23 ideas
6222 | If a decision is in accord with right reason, everyone can agree with it [Cumberland] |
Full Idea: No decision can be in accord with right reason unless all can agree on it. | |
From: Richard Cumberland (De Legibus Naturae [1672], Ch.V.XLVI) | |
A reaction: Personally I think anyone who disagrees with this should get out of philosophy (and into sociology, fantasy fiction, ironic game-playing, crime…). Of course 'can' agree is not the same as 'will' agree. You must have faith that good reasons are persuasive. |
20339 | Classes rarely share properties with their members - unlike universals and types [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: Classes can share properties with their members (e.g. the class of big things is big), but this is very rare. ....In the case of both universals and types, there will be shared properties. Red things can be exhilarating, and so can redness. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 92) | |
A reaction: 'Exhilarating' is an extrinsic property, so not the best illustration. This is interesting, but would need checking with a wide range of examples. (Too busy for that right now) |
604 | Knowledge is mind and knowing 'cohabiting' [Lycophron, by Aristotle] |
Full Idea: Lycophron has it that knowledge is the 'cohabitation' (rather than participation or synthesis) of knowing and the soul. | |
From: report of Lycophron (fragments/reports [c.375 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 1045b | |
A reaction: This sounds like a rather passive and inert relationship. Presumably knowing something implies the possibility of acting on it. |
20338 | We often treat a type as if it were a sort of token [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: Much of the time we think and talk of a type as though it were itself a kind of token. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 35) | |
A reaction: A helpful way of connecting what I call 'objectification' to the more conventional modern philosophical vocabulary. Thus I might claim that beauty is superior to truth, as if they were two tokens. |
20342 | Interpretation is performance for some arts, and critical for all arts [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: Performative interpretation occurs only with certain arts, but critical intepretation pertains to all. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 38) | |
A reaction: Fairly obvious, but this is the first point to make about the concept of 'interpretation'. Does the word in fact have two meanings? Or do I perform a painting when I look carefully at it? |
20343 | A love of nature must precede a love of art [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: We could not have a feeling for the beauties of art unless we had been correspondingly moved in front of nature. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 43) | |
A reaction: Wollheim offers this in defence of Kant's view, without necessarily agreeing. Similarly one could hardly care for fictional characters, but not for real people. So the aesthetic attitude may arise from life, rather than from art. Is art hence unimportant? |
20348 | A criterion of identity for works of art would be easier than a definition [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: Maybe, rather than defining art, it would be more fruitful, and more realistic, to seek a general method of identifying works of art. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 60) | |
A reaction: The whole enterprise is ruined by Marcel Duchamp! I'm more interested in identifying or defining good art. |
20347 | If beauty needs organisation, then totally simple things can't be beautiful [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: It is said that beauty cannot consist in organisation because, if it did, we would not be able to predicate beauty of totally simple objects. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 59) | |
A reaction: [He says this idea originates in Plotinus] I'm struggling to think of an example of something which is 'totally' simple and beautiful. Maybe a patch of colour like the breast of a bullfinch? |
20345 | Some say art must have verbalisable expression, and others say the opposite! [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: The view that a work of art expresses nothing if it can't be put into other words ...is reduced by the view that a work of art has no value if what it expresses or says can be put into (other) words. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 49) | |
A reaction: I prefer the second view. Poetry is what is lost in translation. Good art actually seems to evoke emotions which one virtually never feels in ordinary life. But how could that be possible? What are those emotions doing there? |
20331 | It is claimed that the expressive properties of artworks are non-physical [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: The argument that works of art have properties that physical objects could not have characteristically concentrates on the expressive properties of works of art. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 10) | |
A reaction: Since the idea of an object having non-physical properties strikes me as ridiculous, this gets off to a bad start. If artworks are abstract objects, then all of their properties are non-physical. |
20336 | Style can't be seen directly within a work, but appreciation needs a grasp of style [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: 'Style' would seem to be a concept that cannot be applied to a work solely on the basis of what is represented and yet it is also essential to a proper understanding or appreciation of a work. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 32) | |
A reaction: Sounds right. One long held musical note creates an expectation which depends on the presumed style of the piece of music. A single bar from a piece may well not exhibit its characteristic style. |
20337 | The traditional view is that knowledge of its genre to essential to appreciating literature [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: From Aristotle onwards it has been a tenet of the traditional rhetoric that the proper understanding of a literary work involves the location of it in the correct genre, that is, as drama, epic or lyric. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 32) | |
A reaction: Walton argues this persuasively. I've seen the climax of a Jacobean tragedy ruined by laughter from the audience. Genre dictates appropriate responses, so it is a communal concept. |
