8 ideas
| 21238 | Later phenomenologists tried hard to incorporate social relationships [Bakewell] |
| Full Idea: Ever since Husserl, phenomenologists and existentialists had been trying to stretch the definition of existence to incorporate our social lives and relationships. | |
| From: Sarah Bakewell (At the Existentialist Café [2016], 08) | |
| A reaction: I see a parallel move in Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument. Husserl's later work seems to have been along those lines. Putnam's Twin Earth too. |
| 21237 | Phenomenology begins from the immediate, rather than from axioms and theories [Bakewell] |
| Full Idea: Traditional philosophy often started with abstract axioms or theories, but the German phenomenologists went straight for life as they experienced it, moment to moment. | |
| From: Sarah Bakewell (At the Existentialist Café [2016], 01) | |
| A reaction: Bakewell gives this as the gist of what Aron said to Sartre in 1933, providing the bridge from phenomenology to existentialism. The obvious thought is that everybody outside philosophy starts from immediate experience, so why is this philosophy? |
| 2170 | Homer does not distinguish between soul and body [Homer, by Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: Homer's descriptions of people did without a dualistic distinction between soul and body. | |
| From: report of Homer (The Iliad [c.850 BCE]) by Bernard Williams - Shame and Necessity II - p.23 |
| 2171 | The 'will' doesn't exist; there is just conclusion, then action [Homer, by Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: Homer left out another mental action lying between coming to a conclusion and acting on it; and he did well, since there is no such action, and the idea is the invention of bad philosophy. | |
| From: report of Homer (The Iliad [c.850 BCE]) by Bernard Williams - Shame and Necessity II - p.37 | |
| A reaction: This is a characteristically empiricist view, which is found in Hobbes. The 'will' seems to have a useful role in folk psychology. We can at least say that coming to a conclusion that I should act, and then actually acting, are not the same thing. |
| 21819 | Plato says the Good produces the Intellectual-Principle, which in turn produces the Soul [Homer, by Plotinus] |
| Full Idea: In Plato the order of generation is from the Good, the Intellectual-Principle; from the Intellectual-Principle, the Soul. | |
| From: report of Homer (The Iliad [c.850 BCE], 509b) by Plotinus - The Enneads 5.1.08 | |
| A reaction: The doctrine of Plotinus merely echoes Plato, in that case, except that the One replaces the Form of the Good. Does this mean that what is first in Plotinus is less morally significant, and more concerned with reason and being? |
| 11388 | Let there be one ruler [Homer] |
| Full Idea: The rule of many is not good; let there be one ruler. | |
| From: Homer (The Iliad [c.850 BCE], 2.204), quoted by Vassilis Politis - Aristotle and the Metaphysics 8.9 | |
| A reaction: [Quoted by Aristotle at Metaphysics 1076a04] |
| 14829 | Homer so enjoys the company of the gods that he must have been deeply irreligious [Homer, by Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Homer is so at home among his gods, and takes such delight in them as a poet, that he surely must have been deeply irreligious. | |
| From: report of Homer (The Iliad [c.850 BCE]) by Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human 125 | |
| A reaction: Blake made a similar remark about where the true allegiance of Milton lay in 'Paradise Lost'. |
| 1513 | The Egyptians were the first to say the soul is immortal and reincarnated [Herodotus] |
| Full Idea: The Egyptians were the first to claim that the soul of a human being is immortal, and that each time the body dies the soul enters another creature just as it is being born. | |
| From: Herodotus (The Histories [c.435 BCE], 2.123.2) |