14 ideas
| 23449 | Interpreting a text is representing it as making sense [Morris,M] |
| Full Idea: Interpreting a text is a matter of making sense of it. And to make sense of a text is to represent it as making sense. | |
| From: Michael Morris (Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Tractatus [2008], Intro.2) | |
| A reaction: 'Making sense' is obviously not a very precise or determinate concept. It is probably better to say that the process is 'trying' to make sense of the text, because most texts don't totally make sense. |
| 23484 | Bipolarity adds to Bivalence the capacity for both truth values [Morris,M] |
| Full Idea: According to the Principle of Bipolarity, every meaningful sentence must be capable both of being true and of being false. It is not enough merely that every sentence must be either true or false (which is Bivalence). | |
| From: Michael Morris (Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Tractatus [2008], 3D) | |
| A reaction: It is said that early Wittgenstein endorses this. That is, in addition to being true, the sentence must be capable of falsehood (and vice versa). This seems to be flirting with the verification principle. I presume it is 'affirmative' sentences. |
| 23494 | Conjunctive and disjunctive quantifiers are too specific, and are confined to the finite [Morris,M] |
| Full Idea: There are two problems with defining the quantifiers in terms of conjunction and disjunction. The general statements are unspecific, and do not say which things have the properties, and also they can't range over infinite objects. | |
| From: Michael Morris (Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Tractatus [2008], 5C) | |
| A reaction: That is, the universal quantifier is lots of ands, and the existential is lots of ors. If there only existed finite objects, then naming them all would be universal, and the infinite wouldn't be needed. |
| 23451 | Counting needs to distinguish things, and also needs the concept of a successor in a series [Morris,M] |
| Full Idea: Just distinguishing things is not enough for counting (and hence arithmetic). We need the crucial extra notion of the successor in a series of some kind. | |
| From: Michael Morris (Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Tractatus [2008], Intro.5) | |
| A reaction: This is a step towards the Peano Axioms of arithmetic. The successors could be fingers and toes, taken in a conventional order, and matched one-to-one to the objects. 'My right big toe of cows' means 16 cows (but non-verbally). |
| 23460 | To count, we must distinguish things, and have a series with successors in it [Morris,M] |
| Full Idea: Distinguishing between things is not enough for counting. …We need the crucial extra notion of a successor in a series of a certain kind. | |
| From: Michael Morris (Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Tractatus [2008], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This is the thinking that led to the Dedekind-Peano axioms for arithmetic. E.g. each series member can only have one successor. There is an unformalisable assumption that the series can then be applied to the things. |
| 23452 | Discriminating things for counting implies concepts of identity and distinctness [Morris,M] |
| Full Idea: The discrimination of things for counting needs to bring with it the notion of identity (and, correlatively, distinctness). | |
| From: Michael Morris (Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Tractatus [2008], Intro.5) | |
| A reaction: Morris is exploring how practices like counting might reveal necessary truths about the world. |
| 23491 | There must exist a general form of propositions, which are predictabe. It is: such and such is the case [Morris,M] |
| Full Idea: The existence of a general propositional form is proved by the fact that there cannot be a proposition whose form could not have been foreseen (i.e. constructed). The general form of the proposition is: Such and such is the case. | |
| From: Michael Morris (Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Tractatus [2008], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: [last bit in Ogden translation] LW eventually expresses this symbolically. We could just say a proposition is an assertion. This strikes as either a rather empty claim, or an unfounded one. |
| 22709 | We should first decide what are the great works of art, with aesthetic theory following from that [Murdoch] |
| Full Idea: Our aesthetic must stand to be judged by great works of art which we know to be such independently. …So let us start by saying that Shakespeare is the greatest of all artists, and let our aesthetic be the philosophical justification of this judgement. | |
| From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.205) | |
| A reaction: She offers this view in specific contradiction of Tolstoy, which says we should first have a theory, and then judge accordingly. I take Murdoch to be entirely right, but it means that our aesthetic theory will shift over time. |
| 22715 | Great art proves the absurdity of art for art's sake [Murdoch] |
| Full Idea: The work of the great artists shows up 'art-for-art's-sake' as a flimsy frivolous doctrine. | |
| From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.218) | |
| A reaction: She keeps referring to tragedy (as the greatest art), but it is hard to see how we learn love and morality from a great pot or a great abstract painting. Wilde makes the doctrine frivolous, but I think it contains a degree of truth. Music. |
| 22714 | Because art is love, it improves us morally [Murdoch] |
| Full Idea: It is of course a fact that if art is love then art improves us morally, but this is, as it were, accidental. | |
| From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.218) | |
| A reaction: Is an enhancement of one's love necessarily a moral improvement? Love is a fine feeling, but how does it motivate? Has no wickedness ever been perpetrated in the name of love? 'All's fair in love and war'. |
| 22712 | Art and morals are essentially the same, and are both identical with love [Murdoch] |
| Full Idea: Art and morals are (with certain provisos) one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. | |
| From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.215) | |
| A reaction: The idea that art, morals and love are all just a single thing seems unhelpful. What about satire? What about duty without love? What about pure abstract painting? What about Stravinsky's highly formal view of his music? |
| 22713 | Love is realising something other than oneself is real [Murdoch] |
| Full Idea: Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. | |
| From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.215) | |
| A reaction: I suspect that this is a necessary condition for love, but not the thing itself. The realisation she describes may not be love. You would attain her realisation if you shared a prison cell with a terrifying psychopath. |
| 1748 | Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless [Archelaus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.3 |
| 5989 | Archelaus said life began in a primeval slime [Archelaus, by Schofield] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus wrote that life on Earth began in a primeval slime. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Malcolm Schofield - Archelaus | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a fairly clearcut assertion of the production of life by evolution. Darwin's contribution was to propose the mechanism for achieving it. We should honour the name of Archelaus for this idea. |