10 ideas
| 9777 | Kant was the first philosopher [Zizek] |
| Full Idea: From today's perspective it is in a way clear that Kant was the first philosopher. Pre-Kantian philosophy cannot think in his transcendental aspect. | |
| From: Slavoj Zizek (Conversations, with Glyn Daly [2004], §1) | |
| A reaction: It is probably equally plausible to say that Kant was the last philosopher. More thought-provoking than true. |
| 9778 | There is no dialogue in philosophy [Zizek] |
| Full Idea: I think I truly became a philosopher when I realised that there is no dialogue in philosophy. Plato's dialogues are clearly fakes, with one guy talking most of the time. ...Philosophy as an interdisciplinary project is the ultimate nightmare. | |
| From: Slavoj Zizek (Conversations, with Glyn Daly [2004], §1) | |
| A reaction: This goes against all my prejudices in favour of teamwork and mutual criticism (e.g. Idea 1576), but I was a bit shaken by it, and have begun to wonder whether I must just face up to the solitary nature of the enterprise. |
| 9779 | Philosophy is transcendental questioning (not supporting science or constructing ontology) [Zizek] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy can no longer play its traditional roles, giving foundations to science, or constructing general ontology. It should simply fulfil its task of transcendental questioning. | |
| From: Slavoj Zizek (Conversations, with Glyn Daly [2004], §2) | |
| A reaction: I remain unsure what is being recommended, unless it is for philosophy to start asking questions just at the point where everyone else gives up. |
| 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. |
| 8511 | Stout first explicitly proposed that properties and relations are particulars [Stout,GF, by Campbell,K] |
| Full Idea: In modern times, it was G.F. Stout who first explicitly made the proposal that properties and relations are as particular as the substances that they qualify. | |
| From: report of G.F. Stout (The Nature of Universals and Propositions [1923]) by Keith Campbell - The Metaphysic of Abstract Particulars §1 | |
| A reaction: Note that relations will have to be tropes, as well as properties. Williams wants tropes to be parts of objects, but that will be tricky with relations. If you place two objects on a table, how does the 'to the left of' trope come into existence? |
| 9780 | Consciousness is a malfunction of evolution [Zizek] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is a kind of mistake, a malfunction of evolution, and out of this mistake a miracle occurred. | |
| From: Slavoj Zizek (Conversations, with Glyn Daly [2004], §2) | |
| A reaction: Rather hard to prove, but actually quite an uplifting thought. If consciousness only evolved so that we could navigate and defend ourselves, our 'higher' activities seem irrelevant. But Zizek's view means we can make them central. Nice. |
| 9781 | Tolerance and love are strategies to avoid encountering our neighbours [Zizek] |
| Full Idea: All this preaching about tolerance, love for one's neighbour and so on, are ultimately strategies to avoid encountering the neighbour. | |
| From: Slavoj Zizek (Conversations, with Glyn Daly [2004], §2) | |
| A reaction: I have begun to wonder whether some such motivation underlies the modern obsession with raising huge sums for charity. |