48 ideas
| 19579 | The history of philosophy is just experiments in how to do philosophy [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The history of philosophy up to now is nothing but a history of attempts to discover how to do philosophy. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 01) | |
| A reaction: I take post-Fregean analytic metaphysics to be another experiment in how to do philosophy. I suspect that the experiment of Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida etc has been a failure. |
| 19583 | Philosophy only begins when it studies itself [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: All philosophy begins where philosophizing philosophises itself. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 79) | |
| A reaction: The modern trend for doing metaphilosophy strikes me as wholly admirable, though I suspect that the enemies of philosophy (who are legion) see it as a decadence. |
| 22026 | Philosophy is homesickness - the urge to be at home everywhere [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is actually homesickness - the urge to be everywhere at home. | |
| From: Novalis (General Draft [1799], 45) | |
| A reaction: The idea of home [heimat] is powerful in German culture. The point of romanticism was seen as largely concerning restless souls like Byron and his heroes, who do not feel at home. Hence ironic detachment. |
| 19588 | The highest aim of philosophy is to combine all philosophies into a unity [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: He attains the maximum of a philosopher who combines all philosophies into a single philosophy | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 31) | |
| A reaction: I have found the epigraph for my big book! Recently a few narrowly analytical philosophers have attempted big books about everything (Sider, Heil, Chalmers), and they get a huge round of applause from me. |
| 19598 | Philosophy relies on our whole system of learning, and can thus never be complete [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Now all learning is connected - thus philosophy will never be complete. Only in the complete system of all learning will philosophy be truly visible. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 39) | |
| A reaction: Philosophy is evidently the unifying subject, which reveals the point of all the other subjects. It matches my maxim that 'science is the servant of philosophy'. |
| 19586 | Philosophers feed on problems, hoping they are digestible, and spiced with paradox [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher lives on problems as the human being does on food. An insoluble problem is an indigestible food. What spice is to food, the paradoxical is to problems. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 09) | |
| A reaction: Novalis would presumably have disliked Hegel's dialectic, where the best food seems to be the indigestible. |
| 19587 | Philosophy aims to produce a priori an absolute and artistic world system [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy ...is the art of producing all our conceptions according to an absolute, artistic idea and of developing the thought of a world system a priori out of the depths of our spirit. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 19) | |
| A reaction: A lovely statement of the dream of building world systems by pure thought - embodying perfectly the view of philosophy despised by logical positivists and modern logical metaphysicians. The Novalis view will never die! I like 'artistic'. |
| 22353 | One view says objectivity is making a successful claim which captures the facts [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| Full Idea: One conception of objectivity is that the facts are 'out there', and it is the task of scientists to discover, analyze and sytematize them. 'Objective' is a success word: if a claim is objective, it successfully captures some feature of the world. | |
| From: Reiss,J/Spreger,J (Scientific Objectivity [2014], 2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to describe truth, rather than objectivity. You can establish accurate facts by subjective means. You can be fairly objective but miss the facts. Objectivity is a mode of thought, not a link to reality. |
| 22356 | An absolute scientific picture of reality must not involve sense experience, which is perspectival [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| Full Idea: Sense experience is necessarily perspectival, so to the extent to which scientific theories are to track the absolute conception [of reality], they must describe a world different from sense experience. | |
| From: Reiss,J/Spreger,J (Scientific Objectivity [2014], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: This is a beautifully simple and interesting point. Even when you are looking at a tree, to grasp its full reality you probably need to close your eyes (which is bad news for artists). |
| 22359 | Topic and application involve values, but can evidence and theory choice avoid them? [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| Full Idea: There may be values involved in the choice of a research problem, the gathering of evidence, the acceptance of a theory, and the application of results. ...The first and fourth do involve values, but what of the second and third? | |
