we may end up having explained all that is dreamt of in our philosophies by intricately crafted postulates that are false. | |
From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
A reaction: This is more persuasive that Idea 12769. People who cannot bear to live with a total absence of explanation (with Keats's 'negative capability') are most in danger from this threat. |
14919 | Empiricists deny what is unobservable, and reject objective modality [Fraassen] |
Full Idea: To be an empiricist is to withhold belief in anything that goes beyond the actual, observable phenomena, and to recognise no objective modality in nature. | |
From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Scientific Image [1980], p.202), quoted by J Ladyman / D Ross - Every Thing Must Go 2.3.1 | |
A reaction: To only believe in what is actually observable strikes me as ridiculous. It might be, though, that we observe modality, in observing dispositions. If you pull back a bowstring, you feel the possibilities. |
6783 | To 'accept' a theory is not to believe it, but to believe it empirically adequate [Fraassen, by Bird] |
Full Idea: To 'accept' a theory is not to believe it, but is instead to believe it to be empirically adequate. | |
From: report of Bas C. van Fraassen (The Scientific Image [1980]) by Alexander Bird - Philosophy of Science Ch.4 | |
A reaction: The second half of this doesn't avoid the word 'belief'. Nevertheless the suggestion is that we never believe (i.e. commit to truth) ever again. So you avoid an on-coming bus because the threat appears to be 'empirically adequate'. Hm. |
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). |
14917 | To accept a scientific theory, we only need to believe that it is empirically adequate [Fraassen] |
Full Idea: Science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate; and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empiricially adequate. | |
From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Scientific Image [1980], p.12), quoted by J Ladyman / D Ross - Every Thing Must Go 2.3.1 | |
A reaction: This won't tell us what to do if there is a tie between two theories, and we will want to know the criteria for 'adequate'. Presumably there are theories which are empirically quite good, but not yet acceptable. Theories commit beyond experience. |
6784 | Why should the true explanation be one of the few we have actually thought of? [Fraassen, by Bird] |
Full Idea: Van Fraassen asks why we should think that the actual explanation of the evidence should be found among the theories we are considering, when there must be an infinity of theories which are also potential explanations of the evidence? | |
From: report of Bas C. van Fraassen (The Scientific Image [1980]) by Alexander Bird - Philosophy of Science Ch.4 | |
A reaction: This has become one of the leading modern anti-realist arguments. We must introduce an element of faith here; presumably evolution makes us experts on immediate puzzles, competent on intermediate ones, and hopeful on remote ones. |
12769 | Inference to best explanation contains all sorts of hidden values [Fraassen] |
Full Idea: The very phrase 'inference to the best explanation' should wave a red flag for us. What is good, better, best? What values are slipped in here, under a common name, and where do they come from? | |
From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
A reaction: A point worth making, but overstated. If we are going to refuse to make judgements for fear that some wicked 'value' might creep in, our lives will be reduced to absurdity. |
13066 | An explanation is just descriptive information answering a particular question [Fraassen, by Salmon] |
Full Idea: On van Fraassen's theory an explanation is simply an answer to a why-question; it is nothing other than descriptive information that, in a given context, answers a particular type of question. | |
From: report of Bas C. van Fraassen (The Scientific Image [1980]) by Wesley Salmon - Four Decades of Scientific Explanation 4.3 | |
A reaction: Presumably we would need some sort of criterion for a 'good' explanation, and it seems to me that a very good explanation might be given which was nevertheless beyond the grasp of the questioner. |
12768 | We accept many scientific theories without endorsing them as true [Fraassen] |
Full Idea: The choice among theories in science may be a choice to accept in some sense falling far short of endorsement as true. | |
From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
A reaction: When put like this, it is hard to deny the force of Van Fraassen's reservations about science. Lots of people, including me, use scientific theories as working assumptions for life, with nothing like full confidence in their truth. |
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. |
6005 | Animals are dangerous and nourishing, and can't form contracts of justice [Hermarchus, by Sedley] |
Full Idea: Hermarchus said that animal killing is justified by considerations of human safety and nourishment and by animals' inability to form contractual relations of justice with us. | |
From: report of Hermarchus (fragments/reports [c.270 BCE]) by David A. Sedley - Hermarchus | |
A reaction: Could the last argument be used to justify torturing animals? Or could we eat a human who was too brain-damaged to form contracts? |