46 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'. |
19504 | My modus ponens might be your modus tollens [Pritchard,D] |
Full Idea: One philosopher's modus ponens is another philosopher's modus tollens. | |
From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 3.§2) | |
A reaction: [Anyone know the originator of this nice thought?] You say A is true, and A proves B, so B is true. I reply that if A proves something as daft as B, then so much the worse for A. Ain't it the truth? |
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. |
16627 | If you remove the accidents from a horse and a lion, the intellect can't tell them apart [Francis of Marchia] |
Full Idea: Let all accidents be removed from a lion and a horse. Nothing remains in the intellect to distinguish them. We distinguish a lion and a horse only by analogy to the accidents proper to each. The intellect does not have an essential concept of either one. | |
From: Francis of Marchia (Commentary on Sentences [1330], I.3.1), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 07.3 | |
A reaction: What a very nice thought experiment, and very convincing about how the mind perceives such things. But we don't believe horse and lion just consists of the surface properties of them which we experience. |
19503 | An improbable lottery win can occur in a nearby possible world [Pritchard,D] |
Full Idea: Low probability events such as lottery wins can occur in nearby possible worlds. | |
From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 2.n2) | |
A reaction: This seems to ruin any chance of mapping probabilities and counterfactuals in the neat model of nested possible worlds (like an onion). [Lewis must have thought of this, surely? - postcards, please] |
19505 | Moore begs the question, or just offers another view, or uses 'know' wrongly [Pritchard,D, by PG] |
Full Idea: The three main objections to Moore's common-sense refutation of scepticism is that it either begs the question, or it just offers a rival view instead of a refutation, or it uses 'know' in a conversationally inappropriate way. | |
From: report of Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 3.§2) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
A reaction: [I deserve applause for summarising two pages of Pritchard's wordy stuff so neatly] |
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... |
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. |
19499 | We can have evidence for seeing a zebra, but no evidence for what is entailed by that [Pritchard,D] |
Full Idea: The closure principle forces us to regard Zula as knowing that what she is looking at is not a cleverly disguised mule, and yet she doesn't appear to have any supporting evidence for this knowledge. | |
From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 2.§3) | |
A reaction: [Zula observes a zebra in the zoo] Entailment is a different type of justification from perception. If we add fallibilism to the mix, then fallibility can increase as we pursue a string of entailments. But proper logic, of course, should not be fallible. |
19500 | Favouring: an entailment will give better support for the first belief than reason to deny the second [Pritchard,D] |
Full Idea: The Favouring Principle says that if S knows two things, and that the first entails the second, then S has better evidence in support of her belief in the first than she has for denying the second. | |
From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 2.§3) | |
A reaction: [his version is full of Greek letters, but who wants that stuff?] Pritchard concludes that if you believe in the closure principle then you should deny the favouring principle. |
19502 | Maybe knowledge just needs relevant discriminations among contrasting cases [Pritchard,D] |
Full Idea: According to the 'contrastivist' proposal knowledge is to be understood as essentially involving discrimination, such that knowing a proposition boils down to having the relevant discriminatory capacities. | |
From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 2.§6) | |
A reaction: Pritchard says this isn't enough, and we must also to be aware of supporting favouring evidence. I would focus on the concept of coherence, even for simple perceptual knowledge. If I see a hawk in England, that's fine. What if I 'see' a vulture? |
19498 | Epistemic internalism usually says justification must be accessible by reflection [Pritchard,D] |
Full Idea: Typically, internal epistemic conditions are characterised in terms of a reflective access requirement. | |
From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 1.§6) | |
A reaction: If your justification is straightforwardly visual, it is unclear what the difference would be between seeing the thing and having reflective access to the seeing. |
19506 | Externalism is better than internalism in dealing with radical scepticism [Pritchard,D] |
Full Idea: Standard epistemic internalism faces an uphill struggle when it comes to dealing with radical scepticism, which points in favour of epistemic externalist neo-Mooreanism. | |
From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 3.§3) | |
A reaction: I incline towards internalism. I deal with scepticism by being a fallibilist, and adding 'but you never know' to every knowledge claim, and then getting on with life. |
19496 | Disjunctivism says perceptual justification must be both factual and known by the agent [Pritchard,D] |
Full Idea: Slogan for disjunctivism: perceptual knowledge is paradigmatically constituted by a true belief whose epistemic support is both factive (i.e. it entails the truth of the propositions believed) and reflectively accessible to the agent. | |
From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], Intro) | |
A reaction: I'm not a fan of externalism, but it could be that the factive bit achieves the knowledge, and then being able to use and answer for that knowledge may just be a bonus, and not an essential ingredient. |
19497 | Metaphysical disjunctivism says normal perceptions and hallucinations are different experiences [Pritchard,D] |
Full Idea: Metaphysical disjunctivists hold that veridical perceptual experiences are not essentially the same as the experiences involved in corresponding cases involving illusion and (especially) hallucination. | |
From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 1.§4) | |
A reaction: Metaphysical disjunctivism concerns what the experiences are; epistemological justification concerns the criteria of justification. I think. I wish Pritchard would spell things out more clearly. Indeed, I wish all philosophers would. |
19495 | Epistemic externalism struggles to capture the idea of epistemic responsibility [Pritchard,D] |
Full Idea: A fundamental difficulty for epistemic externalist positions is that it is hard on this view to capture any adequate notion of epistemic responsibility. | |
From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], Intro) | |
A reaction: He never explains the 'responsibility', but I presume that would be like an expert witness in court, vouching for their knowledge. |
19501 | We assess error against background knowledge, but that is just what radical scepticism challenges [Pritchard,D] |
Full Idea: When faced with an error-possibility we can appeal to background knowledge, as long as the error-possibility does not call into question this background knowledge. The same is not true when we focus on the radical sceptical hypothesis. | |
From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 2.§5) | |
A reaction: [reworded] Doubting everything simultaneously just looks like a mad project. If you doubt linguistic meaning, you can't even express your doubts. |
19507 | Radical scepticism is merely raised, and is not a response to worrying evidence [Pritchard,D] |
Full Idea: Crucially, radical sceptical error-possibilities are never epistemically motivated, but are instead merely raised. | |
From: Duncan Pritchard (Epistemological Disjunctivism [2012], 3.§5) | |
A reaction: In 'The Matrix' someone sees a glitch in the software (a cat crossing a passageway), and that would have to be taken seriously. Otherwise it is a nice strategy to ask why the sceptic is raising this bizzare possibility, without evidence. |
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. |
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. |
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. |