Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Putnam's Paradox' and 'A Conversation: what is it? What is it for?'

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18 ideas

1. Philosophy / C. History of Philosophy / 1. History of Philosophy

21844	The history of philosophy is an agent of power: how can you think if you haven't read the great names? [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the oppressor's role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: I find it hard to relate to this French 1960s obsession with everybody being oppressed in every conceivable way, so that 'liberation' is the only value that matters. If you ask why liberty is needed, you seem to have missed the point.

1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 1. Philosophy

21849	Thought should be thrown like a stone from a war-machine [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: Thought should be thrown like a stone by a war-machine. …Isn't this what Nietzsche does with an aphorism?
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II)
	A reaction: It sounds as if philosophy should consist of nothing but aphorisms.

1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 5. Aims of Philosophy / a. Philosophy as worldly

21845	Philosophy aims to become the official language, supporting orthodoxy and the state [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: Philosophy is shot through with the project of becoming the official language of a Pure State. The exercise of thought thus conforms to the goals of the real State, to the dominant meanings and to the requirements of the established order.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: [He cites Nietzsche's 'Schopenhauer as Educator' as the source of this] Is Karl Marx included in this generalisation, or Diogenes of Sinope? Is conservative philosophy thereby invalidated?

1. Philosophy / F. Analytic Philosophy / 7. Limitations of Analysis

21839	When I meet objections I just move on; they never contribute anything [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: Not reflection, and objections are even worse. Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: 'OK, OK, let's get on to something else'. Objections have never contributed anything.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: I know it is heresy in analytic philosophy, but I love this! In analytic seminars you can barely complete your first sentence before someone interrupts. It's like road range - the philosophical mind state is always poised to attack, attack.

1. Philosophy / H. Continental Philosophy / 1. Continental Philosophy

21841	We must create new words, and treat them as normal, and as if designating real things. [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: This sounds like the attitude of someone creating a computer game. A language game! The idea is to create concepts with which to 'palpitate' our conceptual scheme, in order to reveal it, and thus put it within our power.

2. Reason / C. Styles of Reason / 1. Dialectic

21842	Don't assess ideas for truth or justice; look for another idea, and establish a relationship with it [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: Neither relativism nor dialectic. Sounds like just having fun with ideas, but a commentator tells me it is a strategy for liberating our thought, following an agenda created by Nietzsche.

21850	Dualisms can be undone from within, by tracing connections, and drawing them to a new path [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: It is always possible to undo dualisms from the inside, by tracing the line of flight which passes between the two terms or the two sets …and which draws both into a non-parallel evolution. At least this does not belong to the dialectic.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II)
	A reaction: Deleuze disliked Hegel's version of the dialectic. Not clear what he means here, but he is evidently groping for an alternative account of the reasoning process, which is interesting. Deleuze hates rigid dualisms.

5. Theory of Logic / J. Model Theory in Logic / 2. Isomorphisms

14212	A consistent theory just needs one model; isomorphic versions will do too, and large domains provide those [Lewis]
	Full Idea: A consistent theory is, by definition, one satisfied by some model; an isomorphic image of a model satisfies the same theories as the original model; to provide the making of an isomorphic image of any given model, a domain need only be large enough.
	From: David Lewis (Putnam's Paradox [1984], 'Why Model')
	A reaction: This is laying out the ground for Putnam's model theory argument in favour of anti-realism. If you are chasing the one true model of reality, then formal model theory doesn't seem to offer much encouragement.

5. Theory of Logic / L. Paradox / 2. Aporiai

21838	Before we seek solutions, it is important to invent problems [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: The art of constructing a problem is very important: you invent a problem, a problem-position, before finding a solution.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: I get the impression that Deleuze prefers problems to solutions, so the activity of exploring the problem is all that really matters. Sceptics accuse philosophers of inventing pseudo-problems. We must first know why 'problematising' is good.

7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 3. Being / i. Deflating being

21847	Before Being there is politics [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: Before Being there is politics.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: [He says he is quoting Felix Guattari] I can only think that this is a very Marxist view - that politics permeates and dictates everything. This seems to tell me that I am forever controlled by something so deep and vast that I can never understand it.

