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). |
1630 | We can only see an alien language in terms of our own thought structures (e.g. physical/abstract) [Quine] |
Full Idea: We are prone to talk about physical and abstract objects. It is hard to know how else to talk, because we are bound to adapt any alien pattern to our own in the very process of understanding or translating the alien sentences. | |
From: Willard Quine (Speaking of Objects [1960], pt.I,p.1) | |
A reaction: It is fine for mathematicians (or economists) to refer to their subject matter as 'objects', but ontologists really need to be more careful. Some very silly theories can otherwise result. |
5747 | "No entity without identity" - our ontology must contain items with settled identity conditions [Quine, by Melia] |
Full Idea: Quine's well-known slogan "no entity without identity" means that no object should be admitted into our ontology unless its identity conditions, the conditions that say which object it is, have been settled. | |
From: report of Willard Quine (Speaking of Objects [1960]) by Joseph Melia - Modality Ch.4 | |
A reaction: This invites science fiction scenarios, where we admit the existence of something before we have a clue what it is (whether it is physical, hallucination, divine..). Quine's slogan seems attractive but optimistic. How 'settled'? |
7925 | There is no proper identity concept for properties, and it is hard to distinguish one from two [Quine] |
Full Idea: The lack of a proper identity concept for attributes (properties) is a lack that philosophers feel impelled to supply; for, what sense is there in saying there are attributes when there is no sense in saying when there is one attribute and when two? | |
From: Willard Quine (Speaking of Objects [1960], IV) | |
A reaction: This strikes me as being a really crucial question. There is a mistaken tendency to take any possible linguistic predicate as implying a natural property. I sympathise with the sceptics here (see Ideas 4029, 3906, 3322). How to individuate properties? |
13387 | Our conceptual scheme becomes more powerful when we posit abstract objects [Quine] |
Full Idea: There is no denying the access of power that accrues to our conceptual scheme through the positing of abstract objects. | |
From: Willard Quine (Speaking of Objects [1960], §5) | |
A reaction: This seems right, both in its use of the word 'posit', and in its general pragmatic claim. So why? If they enable us to grapple with the world better, it must be because of their power of generalisation. They are nets thrown over chunks of reality. |
8277 | I prefer 'no object without identity' to Quine's 'no entity without identity' [Lowe on Quine] |
Full Idea: To adapt Quine's famous slogan ('no entity without identity'), I prefer to say 'no object without identity'. | |
From: comment on Willard Quine (Speaking of Objects [1960], p.52) by E.J. Lowe - The Possibility of Metaphysics 7.1 | |
A reaction: Quine was trying to make us all more scientific, but Lowe is closer to common sense. The sky is an entity, most of us would say, but with very shaky identity-conditions. A wave of the sea is a good example. |
1631 | You could know the complete behavioural conditions for a foreign language, and still not know their beliefs [Quine] |
Full Idea: We could know the necessary and sufficient stimulatory conditions of every possible act of utterance, in a foreign language, and still not know how to determine what objects the speakers of that language believe in. | |
From: Willard Quine (Speaking of Objects [1960], pt.III,p.11) | |
A reaction: I just don't believe this, because the same scepticism then creeps into discussions of native speakers of a single language, and all communcation is blighted - which is nonsense. |
1632 | Translation of our remote past or language could be as problematic as alien languages [Quine] |
Full Idea: Translation of our remote past or future discourse into the terms we now know could be about as tenuous and arbitrary a projection as translation of a heathen language was seen to be. | |
From: Willard Quine (Speaking of Objects [1960], pt.V,p.25) | |
A reaction: Is he seriously saying that we can't understand Shakespeare, because holism implies that we would have to be Elizabethans? So scholarship is in vain? Is yesterday the 'past'? |
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. |