15 ideas
20955 | Art can make reason more all-inclusive, by articulating what seemed inexpressible [Bowie] |
Full Idea: The early German Romantics argued that art pointed to a more all-inclusive conception of reason, which can offer ways of articulating what is not conceptually accessible. | |
From: Andrew Bowie (Introduction to German Philosophy [2003], 5 'Reason') | |
A reaction: [This is Novalis, F.Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Hölderlin] I'm in favour of expanding reason, to include assessment of situations and coherence, rather than just stepwise reasoning. Not sure that art 'articulates' something new. |
16062 | A necessary relation between fact-levels seems to be a further irreducible fact [Lynch/Glasgow] |
Full Idea: It seems unavoidable that the facts about logically necessary relations between levels of facts are themselves logically distinct further facts, irreducible to the microphysical facts. | |
From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C) | |
A reaction: I'm beginning to think that rejecting every theory of reality that is proposed by carefully exposing some infinite regress hidden in it is a rather lazy way to do philosophy. Almost as bad as rejecting anything if it can't be defined. |
16061 | If some facts 'logically supervene' on some others, they just redescribe them, adding nothing [Lynch/Glasgow] |
Full Idea: Logical supervenience, restricted to individuals, seems to imply strong reduction. It is said that where the B-facts logically supervene on the A-facts, the B-facts simply re-describe what the A-facts describe, and the B-facts come along 'for free'. | |
From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C) | |
A reaction: This seems to be taking 'logically' to mean 'analytically'. Presumably an entailment is logically supervenient on its premisses, and may therefore be very revealing, even if some people think such things are analytic. |
16060 | Nonreductive materialism says upper 'levels' depend on lower, but don't 'reduce' [Lynch/Glasgow] |
Full Idea: The root intuition behind nonreductive materialism is that reality is composed of ontologically distinct layers or levels. …The upper levels depend on the physical without reducing to it. | |
From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], B) | |
A reaction: A nice clear statement of a view which I take to be false. This relationship is the sort of thing that drives people fishing for an account of it to use the word 'supervenience', which just says two things seem to hang out together. Fluffy materialism. |
16064 | The hallmark of physicalism is that each causal power has a base causal power under it [Lynch/Glasgow] |
Full Idea: Jessica Wilson (1999) says what makes physicalist accounts different from emergentism etc. is that each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is numerically identical with a causal power associated with its base property. | |
From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], n 11) | |
A reaction: Hence the key thought in so-called (serious, rather than self-evident) 'emergentism' is so-called 'downward causation', which I take to be an idle daydream. |
16698 | Days exist, and yet they seem to be made up of parts which don't exist [Burley] |
Full Idea: I grant that a successive being is composed out of non-beings, as is clear of a day, which is composed of non-entities. Some part of this day is past and some future, and yet this day is. | |
From: Walter Burley (Commentary on 'Physics' [1325], III text 11,f.65rb), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 18.3 | |
A reaction: The dilemma of Aristotle over time infected the scholastic attempt to give an account of successive entities. A day is a wonderfully elusive entity for a metaphysician. |
16690 | Unlike permanent things, successive things cannot exist all at once [Burley] |
Full Idea: This is the difference between permanent and successive things: that a permanent thing exists all at once, or at least can exist all at once, whereas it is incompatible with a successive thing to exist all at once. | |
From: Walter Burley (Commentary on 'Physics' [1325], III txt 11,f.65rb), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 18.1 | |
A reaction: Permanent things sound like what are now called 'three-dimensional' objects, but scholastic 'entia successiva' are not the same as spacetime 'worms' or collections of temporal stages. |
22049 | Transcendental idealism aims to explain objectivity through subjectivity [Bowie] |
Full Idea: The aim of transcendental idealism is to give a basis for objectivity in terms of subjectivity. | |
From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 1) | |
A reaction: Hume used subjectivity to undermine the findings of objectivity. There was then no return to naive objectivity. Kant's aim then was to thwart global scepticism. Post-Kantians feared that he had failed. |
20950 | German Idealism says our thinking and nature have the same rational structure [Bowie] |
Full Idea: German Idealism aims to demonstrate that our thinking relates to a nature which is intelligibly structured in the same way as our thinking is structured. | |
From: Andrew Bowie (Introduction to German Philosophy [2003], 3 'Limits') | |
A reaction: Now that's an idealism I might buy into. Frege thought his logic was mapping rational reality. My angle is that we are a product of this 'reality', so we should expect our thinking to be similarly structured. Reason is derived from nature. |
22055 | The Idealists saw the same unexplained spontaneity in Kant's judgements and choices [Bowie] |
Full Idea: The Idealist saw in Kant that knowledge, which depends on the spontaneity of judgement, and self-determined spontaneous action, can be seen as sharing the same source, which is not accessible to scientific investigation. | |
From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010]) | |
A reaction: This is the 'spontaneity' of judgements and choices which was seen as the main idea in Kant. It inspired romantic individualism. The judgements are the rule-based application of concepts. |
22054 | German Idealism tried to stop oppositions of appearances/things and receptivity/spontaneity [Bowie] |
Full Idea: A central aim of German Idealism is to overcome Kant's oppositions between appearances and thing in themselves, and between receptivity and spontaneity. | |
From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 2) | |
A reaction: I have the impression that there were two strategies: break down the opposition within the self (Fichte), or break down the opposition in the world (Spinozism). |
22056 | Crucial to Idealism is the idea of continuity between receptivity and spontaneous judgement [Bowie] |
Full Idea: A crucial idea for German Idealism (from Hamann) is that apparently passive receptivity and active spontaneity are in fact different degrees of the same 'activity, and the gap between subject and world can be closed. | |
From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 3) | |
A reaction: The 'passive' bit seems to be Hume's 'impressions', which are Kant's 'intuitions', which need 'spontaneous' interpretation to become experiences. Critics of Kant said this implied a dualism. |
16719 | The primary qualities are mixed to cause secondary qualities [Burley] |
Full Idea: Secondary qualities are caused by a mixture of primary qualities. | |
From: Walter Burley (De formis [1330], pars post p.65), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 21.2 | |
A reaction: Like paint. He probably has in mind hot, cold, wet and dry as the primary qualities. |
20942 | Nazis think race predetermines the self [Bowie] |
Full Idea: The Nazi idea is that the self is predetermined primarily by its race. | |
From: Andrew Bowie (Introduction to German Philosophy [2003], Intro) | |
A reaction: I suspect that I occasionally encounter this view, in very patriotic people. But then you meet people who feeling that their self is mainly determined by support of a football team. Note, though, 'pre-'determined. Hegel makes this idea possible? |
20946 | Rhetoric is built into language, so it cannot be stripped from philosophy [Bowie] |
Full Idea: The attempt to rid philosophy of rhetoric falls prey precisely to that fact that what is involved in rhetoric is inherent in what is built into all natural languages by their genesis in the real historical world. | |
From: Andrew Bowie (Introduction to German Philosophy [2003], 2 'Hamann') | |
A reaction: Rhetoric can range from charming to bullying, and it is the latter which is the problem. The underlying issue is dogma versus dialectic. Some analytic philosophers have a good shot at being non-rhetorical. |