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Single Idea 19577
[filed under theme 18. Thought / E. Abstraction / 2. Abstracta by Selection
]
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.
Gist of Idea
Everything is a chaotic unity, then we abstract, then we reunify the world into a free alliance
Source
Novalis (Miscellaneous Observations [1798], 094)
Book Ref
Novalis: 'Philosophical Writings', ed/tr. Stoljar,M.M. [SUNY 1997], p.40
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.
Related Idea
Idea 6118
Philosophy is logical analysis, followed by synthesis [Russell]
The
24 ideas
with the same theme
[mental acts which create abstract concepts]:
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9789
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You can't abstract natural properties to make Forms - objects and attributes are defined together
[Aristotle]
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9070
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We learn primitives and universals by induction from perceptions
[Aristotle]
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10506
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Mathematics can be abstracted from sensible matter, and from individual intelligible matter
[Aquinas]
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9104
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A universal is the result of abstraction, which is only a kind of mental picturing
[William of Ockham]
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23640
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Only mature minds can distinguish the qualities of a body
[Reid]
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23653
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If you can't distinguish the features of a complex object, your notion of it would be a muddle
[Reid]
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19577
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Everything is a chaotic unity, then we abstract, then we reunify the world into a free alliance
[Novalis]
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9145
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We form the image of a cardinal number by a double abstraction, from the elements and from their order
[Cantor]
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13454
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Cantor says (vaguely) that we abstract numbers from equal sized sets
[Hart,WD on Cantor]
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9976
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Frege accepts abstraction to the concept of all sets equipollent to a given one
[Tait on Frege]
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9361
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We have to separate the mathematical from physical phenomena by abstraction
[Lewis,CI]
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10644
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A 'felt familiarity' with universals is more primitive than abstraction
[Price,HH]
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10646
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Our understanding of 'dog' or 'house' arises from a repeated experience of concomitances
[Price,HH]
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9031
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The basic concepts of conceptual cognition are acquired by direct abstraction from instances
[Price,HH]
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10557
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Abstract objects are captured by second-order modal logic, plus 'encoding' formulas
[Zalta]
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12657
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Abstractionism claims that instances provide criteria for what is shared
[Fodor]
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9149
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To obtain the number 2 by abstraction, we only want to abstract the distinctness of a pair of objects
[Fine,K]
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9150
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We should define abstraction in general, with number abstraction taken as a special case
[Fine,K]
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9981
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Abstraction is 'logical' if the sense and truth of the abstraction depend on the concrete
[Tait]
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9982
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Cantor and Dedekind use abstraction to fix grammar and objects, not to carry out proofs
[Tait]
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10141
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Many different kinds of mathematical objects can be regarded as forms of abstraction
[Fine,K]
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10229
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Simple types can be apprehended through their tokens, via abstraction
[Shapiro]
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9919
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The old debate classified representations as abstract, not entities
[Burgess/Rosen]
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8917
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The Way of Abstraction used to say an abstraction is an idea that was formed by abstracting
[Rosen]
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