22 ideas
| 1606 | You have to be a Platonist to debate about reality, so every philosopher is a Platonist [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Everyone who enters into a debate about reality automatically becomes a Platonist. Since such debates are the essence of philosophy, every philosopher is a Platonist. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.199) | |
| A reaction: This is correct |
| 1595 | Philosophy aims to satisfy the chief human desire - the articulation of beauty itself [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy, the attempt to articulate the vision of beauty itself, is the attempt to satisfy the highest human desire. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.120) | |
| A reaction: A million miles away from modern philosophy, but still an ideal to be taken seriously. |
| 1571 | 'Logos' ranges from thought/reasoning, to words, to rational structures outside thought [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Logos can mean i) a thought or reasoning, ii) the word which expresses a thought, iii) a rational structure outside human thought. These meanings give 'logos' an extraordinary range. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], Intro. 12) |
| 1572 | In the seventeenth century the only acceptable form of logos was technical knowledge [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: In the seventeenth century only a certain type of logos was deemed legitimate, namely that identified with technical knowledge (or 'techné'). | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], Intro. 15) |
| 1573 | The hallmark of a person with logos is that they give reasons why one opinion is superior to another [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: What is supposed to identify the person of logos from the one without is the commitment to giving reasons explaining why one opinion is superior to another. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], Intro. 17) |
| 1592 | Logos cannot refute the relativist, and so must admit that it too is a matter of desire (for truth and agreement) [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Logos cannot refute the radical, consistent and self-conscious relativist. Therefore it must admit that, like the relativist, it itself is essentially a matter of desire. It wants to say what is right and wrong, true and false, and for others to agree. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.108) |
| 1593 | Human desire has an ordered structure, with logos at the pinnacle [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Human desire has an ordered structure, with logos at the pinnacle. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.109) |
| 1603 | Logos is not unconditionally good, but good if there is another person willing to engage with it [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Logos is not unconditionally good, but good contingent on there being some other person (out there) who is willing to talk with logos, to approach it even as an opponent. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.175) |
| 1598 | We prefer reason or poetry according to whether basics are intelligible or not [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Is the arché (basis) intelligible, or is it chaos? Upon this question hinges all, for answering it determines whether poetry or logos is the form of human speech that best does justice to the world. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.139) |
| 1584 | Modern science, by aiming for clarity about the external world, has abandoned rationality in the human world [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: The modern scientific world view, with all its hope for clarity and precision, has a flipside, …which is its abandonment of rationality in the world of human significance. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.74) |
| 1591 | Unfortunately for reason, argument can't be used to establish the value of argument [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Unfortunately for the logos there is no argument that can, without begging the question, establish the goodness of argumentation. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.106) |
| 1599 | Attempts to suspend all presuppositions are hopeless, because a common ground must be agreed for the process [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: To debate about suspending all our presuppositions requires a common ground which, upon being established, immediately renders the debate superfluous. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.144) |
| 1605 | Reality can be viewed neutrally, or as an object of desire [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: There are two extremes: the Aristotelian views reality simply as reality, and the sophist or poet view reality only as an object of desire. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.199) |
| 1577 | Relativism is a disease which destroys the possibility of rational debate [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Relativism is disease, is pollution, for it negates the efficacy of logos. It destroys the possibility of a complete rational debate of fundamental questions. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.41) |
| 5210 | We could know what a lion thinks by mapping both its brain patterns and its experiences [Douglas,A] |
| Full Idea: In principle, it seems possible to monitor both the brain activity and the external experiences of a lion cub from birth, and by extensive mapping of one against the other to work out fairly accurately what a lion is thinking. | |
| From: Andy Douglas (talk [2003]) | |
| A reaction: This has limitations (e.g. we could monitor the external events, but not the way the lion experiences them), but it seems to me to offer a real theoretical possibility of breaching the mental privacy of an inarticulate creature. |
| 1596 | Reasoning aims not at the understanding of objects, but at the desire to give beautiful speeches [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Logos originates not in a cognitive capacity for the apprehension of objects, but in the desire to give birth to beautiful speeches. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.124) | |
| A reaction: It is hard for us to grasp this, but it might be quite life-enhancing if we could return to that old way of thought. |
| 1578 | If relativism is the correct account of human values, then rhetoric is more important than reasoning [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: If relativism offers an accurate description of human values, then rhetoric replaces logos as the most fundamental human activity. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.47) | |
| A reaction: Or putting it another way, logos (reason) becomes meaningless. I suppose, though, that a relativist can conduct conditional reasoning (but must belief in some rules of reason). |
| 6613 | The natural kinds are objects, processes and properties/relations [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: There are three hierarchies of natural kinds: objects or substances (substantive universals), events or processes (dynamic universals), and properties or relations (tropic universals). | |
| From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005], 91) | |
| A reaction: Most interesting here is the identifying of natural kinds with universals, making universals into the families of nature. Universals are high-level sets of natural kinds. To grasp universals you must see patterns, and infer the underlying order. |
| 6616 | Least action is not a causal law, but a 'global law', describing a global essence [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: The principle of least action is not a causal law, but is what I call a 'global law', which describes the essence of the global kind, which every object in the universe necessarily instantiates. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005]) | |
| A reaction: As a fan of essentialism I find this persuasive. If I inherit part of my essence from being a mammal, I inherit other parts of my essence from being an object, and all objects would share that essence, so it would look like a 'law' for all objects. |
| 6615 | A species requires a genus, and its essence includes the essence of the genus [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: A specific universal can exist only if the generic universal of which it is a species exists, but generic universals don't depend on species; …the essence of any genus is included in its species, but not conversely. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005], 91) | |
| A reaction: Thus the species 'electron' would be part of the genus 'lepton', or 'human' part of 'mammal'. The point of all this is to show how individual items connect up with the rest of the universe, giving rise to universal laws, such as Least Action. |
| 6614 | A hierarchy of natural kinds is elaborate ontology, but needed to explain natural laws [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: The hierarchy of natural kinds proposed by essentialism may be more elaborate than is strictly required for purposes of ontology, but it is necessary to explain the necessity of the laws of nature, and the universal applicability of global principles. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005], 91) | |
| A reaction: I am all in favour of elaborating ontology in the name of best explanation. There seem, though, to be some remaining ontological questions at the point where the explanations of essentialism run out. |
| 6612 | Without general principles, we couldn't predict the behaviour of dispositional properties [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: It is objected to dispositionalism that without the principle of least action, or some general principle of equal power, the specific dispositional properties of things could tell us very little about how these things would be disposed to behave. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005], 90) | |
| A reaction: Ellis attempts to meet this criticism, by placing dispositional properties within a hierarchy of broader properties. There remains a nagging doubt about how essentialism can account for space, time, order, and the existence of essences. |