| From: Reiss,J/Spreger,J (Scientific Objectivity [2014], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] My own view is that the danger of hidden distorting values has to be recognised, but it is then possible, by honest self-criticism, to reduce them to near zero. Sociological enquiry is different, of course. |
| 22360 | The Value-Free Ideal in science avoids contextual values, but embraces epistemic values [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| Full Idea: According to the Value-Free Ideal, scientific objectivity is characterised by absence of contextual values and by exclusive commitment to epistemic values in scientific reasoning. | |
| From: Reiss,J/Spreger,J (Scientific Objectivity [2014], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems appealing, because it concedes that we cannot be value-free, without suggesting that we are unavoidably swamped by values. The obvious question is whether the two types of value can be sharply distinguished. |
| 22362 | Value-free science needs impartial evaluation, theories asserting facts, and right motivation [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| Full Idea: Three components of value-free science are Impartiality (appraising theories only by epistemic scientific standards), Neutrality (the theories make no value statements), and Autonomy (the theory is motivated only by science). | |
| From: Reiss,J/Spreger,J (Scientific Objectivity [2014], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: [They are summarising Hugh Lacey, 1999, 2002] I'm not sure why the third criterion matters, if the first two are met. If a tobacco company commissions research on cigarettes, that doesn't necessarily make the findings false or prejudiced. |
| 22364 | Thermometers depend on the substance used, and none of them are perfect [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| Full Idea: Thermometers assume the length of the fluid or gas is a function of temperature, and different substances yield different results. It was decided that different thermometers using the same substance should match, and air was the best, but not perfect. | |
| From: Reiss,J/Spreger,J (Scientific Objectivity [2014], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: [summarising Hasok Chang's research] This is a salutary warning that instruments do not necessarily solve the problem of objectivity, though thermometers do seem to be impersonal, and offer relative accuracy (i.e. ranking temperatures). Cf breathalysers. |
| 19574 | If man sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself, by acting against his own convictions [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Man has his being in truth - if he sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself. Whoever betrays truth betrays himself. It is not a question of lying - but of acting against one's conviction. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 038) | |
| A reaction: Does he condone lying here, as long as you don't believe the lie? We would call it loss of integrity. |
| 19571 | Delusion and truth differ in their life functions [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The distinction between delusion and truth lies in the difference in their life functions. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 008) | |
| A reaction: Pure pragmatism, it seems. We might expect doubts about objective truth from a leading light of the Romantic movement. |
| 19597 | Logic (the theory of relations) should be applied to mathematics [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Ought not logic, the theory of relations, be applied to mathematics? | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 38) | |
| A reaction: Bolzano was 19 when his was written. I presume Novalis would have been excited by set theory (even though he was a hyper-romantic). |
| 19581 | A problem is a solid mass, which the mind must break up [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: A problem is a solid, synthetic mass which is broken up by means of the penetrating power of the mind. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 04) |
| 19584 | Whoever first counted to two must have seen the possibility of infinite counting [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Whoever first understood how to count to two, even if he still found it difficult to keep on counting, saw nonetheless the possibility of infinite counting according to the same laws. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 84) | |
| A reaction: Presumably it is the discerning of the 'law' which triggers this. Is the key concept 'addition' or 'successor' (or are those the same?). |
| 22025 | Novalis thought self-consciousness cannot disclose 'being', because we are temporal creatures [Novalis, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Novalis came to think that the kind of existence , or 'being', that is disclosed in self-consciousness remains, as it were, forever out of our reach because of the kind of temporal creatures we are. | |
| From: report of Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 06 | |
| A reaction: It looks here as if Novalis kicked Heidegger's Dasein into the long grass before it even got started, but maybe they have different notions of 'being', with Novalis seeking timeless being, and Heidegger, influenced by Bergson, accepting temporality. |
