20 ideas
| 14767 | The demonstrations of the metaphysicians are all moonshine [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The demonstrations of the metaphysicians are all moonshine. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Concerning the Author [1897], p.2) |
| 14764 | I am saturated with the spirit of physical science [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: I am saturated, through and through, with the spirit of the physical sciences. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Concerning the Author [1897], p.1) |
| 14768 | Infallibility in science is just a joke [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Infallibility in scientific matters seems to me irresistibly comical. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Concerning the Author [1897], p.3) |
| 14765 | Association of ideas is the best philosophical idea of the prescientific age [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The doctrine of the association of ideas is, to my thinking, the finest piece of philosophical work of the prescientific ages. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Concerning the Author [1897], p.2) |
| 14766 | Duns Scotus offers perhaps the best logic and metaphysics for modern physical science [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The works of Duns Scotus have strongly influenced me. …His logic and metaphysics, torn away from its medievalism, …will go far toward supplying the philosophy which is best to harmonize with physical science. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Concerning the Author [1897], p.2) |
| 24016 | Consciousness always transcends itself [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: It is of the essence of consciousness to transcend itself | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |
| A reaction: As usual, I am a bit baffled by these sorts of pronouncement. Sounds like an oxymoron to me. Maybe it is a development of Schopenhauer's thought. |
| 7647 | The imagination alone perceives all objects; it is the soul, playing all its roles [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: The imagination alone perceives; it forms an idea of all objects, with the words and figures that characterise them; thus the imagination is the soul, because it plays all its roles. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.15) | |
| A reaction: This is not just a big claim for the importance of imagination, in strong opposition to Descartes's rather dismissive view (Idea 1399), but also appears to be the germ of an interesting theory about the nature of personal identity. |
| 7645 | When falling asleep, the soul becomes paralysed and weak, just like the body [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: The soul and body fall asleep together. The soul slowly becomes paralysed, together with all the body's muscles. They can no longer hold up the weight of the head, while the soul can no longer bear the burden of thought. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.6) | |
| A reaction: A very nice observation, to place alongside other evidence such as drunkenness and blushing. Personally I find it hard to see why anyone ever believed dualism. You don't need modern brain scans and brain lesion research to see the problem. |
| 23225 | The soul's faculties depend on the brain, and are simply the brain's organisation [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: All the soul's faculties depend so much on the specific organisation of the brain and of the whole body that they are clearly nothing but that organisation. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.26) | |
| A reaction: An interesting idea because it suggests that La Mettrie is a functionalist, rather than simply a reductive physicalist. |
| 7652 | Man is a machine, and there exists only one substance, diversely modified [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: Let us conclude boldly that man is a machine and that there is in the whole universe only one diversely modified substance. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.39) | |
| A reaction: What courage it must have taken to write what now seems a perfectly acceptable and normal view. One day there should be a collective monument to Hobbes, Gassendi, Spinoza, La Mettrie and Hume, who thought so boldly. |
| 24013 | An emotion and its object form a unity, so emotion is a mode of apprehension [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Emotion returns to its object every moment, and feeds upon it. …The emotional subject and the object of the emotion are united in an indissoluble synthesis. Emotion is a specific manner of apprehending the world. …[39] It is a transformation of the world. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |
| A reaction: The last sentence is the essence (or existence?) of Sartre's core theory of the emotions. They are, it seems, a mode of perception, like a colour filter added to a camera. I don't think I agree. I see them as a response to perceptions, not part of them. |
| 24017 | Emotion is one of our modes of understanding our Being-in-the-World [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Emotion is not an accident, it is a mode of our conscious existence, one of the ways in which consciousness understands (in Heidegger's sense of verstehen) its Being-in-the-World. …It has a meaning. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |
| A reaction: Calling emotions a 'mode' suggests that this way of understanding is intermittent, which seems wrong. Even performing arithmetical calculations is coloured by emotions, so they go deeper than a 'mode'. |
| 24014 | Emotions are a sort of bodily incantation which brings a magic to the world [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Joy is the magical behaviour which tries, by incantation, to realise the possession of the desired object as an instantaneous totality. [47] Emotions are all reducible to the constitution of a magic world by using our bodies as instruments of incantation. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |
| A reaction: I can't pretend to understand this, but I am reminded of the fact that the so-called primary qualities of perception are innately boring, and it is only the secondary qualities (like colour and smell) which make the world interesting. |
| 24015 | Emotions makes us believe in and live in a new world [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Emotion is a phenomenon of belief. Consciousness does not limit itself to the projection of affective meanings upon the world around it; it lives the new world it has thereby constituted. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be an implied anti-realism in this, since the emotions prevent us from relating more objectively to the world. The 'magic' seems to be compulsory. |
| 7650 | All thought is feeling, and rationality is the sensitive soul contemplating reasoning [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: Thought is only a capacity to feel, and the rational soul is only the sensitive soul applied to the contemplation of ideas and to reasoning. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.33) | |
| A reaction: What a very nice idea. La Mettrie wants to bring us closer to animals. Because we can pursue a train of rational thought, it does not follow that we have a faculty called 'rationality'. A dog can follow a clever series of clues that lead to food. |
| 7651 | With wonderful new machines being made, a speaking machine no longer seems impossible [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: If wonderful machines like Huygens's planetary clock can be made, it would take even more cogs and springs to make a speaking machine, which can no longer be considered impossible, particularly at the hands of a new Prometheus. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.34) | |
| A reaction: Compare Descartes in Idea 3614. The idea of artificial intelligence does not arise with the advent of computers; it follows naturally from the materialist view of the mind, along with a bit of ambition to build complex machines. |
| 20491 | States have a monopoly of legitimate violence [Sartre, by Wolff,J] |
| Full Idea: Max Weber observed that states possess a monopoly of legitimate violence. | |
| From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939]) by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) 2 'State' | |
| A reaction: This sounds rather hair-raising, and often is, but it sounds quite good if we describe it as a denial of legitimate violence to individual citizens. Hobbes would like it, since individual violence breaches some sort of natural contract. Guns in USA. |
| 7648 | The sun and rain weren't made for us; they sometimes burn us, or spoil our seeds [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: The sun was not made in order to heat the earth and all its inhabitants - whom it sometimes burns - any more than the rain was created in order to grow seeds - which it often spoils. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747]) | |
| A reaction: This denial of Aristotelian (and divine) teleology is as much part of the movement against religion, as are concerns about natural evil, and about the weakness of arguments for God's existence. These facts were obvious long before La Mettrie. |
| 7646 | There is no abrupt transition from man to animal; only language has opened a gap [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: From animals to man there is no abrupt transition. What was man before he invented words and learnt languages? An animal of a particular species, with much less natural instinct than the others. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.13) | |
| A reaction: This shows how strongly the evolutionary idea was in the air, a century before Darwin proposed a mechanism for it. This thought is the beginning of a very new view of man, and also of a very new view of animals. |
| 7649 | There is no clear idea of the soul, which should only refer to our thinking part [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: The soul is merely a vain term of which we have no idea and which a good mind should use only to refer to that part of us which thinks. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747]) | |
| A reaction: I have always found the concept of the soul particularly baffling. It seems that it is only believed in to make immortality possible, with no other purpose to the belief, let alone evidence. I suspect that Descartes agreed with La Mettrie on this. |