Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Individuals without Sortals', 'Ways of Worldmaking' and 'Being and Nothingness'

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7 ideas

7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 3. Being / h. Dasein (being human)
For Sartre there is only being for-itself, or being in-itself (which is beyond experience) [Sartre, by Daigle]
     Full Idea: The two most fundamental modes of being in Sartre's ontology are being in-itself, and being for-itself. ...The in-itself lies beyond our experience of it.
     From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943]) by Christine Daigle - Jean-Paul Sartre 2.2
     A reaction: This appears to be Kant's ding-an-sich, paired with Heidegger's Dasein. If those are the only options, then reality is either subjective or unknown, which seems to make Sartre an idealist, but he asserted that phenomena vindicate the in-itself.
7. Existence / B. Change in Existence / 4. Events / a. Nature of events
Events do not have natural boundaries, and we have to set them [Ayers]
     Full Idea: In order to know which event has been ostensively identified by a speaker, the auditor must know the limits intended by the speaker. ...Events do not have natural boundaries.
     From: M.R. Ayers (Individuals without Sortals [1974], 'Concl')
     A reaction: He distinguishes events thus from natural objects, where the world, to a large extent, offers us the boundaries. Nice point.
7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 4. Ontological Dependence
Being primitive or prior always depends on a constructional system [Goodman]
     Full Idea: Nothing is primitive or derivationally prior to anything apart from a constructional system.
     From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.4c)
     A reaction: Something may be primitive not just because we can't be bothered to analyse it any further, but because even God couldn't analyse it. Maybe.
7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 5. Supervenience / d. Humean supervenience
We don't recognise patterns - we invent them [Goodman]
     Full Idea: Recognising patterns is very much a matter of inventing or imposing them.
     From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.7)
     A reaction: I take this to be false.
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 3. Reality
Reality is largely a matter of habit [Goodman]
     Full Idea: Reality in a world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit.
     From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.6)
     A reaction: I'm a robust realist, me, but I sort of see what he means. We become steeped in unspoken conventions about how we take our world to be, and filter out anything that conflicts with it.
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 4. Anti-realism
We build our world, and ignore anything that won't fit [Goodman]
     Full Idea: We dismiss as illusory or negligible what cannot be fitted into the architecture of the world we are building.
     From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.4d)
     A reaction: I'm trying to think of an example of this, but can't. Maybe poor people are invisible to the rich?
7. Existence / E. Categories / 5. Category Anti-Realism
A world can be full of variety or not, depending on how we sort it [Goodman]
     Full Idea: A world may be unmanageably heterogeneous or unbearably monotonous according to how events are sorted into kinds.
     From: Nelson Goodman (Ways of Worldmaking [1978], 1.4a)
     A reaction: We might expect this from the man who invented 'grue', which allows you to classify things that change colour with things that don't. Could you describe a bird as 'might have been a fish', and classify it with fish? ('Projectible'?)