| 19575 | Refinement of senses increasingly distinguishes individuals [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The more our senses are refined, the more capable they become of distinguishing between individuals. The highest sense would be the highest receptivity to particularity in human nature. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 072) | |
| A reaction: I adore this idea!! It goes into the collection of support I am building for individual essences, against the absurd idea of kinds as essences (when they are actually categorisations). It also accompanies particularism in ethics. |
| 7630 | Ryle's dichotomy between knowing how and knowing that is too simplistic [Maund] |
| Full Idea: There is a convincing claim that we need to leave behind Ryle's dichotomy between knowing how and knowing that as being too simplistic. | |
| From: Barry Maund (Perception [2003], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: [John Campbell is mentioned as source of this idea] I find this proposal immediately appealing. I was taught that riding a bicycle shows the division, as hardly anyone knows the theory, but I am sure children need some propositional information. |
| 22067 | Poetry is true idealism, and the self-consciousness of the universe [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Poetry is true idealism - contemplation of the world as contemplation of a large mind - self-consciousness of the universe. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], vol 3 p.640), quoted by Ernst Behler - Early German Romanticism | |
| A reaction: It looks like the step from Fichte's idealism to the Absolute is poetry, which embraces the ultimate Spinozan substance through imagination. Or something... |
| 7632 | Perception is sensation-then-concept, or direct-concepts, or sensation-saturated-in-concepts [Maund] |
| Full Idea: Three forms of (cognitive) direct realism are: two stages - non-conceptual sensory experience, then a non-sensory conceptual state; directly acquiring non-sensuous conceptual states; and sensuous states saturated with concepts. | |
| From: Barry Maund (Perception [2003], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: [First: Reid, Dretske, Evans, Sellars. Second: Armstrong, Heil, Pitcher, Clark. Third: Kant, McDowell, Strawson, McGinn, Searle]. I find the first one plausible, because of the ambiguity in language, and because unusual experiences separate them. |
| 7635 | Sense-data have an epistemological purpose (foundations) and a metaphysical purpose (explanation) [Maund] |
| Full Idea: Sense-data have an epistemological purpose (to serve as foundations on which the edifice of knowledge is to be constructed), and a metaphysical purpose (to provide an accurate account of the phenomenology of perceptual experience). | |
| From: Barry Maund (Perception [2003], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: This is very important, because there is a real danger (e.g. in Russell) that the epistemological convenience of sense-data for giving reliability in knowledge means that we are too quick in making the assumption that they actually exist. |
| 7638 | One thesis says we are not aware of qualia, but only of objects and their qualities [Maund] |
| Full Idea: The representationalist/intentionalist thesis about perception is that we are not aware of the intrinsic qualities of experience in normal perception; we are instead aware of those objects and their qualities that are specified in the content. | |
| From: Barry Maund (Perception [2003], Ch. 9) | |
| A reaction: If secondary qualities are in the mind, not in objects, how come people always thought they were in objects? Answer: because this thesis is right? The primary mode of the mind is projected outwards, though we can introspect about colours. [Dretske] |
| 7642 | The Myth of the Given claims that thought is rationally supported by non-conceptual experiences [Maund] |
| Full Idea: The so-called 'myth of the given' is the view that conceptual content can be rationally supported by experiences construed as states with non-conceptual content. | |
| From: Barry Maund (Perception [2003], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: The myth is attacked by Sellars and McDowell, the latter claiming that concepts must be embedded in the experiences. Maybe only realism is required to make the Given work. The experiences are definitely of something, and off we go... |
| 7640 | Mountains are adverbial modifications of the earth, but still have object-characteristics [Maund] |
| Full Idea: Metaphysically, mountains are only adverbial modifications of the Earth's belt. They have no existence independent of being part of the earth. Yet for all that, they have some rather strong 'object'-characteristics. | |
| From: Barry Maund (Perception [2003], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: The point being that you don't give up all the advantages of a sense-data view if you switch to adverbialism. I'm not convinced by the analogy, but we can only be aware of adverbial qualities if they have causal powers. |
| 7641 | Adverbialism tries to avoid sense-data and preserve direct realism [Maund] |
| Full Idea: The two primary motivations of the adverbialist analysis are thought to be to avoid commitment to sensory particulars such as sense-data, and to allow us to hold on to a version of direct realism. | |