20333 | If artworks are not physical objects, they are either ideal entities, or collections of phenomena [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: In denying that works of art are physical objects, one theory (the 'ideal') withdraws them altogether from experience, and a second theory ('phenomenal') pins them too it inescapably and at all points. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 21) | |
A reaction: I incline towards them being transient ideals, created by human minds. As with so much, we idealise and objectify them as 'works', and abstract their image from the instance(s) we encounter. |
20334 | The ideal theory says art is an intuition, shaped by a particular process, and presented in public [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: The ideal theory of Croce and Collingwood says art is first an inner intuition or expression of the artist, resulting from a particular process of organisation and unification, which can be externalised in public form. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 22) | |
A reaction: [compressed] As stated this doesn't sound very controversial or 'ideal'. I take it the theory is intended to be more platonist than this expression of it suggests. I think the idea that it is an 'expression' of the artist is wrong. |
20335 | The ideal theory of art neglects both the audience and the medium employed [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: Because the ideal theory makes a work of art inner or mental, the link between the artist and the audience has been severed .....and it also totally ignores the significance of the medium. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 23) | |
A reaction: Emily Dickinson had virtually no audience for her poetry. The medium used to perform Bach's 'Art of Fugue' seems unimportant. For paintings of painterly painters paint matters. For some visual art many different media will suffice. |
20340 | A musical performance has virtually the same features as the piece of music [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: With the usual reservations, there is nothing that can be predicated of a performance of a piece of music that could not also be predicated of that piece of music itself. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 37) | |
A reaction: He offers this as evidence that it fits the performance being a token, and music (and all other art) being a type. There are quite a few 'reservations'. Music too difficult to perform. Great music always badly performed. |
20341 | An interpretation adds further properties to the generic piece of music [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: Interpretation may be regarded as the production of a token that has properties in excess of those of the type. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 37) | |
A reaction: I suppose so. If you play accurately everything that is written in the score, then anything else has to be an addition. If you play less than the score, you aren't quite playing that piece of music. |
20332 | A drawing only represents Napoleon if the artist intended it to [Wollheim] |
Full Idea: It is necessary, if a drawing is to represent Napoleon, that the draughtsman should intend it to be Napoleon. | |
From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 13) | |
A reaction: Does a perfect and intended representation of a person also count as a representation of the person's identical twin? The families of both might well order copies. |
6217 | Natural law is supplied to the human mind by reality and human nature [Cumberland] |
Full Idea: Some truths of natural law, concerning guides to moral good and evil, and duties not laid down by civil law and government, are necessarily supplied ot the human mind by the nature of things and of men. | |
From: Richard Cumberland (De Legibus Naturae [1672], Ch.I.I) | |
A reaction: I agree that some moral truths have the power of self-evidence. If you say they are built into the mind, we now ask what did the building, and evolution is the only answer, and hence we distance ourselves from the truths, seeing them as strategies. |
6221 | If there are different ultimate goods, there will be conflicting good actions, which is impossible [Cumberland] |
Full Idea: If there be posited different ultimate ends, whose causes are opposed to each other, then there will be truly good actions likewise opposed to each other, which is impossible. | |
From: Richard Cumberland (De Legibus Naturae [1672], Ch.V.XVI) | |
A reaction: A very interesting argument for there being one good rather than many, and an argument which I don't recall in any surviving Greek text. A response might be to distinguish between what is 'right' and what is 'good'. See David Ross. |
6218 | The happiness of individuals is linked to the happiness of everyone (which is individuals taken together) [Cumberland] |
Full Idea: The happiness of each person cannot be separated from the happiness of all, because the whole is no different from the parts taken together. | |
From: Richard Cumberland (De Legibus Naturae [1672], Ch.I.VI) | |
A reaction: Sounds suspiciously like the fallacy of composition (Idea 6219). An objection to utilitarianism is its assumption that a group of people have a 'total happiness' that is different from their individual states. Still, Cumberland is on to utilitarianism. |
6220 | The happiness of all contains the happiness of each, and promotes it [Cumberland] |
Full Idea: The common happiness of all contains the greatest happiness for each, and most effectively promotes it. …There is no path leading anyone to his own happiness, other than the path which leads all to the common happiness. | |
From: Richard Cumberland (De Legibus Naturae [1672], Ch.I.VI) | |
A reaction: I take this as a revolutionary idea, which leads to utilitarianism. It is doing what seemed to the Greeks unthinkable, which is combining hedonism with altruism. There is no proof for it, but it is a wonderful clarion call for building a civil society. |
6216 | Natural law is immutable truth giving moral truths and duties independent of society [Cumberland] |
Full Idea: Natural law is certain propositions of immutable truth, which guide voluntary actions about the choice of good and avoidance of evil, and which impose an obligation to act, even without regard to civil laws, and ignoring compacts of governments. | |
From: Richard Cumberland (De Legibus Naturae [1672], Ch.I.I) | |
A reaction: Not a popular view, but I am sympathetic. If you are in a foreign country and find a person lying in pain, there is a terrible moral deficiency in anyone who just ignores such a thing. No legislation can take away a person's right of self-defence. |