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Ideas for 'works', 'Meinong on Complexes and Assumptions' and 'Against the Logicians (two books)'

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4 ideas

18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 3. Emotions / a. Nature of emotions
Freud said passions are pressures of some flowing hydraulic quantity [Freud, by Solomon]
     Full Idea: Freud argued that the passions in general …were the pressures of a yet unknown 'quantity' (which he simply designated 'Q'). He first thought this flowed through neurones, …and always couched the idea in the language of hydraulics.
     From: report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900]) by Robert C. Solomon - The Passions 3.4
     A reaction: This is the main target of Solomon's criticism, because its imagery has become so widespread. It leads to talk of suppressing emotions, or sublimating them. However, it is not too different from Nietzsche's 'drives' or 'will to power'.
18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 6. Judgement / b. Error
Do incorrect judgements have non-existent, or mental, or external objects? [Russell]
     Full Idea: Correct judgements have a transcendent object; but with regard to incorrect judgements, it remains to examine whether 1) the object is immanent, 2) there is no object, or 3) the object is transcendent.
     From: Bertrand Russell (Meinong on Complexes and Assumptions [1904], p.67)
     A reaction: Why is it that only Russell seems to have taken this problem seriously? Its solution gives the clearest possible indicator of how the mind relates to the world.
18. Thought / C. Content / 1. Content
The complexity of the content correlates with the complexity of the object [Russell]
     Full Idea: Every property of the object seems to demand a strictly correlative property of the content, and the content, therefore, must have every complexity belonging to the object.
     From: Bertrand Russell (Meinong on Complexes and Assumptions [1904], p.55)
     A reaction: This claim gives a basis for his 'congruence' account of the correspondence theory of truth. It strikes me as false. If I talk of the 'red red robin', I don't mention the robin's feet. He ignores the psychological selection we make in abstraction.
18. Thought / D. Concepts / 2. Origin of Concepts / b. Empirical concepts
We can only dream of a winged man if we have experienced men and some winged thing [Sext.Empiricus]
     Full Idea: He who in his sleep dreams of a winged man does not dream so without having seen some winged thing and a man. And in general it is impossible to find in conception anything which one does not possess as known by experience.
     From: Sextus Empiricus (Against the Logicians (two books) [c.180], II.058)
     A reaction: This precisely David Hume's empiricist account of the formation of concepts. Hume's example is a golden mountain, which he got from Aquinas. How do we dream of faces we have never encountered, or shapes we have never seen?