7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 4. Anti-realism

14213	Anti-realists see the world as imaginary, or lacking joints, or beyond reference, or beyond truth [Lewis]
	Full Idea: Anti-realists say the only world is imaginary, or only has the parts or classes or relations we divide it into, or doubt that reference to the world is possible, or doubt that our interpretations can achieve truth.
	From: David Lewis (Putnam's Paradox [1984], 'Why Anti-R')
	A reaction: [compression of a paragraph on anti-realism] Lewis is a thoroughgoing realist. A nice example of the rhetorical device of ridiculing an opponent by suggesting that they don't even know what they themselves believe.

9. Objects / C. Structure of Objects / 8. Parts of Objects / b. Sums of parts

14210	A gerrymandered mereological sum can be a mess, but still have natural joints [Lewis]
	Full Idea: The mereological sum of the coffee in my cup, the ink in this sentence, a nearby sparrow, and my left shoe is a miscellaneous mess of an object, yet its boundaries are by no means unrelated to the joints of nature.
	From: David Lewis (Putnam's Paradox [1984], 'What Might')
	A reaction: In that case they do, but if there are no atoms at the root of physics then presumably their could also be thoroughly jointless assemblages, involving probability distributions etc. Even random scattered atoms seem rather short of joints.

15. Nature of Minds / A. Nature of Mind / 1. Mind / d. Location of mind

21840	A meeting of man and animal can be deterritorialization (like a wasp with an orchid) [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: The wasp becomes part of the orchid's reproductive apparatus at the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp. …There are becomings where a man and an animal only meet on the trajectory of a common but asymmetrical deterritorialization.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: [second bit compressed] The point here is to illustrate 'deterritorialization', a term which Deleuze got from Guattari. It seems to be where the margins of your being become unclear. Recall the externalist, anti-individualist view of mind.

16. Persons / E. Rejecting the Self / 1. Self as Indeterminate

21843	People consist of many undetermined lines, some rigid, some supple, some 'lines of flight' [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: Things, people, are made up of varied lines, and they do not necessarily know which line they are on or where they should make the line which they are tracing pass; there is a whole geography in people, with rigid lines, supple lines, lines of flight etc.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: An example of Deleuze creating a novel concept, in order to generate a liberating way of seeing our lives. His big focus is on 'lines of flight' (which, I think, are less restrained by local culture than the others).

19. Language / B. Reference / 3. Direct Reference / b. Causal reference

14215	Causal theories of reference make errors in reference easy [Lewis]
	Full Idea: Whatever happens in special cases, causal theories usually make it easy to be wrong about the thing we refer to.
	From: David Lewis (Putnam's Paradox [1984], 'What Is')
	A reaction: I suppose the point of this is that there are no checks and balances to keep reference in focus, but just a requirement to keep connected to an increasingly attenuated causal chain.

19. Language / B. Reference / 4. Descriptive Reference / b. Reference by description

14209	Descriptive theories remain part of the theory of reference (with seven mild modifications) [Lewis]
	Full Idea: Description theories of reference are supposed to have been well and truly refuted. I think not: ..it is still tenable with my seven points, and part of the truth of reference [7: rigidity, egocentric, tokens, causal, imperfect, indeterminate, families].
	From: David Lewis (Putnam's Paradox [1984], 'Glob Desc')
	A reaction: (The bit at the end refers to his seven points, on p.59). He calls his basic proposal 'causal descriptivism', incorporating his seven slight modifications of traditional descriptivism about reference.

21. Aesthetics / C. Artistic Issues / 7. Art and Morality

468	Musical performance can reveal a range of virtues [Damon of Ath.]
	Full Idea: In singing and playing the lyre, a boy will be likely to reveal not only courage and moderation, but also justice.
	From: Damon (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B4), quoted by (who?) - where?

25. Social Practice / A. Freedoms / 2. Freedom of belief

21848	Some lines (of flight) are becomings which escape the system [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: There are lines which do not amount to the path of a point, which break free from structure - lines of flight, becomings, without future or past, without memory, which resist the binary machine. …The rhizome is all this.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II)
	A reaction: The binary machine enforces simplistic either/or choices. I assume the 'lines' are to replace the Self, with something much more indeterminate, active and changing.