display all the ideas for this combination of texts
9 ideas
| 12954 | God's essence is the source of possibilities, and his will the source of existents [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: God is the source of possibilities and of existents alike, the one by his essence and the other by his will. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.15) | |
| A reaction: Every now and then I rebel against metaphysics, and think 'how do these people know all this great things about which they make these dogmatic claims?' And this is one of those occasions. I get the idea, though... |
| 12988 | The universe contains everything possible for its perfect harmony [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The universe contains everything that its perfect harmony could admit. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.06) | |
| A reaction: This sort of Leibnizian remark leaves most modern readers, including me, totally bewildered. The claim depends entirely on the perfect nature of God. |
| 1414 | A perfection is a simple quality, which is positive and absolute, and has no limit [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I call every simple quality which is positive and absolute, or expresses whatever it expresses without any limits, a perfection. But a quality of this sort, because it is simple, is therefore irresolvable or indefinable. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], App X) | |
| A reaction: I don't think this definition of perfections would have occurred to anyone who wasn't planning to prove that perfections cannot be incompatible (as Leibniz is about to do). |
| 21252 | Perfections must have overlapping parts if their incompatibility is to be proved [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If two propositions (about perfections) are incompatible, that cannot be demonstrated without a resolution of the terms, for otherwise their nature would not enter into the ratiocination. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], App X) | |
| A reaction: If God is omnipotent and wholly free, these appear to be fully separate perfections. But it is their implications (can God decide to do otherwise, given His foreknowledge?) which lead to a problem. So this analyis of contradiction is wrong. |
| 19328 | Without the principle of sufficient reason, God's existence could not be demonstrated [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There is a fundamental axiom that 'nothing happens without reason', without which the existence of God and other great truths cannot be properly demonstrated. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21.13) | |
| A reaction: I'm rather drawn to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, but also to John Keats's 'negative capability'. Belief that there must be a reason in each case is not a justification for inventing a reason every time. There may be a reason for the universe.... |
| 21775 | The God of revealed religion can only be understood through pure speculative knowledge [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: God is attainable in pure speculative knowledge alone and is only in that knowledge, and is only that knowledge itself, for He is Spirit; and this speculative knowledge is the knowledge of revealed religion. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], p.461), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 04 'Absolute' | |
| A reaction: If you were hoping to find out why Hegel believed in God, I fear this is the best evidence available. He is evidently opposed to natural theology. Hegel's language makes it very hard to grasp how we sees the nature of God. |
| 19653 | The ontological proof of a necessary God ensures a reality external to the mind [Meillassoux] |
| Full Idea: Since Descartes conceives of God as existing necessarily, whether I exist to think of him or not, Descartes assures me of a possible access to an absolute reality - a Great Outdoors that is not a correlate of my thought. | |
| From: Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude; the necessity of contingency [2006], 2) | |
| A reaction: His point is that the ontological argument should be seen as part of the scientific revolution, and not an anomaly within it. Interesting. |
| 6917 | God is the essence of thought, abstracted from the thinker [Hegel, by Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: In Hegel the essence of God is actually nothing other than the essence of thought, or thought abstracted from the ego, that is, from the one who thinks. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Ludwig Feuerbach - Principles of Philosophy of the Future §23 | |
| A reaction: Presumably Descartes' Cogito is the origin for this train of thought. This is Feuerbach's reading of Hegel, but the former was keen on the idea of God as idealised humanity. |
| 19658 | Now that the absolute is unthinkable, even atheism is just another religious belief (though nihilist) [Meillassoux] |
| Full Idea: Once the absolute has become unthinkable, even atheism, which also targets God's inexistence in the manner of an absolute, is reduced to a mere belief, and hence to a religion, albeit of the nihilist kind. | |
| From: Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude; the necessity of contingency [2006], 2) | |
| A reaction: An interesting claim. Rather hard to agree or disagree, though the idea that atheism must qualify as a religion seems odd. If it is unqualified it does have the grand quality of a religion, but if it is fallibilist it just seems like an attitude. |