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2 ideas
| 14628 | Imagination is important, in evaluating possibility and necessity, via counterfactuals [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Imagination can be made to look cognitively worthless. Once we recall its fallible but vital role in evaluating counterfactual conditionals, we should be more open to the idea that it plays such a role in evaluating claims of possibility and necessity. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Modal Logic within Counterfactual Logic [2010], 6) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be a really important idea, because it establishes the importance of imagination within the formal framework of modern analytic philosopher (rather than in the whimsy of poets and dreamers). |
| 18310 | The 'highest' concepts are the most general and empty concepts [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The 'highest concepts' ...are the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last fumes of evaporating reality. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols [1889], 2.4) | |
| A reaction: This could be seen as an attack on the aspirations of all of philosophy, which seeks general truths out of the chaos of experience. Should we shut up, then, and just be and do? |