11 ideas
| 5300 | Philosophers have interpreted the world, but the point is to change it [Marx] |
| Full Idea: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. | |
| From: Karl Marx (Theses on Feuerbach [1846], §XI) | |
| A reaction: The 'point' of what? Personally I am more with Aristotle - that the aim is to create a society in which we can all aspire to contemplate like gods. As an interim statement of aim, though, one must respect Marx. But was he a philosopher? |
| 5297 | Whether human thinking can be 'true' must be decided in practice, not theory [Marx] |
| Full Idea: The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question; man must prove the truth of his thinking in practice. | |
| From: Karl Marx (Theses on Feuerbach [1846], §II) | |
| A reaction: This would appear to be an assertion of the pragmatic view of truth well before Peirce. The obvious objections arise, such as whether falsehood (Plato's 'noble lie') might not have equal practical success, and whether truth might be disastrous. |
| 17304 | As causation links across time, grounding links the world across levels [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: Grounding is something like metaphysical causation. Just as causation links the world across time, grounding links the world across levels. Grounding connects the more fundamental to the less fundamental, and thereby backs a certain form of explanation. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (Grounding, Transitivity and Contrastivity [2012], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Obviously you need 'levels' for this, which we should take to be structural levels. |
| 17306 | If ground is transitive and irreflexive, it has a strict partial ordering, giving structure [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: By treating grounding as transitive (and irreflexive), one generates a strict partial ordering that induces metaphysical structure. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (Grounding, Transitivity and Contrastivity [2012], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Schaffer's paper goes on to attach the claim that grounding is transitive, but I didn't find his examples very convincing. |
| 17308 | Explaining 'Adam ate the apple' depends on emphasis, and thus implies a contrast [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: Explaining why ADAM ate the apple is a different matter from explaining why he ATE the apple, and from why he ate THE APPLE. ...In my view the best explanations incorporate ....contrastive information. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (Grounding, Transitivity and Contrastivity [2012], 4.3.1) | |
| A reaction: But why are the contrasts Eve, or throwing it, or a pear? It occurs to me that this is wrong! The contrast is with anything else which could have gone in subject, verb or object position. It is a matter of categories, not of contrasts. |
| 22598 | The authentic self exists at the level of class, rather than the individual [Marx, by Dunt] |
| Full Idea: Instead of focusing on the individual, Marxism suggested that the authentic self was at the social level in the form of class. | |
| From: report of Karl Marx (Theses on Feuerbach [1846]) by Ian Dunt - How to be a Liberal 6 | |
| A reaction: [not sure of the best source in Marx] This idea is expressed here by a defender of liberal individualism. Dunt persuasively attacks any concept of the self as part of some group, rather than as being an individual. |
| 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? |
| 5298 | The human essence is not found in individuals but in social relations [Marx] |
| Full Idea: The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual; in its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. | |
| From: Karl Marx (Theses on Feuerbach [1846], §VI) | |
| A reaction: This is a key Marxist doctrine, and the central difference from Aristotle. Personally I am more with Aristotle, but the truth obviously lies somewhere in between. Man must be a 'social being', or there wouldn't be any social relations. |
| 17305 | I take what is fundamental to be the whole spatiotemporal manifold and its fields [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: I myself would prefer to speak of what is fundamental in terms of the whole spatiotemporal manifold and the fields that permeate it, with parts counting as derivative of the whole. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (Grounding, Transitivity and Contrastivity [2012], 4.1.1) | |
| A reaction: Not quite the Parmenidean One, since it has parts, but a nice try at updating the great man. Note the reference to 'fields', suggesting that this view is grounded in the physics rather than metaphysics. How many fields has it got? |
| 17307 | Nowadays causation is usually understood in terms of equations and variable ranges [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: The leading treatments of causation work within 'structural equation models', with events represented via variables each of which is allotted a range of permitted values, which constitute a 'contrast space'. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (Grounding, Transitivity and Contrastivity [2012], 4.3.1) | |
| A reaction: Like Woodward's idea that causation is a graph, this seems to be a matter of plotting or formalising correlations between activities, which is a very Humean approach to causation. |
| 5299 | Religious feeling is social in origin [Marx] |
| Full Idea: The "religious sentiment" (discussed by Feuerbach) is itself a social product. | |
| From: Karl Marx (Theses on Feuerbach [1846], §VII) | |
| A reaction: Recent brain research has identified a part of the brain which is only active during religious thought and experience. It is easy to produce cynical political accounts of religion, but in its time it was also quite a good scientific account of nature. |