21 ideas
| 1606 | You have to be a Platonist to debate about reality, so every philosopher is a Platonist [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Everyone who enters into a debate about reality automatically becomes a Platonist. Since such debates are the essence of philosophy, every philosopher is a Platonist. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.199) | |
| A reaction: This is correct |
| 1595 | Philosophy aims to satisfy the chief human desire - the articulation of beauty itself [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy, the attempt to articulate the vision of beauty itself, is the attempt to satisfy the highest human desire. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.120) | |
| A reaction: A million miles away from modern philosophy, but still an ideal to be taken seriously. |
| 1571 | 'Logos' ranges from thought/reasoning, to words, to rational structures outside thought [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Logos can mean i) a thought or reasoning, ii) the word which expresses a thought, iii) a rational structure outside human thought. These meanings give 'logos' an extraordinary range. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], Intro. 12) |
| 1572 | In the seventeenth century the only acceptable form of logos was technical knowledge [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: In the seventeenth century only a certain type of logos was deemed legitimate, namely that identified with technical knowledge (or 'techné'). | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], Intro. 15) |
| 1573 | The hallmark of a person with logos is that they give reasons why one opinion is superior to another [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: What is supposed to identify the person of logos from the one without is the commitment to giving reasons explaining why one opinion is superior to another. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], Intro. 17) |
| 1592 | Logos cannot refute the relativist, and so must admit that it too is a matter of desire (for truth and agreement) [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Logos cannot refute the radical, consistent and self-conscious relativist. Therefore it must admit that, like the relativist, it itself is essentially a matter of desire. It wants to say what is right and wrong, true and false, and for others to agree. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.108) |
| 1593 | Human desire has an ordered structure, with logos at the pinnacle [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Human desire has an ordered structure, with logos at the pinnacle. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.109) |
| 1603 | Logos is not unconditionally good, but good if there is another person willing to engage with it [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Logos is not unconditionally good, but good contingent on there being some other person (out there) who is willing to talk with logos, to approach it even as an opponent. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.175) |
| 1598 | We prefer reason or poetry according to whether basics are intelligible or not [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Is the arché (basis) intelligible, or is it chaos? Upon this question hinges all, for answering it determines whether poetry or logos is the form of human speech that best does justice to the world. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.139) |
| 1584 | Modern science, by aiming for clarity about the external world, has abandoned rationality in the human world [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: The modern scientific world view, with all its hope for clarity and precision, has a flipside, …which is its abandonment of rationality in the world of human significance. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.74) |
| 1591 | Unfortunately for reason, argument can't be used to establish the value of argument [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Unfortunately for the logos there is no argument that can, without begging the question, establish the goodness of argumentation. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.106) |
| 1599 | Attempts to suspend all presuppositions are hopeless, because a common ground must be agreed for the process [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: To debate about suspending all our presuppositions requires a common ground which, upon being established, immediately renders the debate superfluous. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.144) |
| 8083 | Boole applied normal algebra to logic, aiming at an algebra of thought [Boole, by Devlin] |
| Full Idea: Boole proposed to use the entire apparatus of a school algebra class, with operations such as addition and multiplication, methods to solve equations, and the like, to produce an algebra of thought. | |
| From: report of George Boole (The Laws of Thought [1854]) by Keith Devlin - Goodbye Descartes Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: The Stoics didn’t use any algebraic notation for their study of propositions, so Boole's idea launched full blown propositional logic, and the rest of modern logic followed. Nice one. |
| 7727 | Boole's notation can represent syllogisms and propositional arguments, but not both at once [Boole, by Weiner] |
| Full Idea: Boole introduced a new symbolic notation in which it was possible to represent both syllogisms and propositional arguments, ...but not both at once. | |
| From: report of George Boole (The Laws of Thought [1854], Ch.3) by Joan Weiner - Frege | |
| A reaction: How important is the development of symbolic notations for the advancement of civilisations? Is there a perfect notation, as used in logical heaven? |
| 8686 | Boole made logic more mathematical, with algebra, quantifiers and probability [Boole, by Friend] |
| Full Idea: Boole (followed by Frege) began to turn logic from a branch of philosophy into a branch of mathematics. He brought an algebraic approach to propositions, and introduced the notion of a quantifier and a type of probabilistic reasoning. | |
| From: report of George Boole (The Laws of Thought [1854], 3.2) by Michèle Friend - Introducing the Philosophy of Mathematics | |
| A reaction: The result was that logic not only became more mathematical, but also more specialised. We now have two types of philosopher, those steeped in mathematical logic and the rest. They don't always sing from the same songsheet. |
| 22277 | Boole's method was axiomatic, achieving economy, plus multiple interpretations [Boole, by Potter] |
| Full Idea: Boole's work was an early example of the axiomatic method, whereby intellectual economy is achieved by studying a set of axioms in which the primitive terms have multiple interpretations. | |
| From: report of George Boole (The Laws of Thought [1854]) by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 02 'Boole' | |
| A reaction: Unclear about this. I suppose the axioms are just syntactic, and a range of semantic interpretations can be applied. Are De Morgan's Laws interpretations, or implications of the syntactic axioms? The latter, I think. |
| 1605 | Reality can be viewed neutrally, or as an object of desire [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: There are two extremes: the Aristotelian views reality simply as reality, and the sophist or poet view reality only as an object of desire. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.199) |
| 1577 | Relativism is a disease which destroys the possibility of rational debate [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Relativism is disease, is pollution, for it negates the efficacy of logos. It destroys the possibility of a complete rational debate of fundamental questions. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.41) |
| 1578 | If relativism is the correct account of human values, then rhetoric is more important than reasoning [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: If relativism offers an accurate description of human values, then rhetoric replaces logos as the most fundamental human activity. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.47) | |
| A reaction: Or putting it another way, logos (reason) becomes meaningless. I suppose, though, that a relativist can conduct conditional reasoning (but must belief in some rules of reason). |
| 1596 | Reasoning aims not at the understanding of objects, but at the desire to give beautiful speeches [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Logos originates not in a cognitive capacity for the apprehension of objects, but in the desire to give birth to beautiful speeches. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.124) | |
| A reaction: It is hard for us to grasp this, but it might be quite life-enhancing if we could return to that old way of thought. |
| 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? |