| From: Barry Maund (Perception [2003], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: Maund says that the adverbialist's fears about indirect/representative theories are unfounded. My feeling is that neither account will do the job properly once we get a better account of consciousness. Maybe adverbialism is only for secondary qualities. |
| 19572 | Experiences tests reason, and reason tests experience [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Experience is the test of the rational - and vice versa. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 010) | |
| A reaction: A wonderful remark. Surely we can't ignore our need to test claims of pure logic by filling in the variables with concrete instances, to assess validity? And philosophy without examples is doomed to be abstract waffle. Coherence is the combined aim. |
| 19590 | Empiricists are passive thinkers, given their philosophy by the external world and fate [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: An empiricist is one whose way of thinking is an effect of the external world and of fate - the passive thinker - to whom his philosophy is given. | |
| From: Novalis (Teplitz Fragments [1798], 33) | |
| A reaction: Novalis goes on to enthuse about 'magical idealism', so he rejects empiricism. This is an early attack on the Myth of the Given, found in Sellars and McDowell. |
| 22357 | The 'experimenter's regress' says success needs reliability, which is only tested by success [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| Full Idea: The 'experimenter's regress' says that to know whether a result is correct, one needs to know whether the apparatus is reliable. But one doesn't know whether the apparatus is reliable unless one knows that it produces correct results ...and so on. | |
| From: Reiss,J/Spreger,J (Scientific Objectivity [2014], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: [H. Collins (1985), a sociologist] I take this to be a case of the triumphant discovery of a vicious circle which destroys all knowledge turning out to be a benign circle. We build up a coherent relationship between reliable results and good apparatus. |
| 19594 | General statements about nature are not valid [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: General statements are not valid in the study of nature. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 17) | |
| A reaction: This is his striking obsession with the particularity and fine detail of nature. Alexander von Humbolt was exploring nature in S.America in this year. It sounds wrong about physics, but possibly right about biology. |
| 22365 | The Bayesian approach is explicitly subjective about probabilities [Reiss/Sprenger] |
| Full Idea: The Bayesian approach is outspokenly subjective: probability is used for quantifying a scientist's subjective degree of belief in a particular hypothesis. ...It just provides sound rules for learning from experience. | |
| From: Reiss,J/Spreger,J (Scientific Objectivity [2014], 4.2) |
| 19591 | Desire for perfection is an illness, if it turns against what is imperfect [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: An absolute drive toward perfection and completeness is an illness, as soon as it shows itself to be destructive and averse toward the imperfect, the incomplete. | |
| From: Novalis (General Draft [1799], 33) | |
| A reaction: Deep and true! Novalis seems to be a particularist - hanging on to the fine detail of life, rather than being immersed in the theory. These are the philosophers who also turn to literature. |
| 19596 | The whole body is involved in the formation of thoughts [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: In the formation of thoughts all parts of the body seem to me to be working together. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 20) | |
| A reaction: I can only think that Spinoza must be behind this thought, or La Mettrie. It seems a strikingly unusual intuition for its time, when almost everyone takes a spiritual sort of dualism for granted. |
| 19573 | The seat of the soul is where our inner and outer worlds interpenetrate [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The seat of the soul is the point where the inner and the outer worlds touch. Wherever they penetrate each other - it is there at every point of penetration. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 020) | |
| A reaction: I surmise that Spinoza's dual-aspect monism is behind this interesting remark. See the related idea from Schopenhauer. |
| 7637 | Thought content is either satisfaction conditions, or exercise of concepts [Maund, by PG] |
| Full Idea: The content of thought can either be expressed as satisfaction conditions (e.g. truth-conditions for beliefs), or as the exercise of at least two concepts. | |
| From: report of Barry Maund (Perception [2003], Ch. 8) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: I think I favour the first view, because not all conjunctions of concepts would count as thoughts (e.g. rhubarb-plus-contradiction). A bunch of concepts becomes a thought when it connects in some way to reality? |
| 19577 | Everything is a chaotic unity, then we abstract, then we reunify the world into a free alliance [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Before abstraction everything is one - but one as chaos is - after abstraction everything is again unified - but in a free alliance of independent, self-determined beings. A crowd has become a society - a chaos is transformed into a manifold world. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 094) | |
