|
20109
|
Hegel inserted society and history between the God-world, man-nature, man-being binary pairs [Hegel, by Safranski]
|
|
Full Idea:
Before Hegel, people thought in binary oppositions of God and the world, man and nature, man and being. After Hegel an intervening world of society and history was inserted between these pairs.
|
|
From:
report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Introduction to the Philosophy of History [1840]) by Rüdiger Safranski - Nietzsche: a philosophical biography 05
|
|
A reaction:
This is what Popper later called 'World Three'. This might be seen as the start of what we islanders call 'continental' philosophy, which we have largely ignored. Analytic philosophy only discovered this through philosophy of language.
|
|
15201
|
That Queen Anne is dead is a 'general fact', not a fact about Queen Anne [Prior,AN]
|
|
Full Idea:
The fact that Queen Anne has been dead for some years is not, in the strict sense of 'about', a fact about Queen Anne; it is not a fact about anyone or anything - it is a general fact.
|
|
From:
Arthur N. Prior (Changes in Events and Changes in Things [1968], p.13), quoted by Robin Le Poidevin - Past, Present and Future of Debate about Tense 1 b
|
|
A reaction:
He distinguishes 'general facts' (states of affairs, I think) from 'individual facts', involving some specific object. General facts seem to be what are expressed by negative existential truths, such as 'there is no Loch Ness Monster'. Useful.
|
|
14292
|
Dispositions seem more ethereal than behaviour; a non-occult account of them would be nice [Goodman]
|
|
Full Idea:
Dispositions of a thing are as important to us as overt behaviour, but they strike us by comparison as rather ethereal. So we are moved to enquire whether we can bring them down to earth, and explain disposition terms without reference to occult powers.
|
|
From:
Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954], II.3)
|
|
A reaction:
Mumford quotes this at the start of his book on dispositions, as his agenda. I suspect that the 'occult' aspect crept in because dispositions were based on powers, and the dominant view was that these were the immediate work of God.
|
|
18749
|
Goodman argued that the confirmation relation can never be formalised [Goodman, by Horsten/Pettigrew]
|
|
Full Idea:
Goodman constructed arguments that purported to show that a satisfactory syntactic analysis of the confirmation relation can never be found. In response, philosophers of science tried to model it in probabilistic terms.
|
|
From:
report of Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954]) by Horsten,L/Pettigrew,R - Mathematical Methods in Philosophy 4
|
|
A reaction:
I take this idea to say that Bayesianism was developed in response to the grue problem. This is an interesting light on 'grue', which never bothered me much. The point is it scuppered formal attempts to model induction.
|
|
23275
|
The state of nature is one of untamed brutality [Hegel]
|
|
Full Idea:
The 'state of nature' is not an ideal condition, but a condition of injustice, of violence, of untamed natural drives, inhuman acts and emotions.
|
|
From:
Georg W.F.Hegel (Introduction to the Philosophy of History [1840], 3)
|
|
A reaction:
He agrees with Hobbes, and disagrees with Rousseau. Hobbes's solution is authoritarian monarchy, but Hegel's solution is the unified and focused state, in which freedom can be realised.
|
|
4794
|
We don't use laws to make predictions, we call things laws if we make predictions with them [Goodman]
|
|
Full Idea:
Rather than a sentence being used for prediction because it is a law, it is called a law because it is used for prediction.
|
|
From:
Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954], p.21), quoted by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation §5.4
|
|
A reaction:
This smacks of dodgy pragmatism, and sounds deeply wrong. The perception of a law has to be prior to making the prediction. Why do we make the prediction, if we haven't spotted a law. Goodman is mesmerised by language instead of reality.
|
|
22899
|
'Thank goodness that's over' is not like 'thank goodness that happened on Friday' [Prior,AN]
|
|
Full Idea:
One says 'thank goodness that is over', ..and it says something which it is impossible which any use of any tenseless copula with a date should convey. It certainly doesn't mean the same as 'thank goodness that occured on Friday June 15th 1954'.
|
|
From:
Arthur N. Prior (Changes in Events and Changes in Things [1968]), quoted by Adrian Bardon - Brief History of the Philosophy of Time 4 'Pervasive'
|
|
A reaction:
[Ref uncertain] This seems to be appealing to ordinary usage, in which tenses have huge significance. If we take time (with its past, present and future) as primitive, then tenses can have full weight. Did tenses mean anything at all to Einstein?
|