display all the ideas for this combination of texts
3 ideas
| 23652 | We must first conceive things before we can consider them [Reid] |
| Full Idea: No man can consider a thing which he does not conceive. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Intellectual Powers 5: Abstraction [1785], 6) | |
| A reaction: This seems to imply concepts, but we should not take this to be linguistic, since animals obviously consider things and make judgements. |
| 23950 | 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'. |
| 23648 | First we notice and name attributes ('abstracting'); then we notice that subjects share them ('generalising') [Reid] |
| Full Idea: First we resolve or analyse a subject into its known attributes, and give a name to each attribute. Then we observe one or more attributes to be common to many subjects. The first philosophers call 'abstraction', and the second is 'generalising'. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Intellectual Powers 5: Abstraction [1785], 3) | |
| A reaction: It is very unfashionable in analytic philosophy to view universals in this way, but it strikes me as obviously correct. There are not weird abstract entities awaiting a priori intuition. There are just features of the world to be observed and picked out. |