| A reaction: Personally I take (unfashionably) psychological abstraction to one of the key foundations of human thought, so I love this idea, which gives a huge picture of how the abstracting mind relates to reality. |
| 19585 | Every person has his own language [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Every person has his own language. Language is the expression of the spirit. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 91) | |
| A reaction: Nice to see someone enthusiastically affirming what was later famously denied, and maybe even disproved. |
| 19578 | Only self-illuminated perfect individuals are beautiful [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Everything beautiful is a self-illuminated, perfect individual. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 101) | |
| A reaction: It is a commonplace to describe something beautiful as being 'perfect'. Unfinished masterpieces are interesting exceptions. Are only 'individuals' beautiful? Is unity a necessary condition of beauty? Bad art fails to be self-illuminated. |
| 19582 | Morality and philosophy are mutually dependent [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Without philosophy there is no true morality, and without morality no philosophy. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 21) | |
| A reaction: Challenging! Maybe unthinking people drift in a sea of vague untethered morality, and people who seem to have a genuine moral strength are always rooted in some sort of philosophy. Maybe. Is the passion for philosophy a moral passion? |
| 22027 | Life isn't given to us like a novel - we write the novel [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 99) | |
| A reaction: The roots of existentialism are in the Romantic movement. Sartre seems to have taken this idea literally. |
| 19589 | The whole point of a monarch is that we accept them as a higher-born, ideal person [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The distinguishing character of the monarchy lies precisely in the fact of belief in a higher-born person, of voluntary acceptance of an ideal person. I cannot choose a leader from among my peers. | |
| From: Novalis (Fath and Love, or the King and Queen [1798], 18) | |
| A reaction: Novalis was passionately devoted to the new king and queen of Prussia, only a few years after the French Revolution. This attitude seems to me unchanged among monarchists in present day Britain. Genetics has undermined 'higher-born'. |
| 19580 | If the pupil really yearns for the truth, they only need a hint [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: If a pupil genuinely desires truth is requires only a hint to show him how to find what he is seeking. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments I [1798], 02) | |
| A reaction: The tricky job for the teacher or supervisor is assessing whether the pupil genuinely desires truth, or needs motivating. |
| 19593 | Persons are shaped by a life history; splendid persons are shaped by world history [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: What is it that shapes a person if not his life history? And in the same way a splendid person is shaped by nothing other than world history. Many people live better in the past and in the future than in the present. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 15) | |
| A reaction: Clearly there is a lot to be said for splendid people who live entirely in the present (such as jazz musicians). Some people do have an awesomely wide historical perspective on their immediate lives. Palaeontology is not the master discipline though! |
| 19595 | Nature is a whole, and its individual parts cannot be wholly understood [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Nature is a whole - in which each part in itself can never be wholly understood. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 18) | |
| A reaction: This doesn't seem right when studying some item in a laboratory, but it seems undeniable when you consider the history and future of each item. |
| 19592 | The basic relations of nature are musical [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Musical relations seem to me to be actually the basic relations of nature. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 10) | |
| A reaction: Novalis shows no signs of being a pythagorean, and then suddenly comes out with this. I suppose if you love music, this thought should float into your mind at regular intervals, because the power of music is so strong. Does he mean ratios? |
| 19576 | Religion needs an intermediary, because none of us can connect directly to a godhead [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Nothing is more indispensable for true religious feeling than an intermediary - which connects us to the godhead. The human being is absolutely incapable of sustaining an immediate relation with this. | |
| From: Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 073) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be a defence of priests and organised religion, and an implied attack on protestants who give centrality to private prayer and conscience. |