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Ideas for 'Metaphysics', 'Logic (Encyclopedia I)' and 'The Tarskian Turn'

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3 ideas

18. Thought / D. Concepts / 1. Concepts / a. Nature of concepts
We don't think with concepts - we think the concepts [Hegel]
     Full Idea: There is a saying that, when we have grasped a concept, we still do not know what to think with it. But there is nothing to be thought with a concept save the concept itself.
     From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §03 Rem)
     A reaction: Analytic philosophers should read Hegel on concepts, because he approaches the matter so very differently, and seems to be the root of the continental approach to such things. He seems to me to talk more sense than Frege on the subject.
Active thought about objects produces the universal, which is what is true and essential of it [Hegel]
     Full Idea: When thinking is taken as active with regard to ob-jects, as the thinking-over of something, then the universal - as the product of the activity - contains the value of the matter, what is essential, inner, true.
     From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §21)
     A reaction: I prefer to talk of 'general terms' rather than 'universals'. If 'tiger' is coined for the first one, but must be applicable to subsequent tigers, it has to generalise what they all have in common. Locke's 'nominal' essence, I would say.
18. Thought / D. Concepts / 4. Structure of Concepts / i. Conceptual priority
It is unclear whether acute angles are prior to right angles, or fingers to men [Aristotle]
     Full Idea: Suppose parts are prior to the whole - then, since the acute angle is a part of the right angle, and a finger is part of an animal, this would mean the acute angle and the finger were prior, but received opinion says otherwise.
     From: Aristotle (Metaphysics [c.324 BCE], 1034b24)