9 ideas
| 19389 | Truth is a characteristic of possible thoughts [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Truth really belongs to the class of thoughts which are possible. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Dialogue on Things and Words [1677], p.7) | |
| A reaction: I like the fact that this ties truth to 'thoughts', rather than peculiar abstract unthought entities called 'propositions', but I take it that thoughts which are possible but not thought will thereby not exist, so they can't be true. |
| 19388 | True and false seem to pertain to thoughts, yet unthought propositions seem to be true or false [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: B: I concede that truth and falsity both pertain to thoughts and not to things. A: But this contradicts your previous opinion that a proposition remains true even when you are not thinking about it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Dialogue on Things and Words [1677], p.7) | |
| A reaction: I don't trigger the truth of a proposition by thinking about it - I see that it is true. But I dislike the idea that reality is full of propositions, which seems to be mad metaphysics. So I deny unthought propositions are true, because there aren't any. |
| 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. |
| 22098 | Socrates neglects the gap between knowing what is good and doing good [Kierkegaard, by Carlisle] |
| Full Idea: There is a fundamental weakness in Socrates, that he does not take into account the gap between knowing what is good and actually putting this into action. | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (The Concept of Dread (/Anxiety) [1844]) by Clare Carlisle - Kierkegaard: a guide for the perplexed 5 | |
| A reaction: This rejects Socrates's intellectualism about weakness of will. It is perhaps a better criticism that Aristotle's view that desires sometimes overcome the will. It is also the problem of motivation in Kantian deontology. Or utilitarianism. |
| 22096 | Anxiety is not a passing mood, but a response to human freedom [Kierkegaard, by Carlisle] |
| Full Idea: For Kierkegaard anxiety is not simply a mood or an emotion that certain people experience at certain times, but a basic response to freedom that is part of the human condition. | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (The Concept of Dread (/Anxiety) [1844]) by Clare Carlisle - Kierkegaard: a guide for the perplexed 5 | |
| A reaction: Outside of Christianity, this may be Kierkegaard's most influential idea - since existential individualism is floating around in the romantic movement. But the Byronic hero experiences a sort of anxiety. If you can't face anxiety, become a monk or nun. |
| 22097 | The ultimate in life is learning to be anxious in the right way [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: Every human being must learn to be anxious in order that he might not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learnt the ultimate. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (The Concept of Dread (/Anxiety) [1844], p.154), quoted by Clare Carlisle - Kierkegaard: a guide for the perplexed 5 | |
| A reaction: I think this is the most existentialist quotation I have found in Kierkegaard. It sounds circular. You must be in anxiety because otherwise you won't be able to cope with anxiety? I suppose anxiety is facing up to his concept of truth. |
| 21909 | Ultimate knowledge is being anxious in the right way [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: Whoever learns to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (The Concept of Dread (/Anxiety) [1844], p.187), quoted by Alastair Hannay - Kierkegaard 06 | |
| A reaction: This shows us that Kierkegaard had a rather bizarre mental life which the rest of us have little chance of penetrating. I'll have a go at cataloguing my types of anxiety, but I'm not hopeful. |
| 20758 | Anxiety is staring into the yawning abyss of freedom [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: One may liken anxiety to dizziness. He whose eyes chance to look down into a yawning abyss becomes dizzy. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom which is when freedom gazes down into its own possibility, grasping at finiteness to sustain itself. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (The Concept of Dread (/Anxiety) [1844], p.55), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 6 'Moods' | |
| A reaction: Most of us rapidly retreat from the thought of the infinity of things we might choose. Choosing bizarrely merely to assert one's freedom is simple stupidity. |
| 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? |