Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Logical Properties', 'Difference and Repetition' and 'fragments/reports'

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9 ideas

7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 1. Nature of Existence
Existence is a primary quality, non-existence a secondary quality [McGinn]
     Full Idea: Existence is like a primary quality; non-existence is like a secondary quality.
     From: Colin McGinn (Logical Properties [2000], Ch.2 n29)
     A reaction: Since McGinn thinks existence really is a property, and hence, presumably, a predicate, I don't quite see why he uses the word "like". A nicely pithy and thought-provoking remark.
7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 3. Being / a. Nature of Being
Ontology can be continual creation, not to know being, but to probe the unknowable [Deleuze]
     Full Idea: Ontology can be an ontology of difference ....where what is there is not the same old things but a process of continual creation, an ontology that does not seek to reduce being to the knowable, but widens thought to palpate the unknowable.
     From: Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]), quoted by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 5.05
     A reaction: I'm inclined to think that the first duty of ontology is to face up to the knowable. I'm not sure that probing the unknowable, with no success or prospect of it, is a good way to spend a life. Probing ('palpating') can sometimes discover things.
'Being' is univocal, but its subject matter is actually 'difference' [Deleuze]
     Full Idea: Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself.
     From: Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968], p.36), quoted by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 3.03
     A reaction: This is an attempt to express the Heraclitean view of reality, as process, movement, multiplicity - something which always eludes our attempts to pin it down.
7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 3. Being / i. Deflating being
Ontology does not tell what there is; it is just a strange adventure [Deleuze, by May]
     Full Idea: In Deleuze's hands ontology is not a matter of telling us what there is, but of taking us on strange adventures.
     From: report of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 3.03
     A reaction: Presumably you only indulge in the strange adventure because you have no idea how to specify what there is. This sounds like the essence of post-modernism, in which life is just a game.
Being is a problem to be engaged, not solved, and needs a new mode of thinking [Deleuze, by May]
     Full Idea: In Deleuze, Being is not a puzzle to be solved but a problem to be engaged. It is to be engaged by a thought that moves as comfortably among problems as it does among solutions, as fluidly among differences as it does among identities.
     From: report of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 4.01
     A reaction: This sounds like what I've always known as 'negative capability' (thanks to Keats). Is philosophy just a hobby, like playing darts? It seems that the aim of the process is 'liberation', about which I would like to know more.
7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 6. Criterion for Existence
Existence can't be analysed as instantiating a property, as instantiation requires existence [McGinn]
     Full Idea: Paraphrasing existence statements into statements about the instantiation of a property does not establish that existence is not a predicate, since the notion of instantiation must be taken to have existence built into it.
     From: Colin McGinn (Logical Properties [2000], Ch.2)
     A reaction: Thank you, Colin McGinn! This now strikes me as so obvious that it is astonishing that for the whole of the twentieth century no one seems to have said it. For a century philosophers had swept the ontological dirt under the mat.
We can't analyse the sentence 'something exists' in terms of instantiated properties [McGinn]
     Full Idea: The problems of the orthodox view are made vivid by analysis of the sentence 'something exists'; this is meaningful and true, but what property are we saying is instantiated here?
     From: Colin McGinn (Logical Properties [2000], Ch.2)
     A reaction: A very nice point. McGinn claims that existence is a property, a very generalised one. Personally I don't think anyone is even remotely clear what a property is, so the whole discussion is a bit premature. Must properties have causal powers?
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 3. Reality
If causal power is the test for reality, that will exclude necessities and possibilities [McGinn]
     Full Idea: Whether my body weight is necessary or contingent makes no difference at all to my causal powers, so modality is epiphenomenal; if you took causal potential as a test of reality you would have to declare modes unreal.
     From: Colin McGinn (Logical Properties [2000], Ch.4)
     A reaction: We could try analysing modality into causal terms, as Lewis proposes with quantification across worlds, or as Quine proposes by reduction to natural regularities. I am not sure what it would mean to declare that modes are 'real'.
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 8. Facts / b. Types of fact
Facts are object-plus-extension, or property-plus-set-of-properties, or object-plus-property [McGinn]
     Full Idea: A fact may be an object and an extension (Quine's view), or a property and a set of properties, or an object and a property; the view I favour is the third one, which seems the most natural.
     From: Colin McGinn (Logical Properties [2000], Ch.3)
     A reaction: Personally I tend to use the word 'fact' in a realist and non-linguistic way. There must be innumerable inexpressible facts, such as the single pattern made by all the particles of the universe. McGinn seems to be talking of 'atomic facts'. See Idea 6111.