7 ideas
| 21238 | Later phenomenologists tried hard to incorporate social relationships [Bakewell] |
| Full Idea: Ever since Husserl, phenomenologists and existentialists had been trying to stretch the definition of existence to incorporate our social lives and relationships. | |
| From: Sarah Bakewell (At the Existentialist Café [2016], 08) | |
| A reaction: I see a parallel move in Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument. Husserl's later work seems to have been along those lines. Putnam's Twin Earth too. |
| 21237 | Phenomenology begins from the immediate, rather than from axioms and theories [Bakewell] |
| Full Idea: Traditional philosophy often started with abstract axioms or theories, but the German phenomenologists went straight for life as they experienced it, moment to moment. | |
| From: Sarah Bakewell (At the Existentialist Café [2016], 01) | |
| A reaction: Bakewell gives this as the gist of what Aron said to Sartre in 1933, providing the bridge from phenomenology to existentialism. The obvious thought is that everybody outside philosophy starts from immediate experience, so why is this philosophy? |
| 3539 | Personal identity is just causally related mental states [Parfit, by Maslin] |
| Full Idea: For Parfit all personal identity really amounts to is a chain of experiences and other psychological features causally related to each other in 'direct' sorts of ways. | |
| From: report of Derek Parfit (Personal Identity [1971]) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 10.5 | |
| A reaction: When summarised like this, it strikes me that Parfit is just false to our experience, whatever Hume may say. I suspect that Parfit (and those like him) concentrate too much on rather passive perceptual experience, and neglect the will. |
| 1393 | One of my future selves will not necessarily be me [Parfit] |
| Full Idea: If I say 'It will not be me, but one of my future selves', I do not imply that I will be that future self. He is one of my later selves, and I am one of his earlier selves. There is no underlying person we both are. | |
| From: Derek Parfit (Personal Identity [1971], §5) | |
| A reaction: The problem here seems to be explaining why I should care about my later self, if it isn't me. If the answer is only that it will be psychologically very similar to me, then I would care more about my current identical twin than about my future self. |
| 1392 | If we split like amoeba, we would be two people, neither of them being us [Parfit] |
| Full Idea: In the case of the man who, like an amoeba, divides….we can suggest that he survives as two different people without implying that he is those people. | |
| From: Derek Parfit (Personal Identity [1971], §1) | |
| A reaction: Maybe an amoeba is a homogeneous substance for which splitting is insignificant, but when a person has certain parts that are totally crucial, splitting them is catastrophic, and quite different. I'm not sure that splitting a self would leave persons. |
| 1391 | Concern for our own lives isn't the source of belief in identity, it is the result of it [Parfit] |
| Full Idea: Egoism, and the fear not of near but of distant death, and the regret that so much of one's life should have gone by - these are not, I think, wholly natural or instinctive. They are strengthened by a false belief in stable identity. | |
| From: Derek Parfit (Personal Identity [1971], §6) | |
| A reaction: This raises some very nice questions, about the extent to which various aspects of self-concern are instinctive and natural, or culturally induced, and even totally misguided and false. I can worry about the distant death of my guinea pig, or my grandson. |
| 17722 | The concept 'red' is tied to what actually individuates red things [Peacocke] |
| Full Idea: The possession conditions for the concept 'red' of the colour red are tied to those very conditions which individuate the colour red. | |
| From: Christopher Peacocke (Explaining the A Priori [2000], p.267), quoted by Carrie Jenkins - Grounding Concepts 2.5 | |
| A reaction: Jenkins reports that he therefore argues that we can learn something about the word 'red' from thinking about the concept 'red', which is his new theory of the a priori. I find 'possession conditions' and 'individuation' to be very woolly concepts. |