14 ideas
| 19588 | The highest aim of philosophy is to combine all philosophies into a unity [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: He attains the maximum of a philosopher who combines all philosophies into a single philosophy | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 31) | |
| A reaction: I have found the epigraph for my big book! Recently a few narrowly analytical philosophers have attempted big books about everything (Sider, Heil, Chalmers), and they get a huge round of applause from me. |
| 19598 | Philosophy relies on our whole system of learning, and can thus never be complete [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Now all learning is connected - thus philosophy will never be complete. Only in the complete system of all learning will philosophy be truly visible. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 39) | |
| A reaction: Philosophy is evidently the unifying subject, which reveals the point of all the other subjects. It matches my maxim that 'science is the servant of philosophy'. |
| 19586 | Philosophers feed on problems, hoping they are digestible, and spiced with paradox [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher lives on problems as the human being does on food. An insoluble problem is an indigestible food. What spice is to food, the paradoxical is to problems. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 09) | |
| A reaction: Novalis would presumably have disliked Hegel's dialectic, where the best food seems to be the indigestible. |
| 19587 | Philosophy aims to produce a priori an absolute and artistic world system [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy ...is the art of producing all our conceptions according to an absolute, artistic idea and of developing the thought of a world system a priori out of the depths of our spirit. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 19) | |
| A reaction: A lovely statement of the dream of building world systems by pure thought - embodying perfectly the view of philosophy despised by logical positivists and modern logical metaphysicians. The Novalis view will never die! I like 'artistic'. |
| 19597 | Logic (the theory of relations) should be applied to mathematics [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Ought not logic, the theory of relations, be applied to mathematics? | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 38) | |
| A reaction: Bolzano was 19 when his was written. I presume Novalis would have been excited by set theory (even though he was a hyper-romantic). |
| 21833 | Research suggest that we overrate conscious experience [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: The emerging consensus is that we probably overrate the power of conscious experience in our lives. Freud, of course, said the same thing for different reasons. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 3 'Ontology') | |
| A reaction: [He cites Pockett, Banks and Gallagher 2006]. Freud was concerned with big deep secrets, but the modern view concerns ordinary decisions and perceptions. An important idea, which should incline us all to become Nietzscheans. |
| 21834 | Sensations may be identical to brain events, but complex mental events don't seem to be [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: There is still some hope for something like identity theory for sensations. But almost no one believes that strict identity theory will work for more complex mental states. Strict identity is stronger than type neurophysicalism. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 3 'Ontology') | |
| A reaction: It is so hard to express the problem. What needs to be explained? How can one bunch of neurons represent many different things? It's not like computing. That just transfers the data to brains, where the puzzling stuff happens. |
| 21837 | Morality is normative because it identifies best practices among the normal practices [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Morality is 'normative' in the sense that it consists of the extraction of ''good' or 'excellent' practices from common practices. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 4 'Naturalism') |
| 21830 | For Darwinians, altruism is either contracts or genetics [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Two explanations came forward in the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Altruism is either 1) person-based reciprocal altruism, or 2) gene-based kin altruism. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 2 'Darwin') | |
| A reaction: Flanagan obviously thinks there is also 'genuine psychological atruism'. Presumably we don't explain mathematics or music or the desire to travel as either contracts or genetics, so we have other explanations available. |
| 21835 | We need Eudaimonics - the empirical study of how we should flourish [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: It would be nice if I could advance the case for Eudaimonics - empirical enquiry into the nature, causes, and constituents of flourishing, …and the case for some ways of living and being as better than others. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 4 'Normative') | |
| A reaction: Things seem to be moving in that direction. Lots of statistics about happiness have been appearing. |
| 21831 | Alienation is not finding what one wants, or being unable to achieve it [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: What Marx called 'alienation' is the widespread condition of not being able to discover what one wants, or not being remotely positioned to achieve. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 2 'Expanding') | |
| A reaction: I took alienation to concern people's relationship to the means of production in their trade. On Flanagan's definition I would expect almost everyone aged under 20 to count as alienated. |
| 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. |
| 21832 | Buddhists reject God and the self, and accept suffering as key, and liberation through wisdom [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Buddhism rejected the idea of a creator God, and the unchanging self [atman]. They accept the appearance-reality distinction, reward for virtue [karma], suffering defining our predicament, and that liberation [nirvana] is possible through wisdom. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 3 'Buddhism') | |
| A reaction: [Compressed] Flanagan is an analytic philosopher and a practising Buddhist. Looking at a happiness map today which shows Europeans largely happy, and Africans largely miserable, I can see why they thought suffering was basic. |