Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Confessions of a Philosopher', 'Evidentialism' and 'Truth and Method'

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5 ideas

7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 3. Being / a. Nature of Being
Only language is understandable Being [Gadamer]
     Full Idea: Being that can be understood is language.
     From: Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method [1960], p.450), quoted by Hans-Johann Glock - What is Analytic Philosophy? 5.2
     A reaction: [also 1967 p.19] Glock quotes this to show that continental philosophers are just as linguistic in their approach as the analytic school. I think the main aim of representational painting is to grasp non-linguistic Being.
11. Knowledge Aims / A. Knowledge / 4. Belief / c. Aim of beliefs
If the only aim is to believe truths, that justifies recklessly believing what is unsupported (if it is right) [Conee/Feldman]
     Full Idea: If it is intellectually required that one try to believe all and only truths (as Chisholm says), ...then it is possible to believe some unsubstantiated proposition in a reckless endeavour to believe a truth, and happen to be right.
     From: E Conee / R Feldman (Evidentialism [1985], 'Justification')
     A reaction: This implies doxastic voluntarism. Sorry! I meant, this implies that we can control what we believe, when actually we believe what impinges on us as facts.
13. Knowledge Criteria / A. Justification Problems / 2. Justification Challenges / c. Knowledge closure
We don't have the capacity to know all the logical consequences of our beliefs [Conee/Feldman]
     Full Idea: Our limited cognitive capacities lead Goldman to deny a principle instructing people to believe all the logical consequences of their beliefs, since they are unable to have the infinite number of beliefs that following such a principle would require.
     From: E Conee / R Feldman (Evidentialism [1985], 'Doxastic')
     A reaction: This doesn't sound like much of an objection to epistemic closure, which I took to be the claim that you know the 'known' entailments of your knowledge.
16. Persons / C. Self-Awareness / 3. Limits of Introspection
Why don't we experience or remember going to sleep at night? [Magee]
     Full Idea: As a child it was incomprehensible to me that I did not experience going to sleep, and never remembered it. When my sister said 'Nobody remembers that', I just thought 'How does she know?'
     From: Bryan Magee (Confessions of a Philosopher [1997], Ch.I)
     A reaction: This is actually evidence for something - that we do not have some sort of personal identity which is separate from consciousness, so that "I am conscious" would literally mean that an item has a property, which it can lose.
22. Metaethics / B. Value / 1. Nature of Value / b. Fact and value
Facts don't oppose values; they are integrated into each person's aspirations [Gadamer, by Zimmermann,J]
     Full Idea: Gadamer shows that we cannot oppose facts to values, but that all facts are integrated into meaningful wholes through a personal commitment to some kind of vision of how things ought to be.
     From: report of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method [1960]) by Jens Zimmermann - Hermeneutics: a very short introduction
     A reaction: Straw man here. Whoever said that facts were 'opposed' to values? Certainly not David Hume. Any sensible empiricist of that type would try to develop values that integrated nicely with the facts. Gadamer seems to be denying facts.