14 ideas
| 23881 | All thought about values is philosophical, and thought about anything else is not philosophy [Weil] |
| Full Idea: All reflections bearing on the notion of value and on the hierarchy of values is philosophical; all efforts of thought bearing on anything other than value are, if one examines them closely, foreign to philosophy. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Reflections on Value [1941], p.30) | |
| A reaction: If nothing else proves that Weil is a platonist, this does. She, of course, has a transcendent and religious view of values, whereas I just see them as concepts which embody what is important. That said, I'm not far off agreeing with this. |
| 23885 | Philosophy aims to change the soul, not to accumulate knowledge [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy does not consist in accumulating knowledge, as science does, but in changing the whole soul. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Reflections on Value [1941], p.33) | |
| A reaction: I agree, roughly. In the sense that philosophy is a much more personal matter than any pure pursuit of knowledge, such as geology. Though a life in geology could change your soul. Not just any old change, of course…. |
| 23886 | Systems are not unique to each philosopher. The platonist tradition is old and continuous [Weil] |
| Full Idea: People believe that every philosopher has a system that contradicts all the others! But there is a tradition, genuinely philosophical, that is as old as humanity itself. …Plato is the most perfect representative of this tradition. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Reflections on Value [1941], p.33) | |
| A reaction: I see roughly two traditions. If you believe in transcendence you follow Plato, like Simone. If you are a naturalist (like me) you follow Aristotle. A third tradition might be much more sceptical. |
| 23884 | Truth is a value of thought [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Truth is a value of thought. The word 'truth' cannot have any other meaning. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Reflections on Value [1941], p.32) | |
| A reaction: This makes a nice change from truth being a mere predicate. I would call truth the criterion of success in thought, and that counts as a value, so she is right. |
| 14633 | How do we tell a table's being contingently plastic from its being essentially plastic? [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: On a friendly reading of Quine, there is nothing to make the difference between a table's being contingently plastic and its being essentially plastic. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is, of course, the dreaded modern usage of 'essential' to just mean 'necessary' and nothing more. In my view, there may be a big problem with knowing whether a problem is necessary, but knowing whether it is essential is much easier. |
| 14635 | An x is essentially F if it is F in every possible world in which it appears [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: On the possible world's account, x's being essentially F is nothing more nor less than x's being F in every world in which it appears. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 6) | |
| A reaction: There you go - 'true in every possible world' is the definition of metaphysical necessity, not the definition of essence. Either get back to Aristotle, or stop (forever!) talking about 'essence'! |
| 14632 | Quine may have conflated de re and de dicto essentialism, but there is a real epistemological problem [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: The unfriendly response to Quine's objection to essentialism is that it conflates the de re and the de dicto. The friendly response is that behind that conflation is a real epistemological problem for essentialism. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 1) | |
| A reaction: He cites Richard Cartwright 1968 for the friendly response. The epistemological question is how we can know the essentialness of an essence. |
| 14631 | How can you show the necessity of an a posteriori necessity, if it might turn out to be false? [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: If something is offered as a candidate necessary a posteriori truth, how could we show that it is necessary, in the face of the fact that it takes investigation to show that it is true, and so, in some sense, it might have turned out to be false? | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is the topic of his paper, which he compares with how we can know that essences are essential. |
| 22049 | Transcendental idealism aims to explain objectivity through subjectivity [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: The aim of transcendental idealism is to give a basis for objectivity in terms of subjectivity. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 1) | |
| A reaction: Hume used subjectivity to undermine the findings of objectivity. There was then no return to naive objectivity. Kant's aim then was to thwart global scepticism. Post-Kantians feared that he had failed. |
| 22055 | The Idealists saw the same unexplained spontaneity in Kant's judgements and choices [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: The Idealist saw in Kant that knowledge, which depends on the spontaneity of judgement, and self-determined spontaneous action, can be seen as sharing the same source, which is not accessible to scientific investigation. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010]) | |
| A reaction: This is the 'spontaneity' of judgements and choices which was seen as the main idea in Kant. It inspired romantic individualism. The judgements are the rule-based application of concepts. |
| 22054 | German Idealism tried to stop oppositions of appearances/things and receptivity/spontaneity [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: A central aim of German Idealism is to overcome Kant's oppositions between appearances and thing in themselves, and between receptivity and spontaneity. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 2) | |
| A reaction: I have the impression that there were two strategies: break down the opposition within the self (Fichte), or break down the opposition in the world (Spinozism). |
| 22056 | Crucial to Idealism is the idea of continuity between receptivity and spontaneous judgement [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: A crucial idea for German Idealism (from Hamann) is that apparently passive receptivity and active spontaneity are in fact different degrees of the same 'activity, and the gap between subject and world can be closed. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 3) | |
| A reaction: The 'passive' bit seems to be Hume's 'impressions', which are Kant's 'intuitions', which need 'spontaneous' interpretation to become experiences. Critics of Kant said this implied a dualism. |
| 23882 | Ends, unlike means, cannot be defined, which is why people tend to pursue means [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Everything that can be taken as an end cannot be defined. Means, such as power and money, are easily defined, and that is why people orient themselves exclusively towards the acquisition of means. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Reflections on Value [1941], p.31) | |
| A reaction: Nice, but too neat, because so many activities can be treated either as means or as ends, and often as both. It makes sense that people pursue what is clear to them. |
| 23883 | Minds essentially and always strive towards value [Weil] |
| Full Idea: For the mind essentially and always, in whatever manner it is disposed, strives towards value. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Reflections on Value [1941], p.31) | |
| A reaction: A typically platonist thought. If you accept my view that values identify what is important, the thought is plausible. We might distinguish between what the mind pointlessly entertains, and what it 'strives' for. |