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Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript' and 'What is Logic?'

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6 ideas

3. Truth / A. Truth Problems / 2. Defining Truth

22092	Kierkegaard's truth draws on authenticity, fidelity and honesty [Kierkegaard, by Carlisle]
	Full Idea: Kierkegaard offers a different interpretation of truth, which draws on the notions of authenticity, fidelity and honesty.
	From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (Concluding Unscientific Postscript [1846]) by Clare Carlisle - Kierkegaard: a guide for the perplexed 4
	A reaction: This notion of truth, meaning 'the real thing' (as in 'she was a true scholar'), seems to begin with Hegel. I suggest we use the word 'genuine' for that, and save 'truth' for its traditional role. It is disastrous to blur the simple concept of truth.

3. Truth / A. Truth Problems / 3. Value of Truth

15999	Pure truth is for infinite beings only; I prefer endless striving for truth [Kierkegaard]
	Full Idea: If God held all truth enclosed in his right hand, and in his left hand the ever-striving drive for truth, even if erring forever, and he were to say Choose! I would humbly fall at his left hand and say Father, give! Pure truth is for infinite beings only.
	From: Søren Kierkegaard (Concluding Unscientific Postscript [1846], p.106)
	A reaction: A sobering realistic thought of our own limitations; Kierkegaard allows that there is no limit to how far we can strive for truth. Just that truth is comprehended by infinite beings (if any), not by mere mortals. [SY]

3. Truth / A. Truth Problems / 8. Subjective Truth

20313	The highest truth we can get is uncertainty held fast by an inward passion [Kierkegaard]
	Full Idea: An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth available for an existing individual.
	From: Søren Kierkegaard (Concluding Unscientific Postscript [1846])
	A reaction: [Bk 711] Offered as a definition of truth, knowing how strange and paradoxical it sounds. If we view all life as subjectivity, then there can of course be nothing more to truth than passionate conviction. Personally I think thought can be objective.

3. Truth / B. Truthmakers / 10. Making Future Truths

21388	The causes of future true events must exist now, so they will happen because of destiny [Chrysippus, by Cicero]
	Full Idea: True future events cannot be such as do not possess causes on account of which they will happen; therefore that which is true must possess causes: and so, when the [true future events] happen they will have happened as a result of destiny.
	From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - On Fate ('De fato') 9.23-8
	A reaction: [exact ref unclear] Presumably the current causes are the truthmakers for the future events, and so the past is the truthmaker of the future, if you are a determinist.

3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 2. Correspondence to Facts

20780	Graspable presentations are criteria of facts, and are molded according to their objects [Chrysippus, by Diog. Laertius]
	Full Idea: Of presentations, some are graspable, some non-graspable. The graspable presentation, which they say is the criterion of facts [pragmata], is that which comes from an existing object and is stamped and molded in accordance wth the existing object itself.
	From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.46
	A reaction: [in lost Physics Bk 2] The big modern anguish over truth-as-correspondence is how you are supposed to verify the 'accordance'. This idea seems to blur the ideas of truth and justification (the 'criterion'), and you can't have both as accordance.

3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 3. Correspondence Truth critique

20793	How could you ever know that the presentation is similar to the object? [Sext.Empiricus on Chrysippus]
	Full Idea: One cannot say that the soul grasps the externally existing objects by means of the states of the senses on the basis of the similarity of these states to the externally existing objects. For on what basis will it know the similarity?
	From: comment on Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Sextus Empiricus - Outlines of Pyrrhonism 2.74
	A reaction: This exactly the main modern reason for rejecting the correspondence theory of truth. You are welcome to affirm a robust view of truth, but supporting it by claiming a correspondence or resemblance is dubious.