display all the ideas for this combination of texts
6 ideas
| 12998 | Understanding grasps the agreements and disagreements of ideas [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Ordinarily, when ideas are thoroughly understood, their agreements and disagreements are apparent. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.02) | |
| A reaction: In other words, there is a holistic aspect of understanding, which makes us ask how understanding ever gets off the ground. Is it not possible to understand a single idea in isolation? |
| 12960 | We understand things when they are distinct, and we can derive necessities from them [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We understand the things of which we are aware only when we have distinct ideas of them accompanied by the power to reflect and to derive necessary truths from those ideas. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: A rather startling way of putting it, but we also say that good understanding brings the power to predict. What must you understand in order to predict? What has to happen next! |
| 15994 | If it is knowledge, it is certain; if it isn't certain, it isn't knowledge [Locke] |
| Full Idea: What reaches to knowledge, I think may be called certainty; and what comes short of certainty, I think cannot be knowledge. | |
| From: John Locke (Letters to Edward Stillingfleet [1695], Letter 2), quoted by Simon Blackburn - Quasi-Realism no Fictionalism | |
| A reaction: I much prefer that fallibilist approach offered by the pragmatists. Knowledge is well-supported belief which seems (and is agreed) to be true, but there is a small shadow of doubt hanging over all of it. |
| 13006 | Certainty is where practical doubt is insane, or at least blameworthy [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Certainty might be knowledge of a truth such that to doubt it in a practical way would be insane; and sometimes it is taken more broadly, to cover cases where doubt would be very blameworthy. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.11) | |
| A reaction: The normative aspect of the second half of this touches on a trend in recent epistemology. You have rights to believe, and duties to believe, and virtues for the justifying process. I prefer more neutral, value-free epistemology. |
| 12996 | I know more than I think, since I know I think A then B then C [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Not only is it immediately evident to me that I think, but it is just as evident that I think various thoughts: at one time I think about A and at another about B and so on. Thus the Cartesian principle is sound, but it is not the only one of its kind. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.02) | |
| A reaction: I don't suppose that Descartes would object to this, but he was aware that there didn't seem to be any actual introspective experience that united the various thoughts into a single thinker. Only logical connections between the thoughts does that. |
| 13003 | The Cogito doesn't prove existence, because 'I am thinking' already includes 'I am' [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To say 'I think therefore I am' is not really to prove existence from thought, since 'to think' and 'to be thinking' are one and the same, and to say 'I am thinking' [je suis pensant] is already to say 'I am' [je suis]. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.07) | |
| A reaction: This is the objection which was offered by A.J. Ayer, and I take it to the one of the two principle objections to the Cogito (i.e. that it may be a tautology), along with the objection about the assumption of the continuity of the same thinker. |