Combining Texts

Ideas for 'works', 'The Universe as We Find It' and 'The Upanishads'

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4 ideas

18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 1. Thought
You can think of tomatoes without grasping what they are [Heil]
     Full Idea: You can entertain thoughts of things like tomatoes without a grasp of what they are.
     From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 08.10)
     A reaction: Lowe seemed to think that you had to grasp the generic essence of a tomato before you could think about it, but I agree entirely with Heil.
18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 8. Human Thought
Linguistic thought is just as imagistic as non-linguistic thought [Heil]
     Full Idea: Thinking - ordinary conscious thinking - is imagistic. This is so for 'linguistic' or 'sentential' thoughts as well as for patently non-linguistic thoughts.
     From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 12.10)
     A reaction: This claim (that linguistic thought is just as imagistic as non-linguistic thought) strikes me as an excellent insight.
Non-conscious thought may be unlike conscious thought [Heil]
     Full Idea: Non-conscious thought need not resemble conscious thought occurring out of sight.
     From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 12.10)
18. Thought / D. Concepts / 5. Concepts and Language / a. Concepts and language
Without speech we cannot know right/wrong, true/false, good/bad, or pleasant/unpleasant [Anon (Upan)]
     Full Idea: If there were no speech, neither right nor wrong would be known, neither the true nor the false, neither the good nor the bad, neither the pleasant nor the unpleasant.
     From: Anon (Upan) (The Upanishads [c.950 BCE], 'Chandogya')
     A reaction: This could stand as the epigraph for the whole of modern philosophy of language. However, the text goes on to say that mind is higher than speech. The test question is the mental capabilities of animals. Do they 'know' pleasure, or truth?