display all the ideas for this combination of texts
7 ideas
9199 | Wisdom for one instant is as good as wisdom for eternity [Chrysippus] |
Full Idea: If a person has wisdom for one instant, he is no less happy than he who possesses it for eternity. | |
From: Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]), quoted by Pierre Hadot - Philosophy as a way of life 8 | |
A reaction: [Hadot quotes Plutarch 'On Common Conceptions' 8,1062a] This makes it sound awfully like some sort of Buddhist 'enlightenment', which strikes like lightning. He does wisdom recognise itself - by a warm glow, or by the cautious thought that got you there? |
20853 | Wise men should try to participate in politics, since they are a good influence [Chrysippus, by Diog. Laertius] |
Full Idea: The wise man will participate in politics unless something prevents him, for he will restrain vice and promote virtue. | |
From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.121 | |
A reaction: [from lost On Ways of Life Bk 1] We have made modern politics so hostile for its participants, thanks to cruel media pressure, that the best people now run a mile from it. Disastrous. |
8927 | Philosophy moves essentially in the element of universality [Hegel] |
Full Idea: Philosophy moves essentially in the element of universality. | |
From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 01) | |
A reaction: I would take this to be uncontroversially correct. An interesting test case is applied ethics, which seems embedded in current cultural practices. I would always take it to be searching for what is universal in each situation. |
20772 | Three branches of philosophy: first logic, second ethics, third physics (which ends with theology) [Chrysippus] |
Full Idea: There are three kinds of philosophical theorems, logical, ethical, and physical; of these the logic should be placed first, ethics second, and physics third (and theology is the final topic in physics). | |
From: Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]), quoted by Plutarch - 70: Stoic Self-contradictions 1035a | |
A reaction: [in his lost 'On Lives' Bk 4] 'Theology is the final topic in physics'! That should create a stir in theology departments. Is this an order of study, or of importance? You come to theology right at the end of your studies. |
21776 | Philosophy aims to reveal the necessity and rationality of the categories of nature and spirit [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
Full Idea: For Hegel, philosophy's principal task is to disclose the enduring necessity and rationality of the categories and forms of nature and spirit that it examines. | |
From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 4 'Phenomenology' | |
A reaction: The idea that a miserable little evolved and transient mammal on a tiny planet has direct insight into the necessities and categories of nature and spirit looks a shade optimistic to me. You have to admire the ambition, though. |
8935 | Without philosophy, science is barren and futile [Hegel] |
Full Idea: Let other sciences try to argue as much as they like without philosophy - without it they can have in them neither life, Spirit, nor truth. | |
From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 67) | |
A reaction: To be pinned up in every physics laboratory in the world. On the whole I agree with this. My slogan is 'science is the servant of philosophy'. An unphilosophical scientist is just a technologist, an artisan. |
22082 | Truth does not appear by asserting reasons and then counter-reasons [Hegel] |
Full Idea: It is not difficult to see that the way of asserting a proposition, adducing reasons for it, and in the same way refuting its opposite by reasons, is not the form in which truth can appear. | |
From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], p.28), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - Hegel p.100 | |
A reaction: This is a pretty good description of the way Plato and Aristotle do philosophy, so this idea, which must be a founding idea for the 'continental school', is extremely radical. Personally I identify rationality with believing things for good reasons. |