43 ideas
| 22496 | Wisdom only implies the knowledge achievable in any normal lifetime [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Wisdom implies no more knowledge and understanding than anyone of normal capacity can and should acquire in the course of an ordinary life. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 5) | |
| A reaction: Have philosophers stopped talking about wisdom precisely because you now need three university degrees to be considered even remotely good at phillosophy? Hence wisdom is an inferior attainment, because Foot is right. |
| 8927 | Philosophy moves essentially in the element of universality [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy moves essentially in the element of universality. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 01) | |
| A reaction: I would take this to be uncontroversially correct. An interesting test case is applied ethics, which seems embedded in current cultural practices. I would always take it to be searching for what is universal in each situation. |
| 21776 | Philosophy aims to reveal the necessity and rationality of the categories of nature and spirit [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, philosophy's principal task is to disclose the enduring necessity and rationality of the categories and forms of nature and spirit that it examines. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 4 'Phenomenology' | |
| A reaction: The idea that a miserable little evolved and transient mammal on a tiny planet has direct insight into the necessities and categories of nature and spirit looks a shade optimistic to me. You have to admire the ambition, though. |
| 8935 | Without philosophy, science is barren and futile [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Let other sciences try to argue as much as they like without philosophy - without it they can have in them neither life, Spirit, nor truth. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 67) | |
| A reaction: To be pinned up in every physics laboratory in the world. On the whole I agree with this. My slogan is 'science is the servant of philosophy'. An unphilosophical scientist is just a technologist, an artisan. |
| 22082 | Truth does not appear by asserting reasons and then counter-reasons [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: It is not difficult to see that the way of asserting a proposition, adducing reasons for it, and in the same way refuting its opposite by reasons, is not the form in which truth can appear. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], p.28), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - Hegel p.100 | |
| A reaction: This is a pretty good description of the way Plato and Aristotle do philosophy, so this idea, which must be a founding idea for the 'continental school', is extremely radical. Personally I identify rationality with believing things for good reasons. |
| 22035 | The structure of reason is a social and historical achievement [Hegel, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: The lesson of Hegel's Phenomenology was that the structure of reason was social, and was therefore a historical achievement. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 10 | |
| A reaction: This must be one of the most influential ideas to have filtered into the modern world. It is a predecessor of Marxist sociology. The idea that stands against it is Frege's platonist view of logic, making it necessary, despite being historical. |
| 8932 | Truth does not come from giving reasons for and against propositions [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The way of asserting a proposition, adducing reasons for it, and in the same way refuting its opposite by reasons, is not the form in which truth can appear. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 48) | |
| A reaction: I can't see Plato or Aristotle agreeing with this. It is obviously the prelude to Hegel's dialectical account of reasoning. However, if we don't believe things because we have good reason to, I'm not sure where we shoud start. |
| 7077 | The true is the whole [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The true is the whole. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 20) | |
| A reaction: This is the full idealist coherence view of truth, that one only approaches the Truth (capital T) as one builds up a more and more coherent picture. It makes truth unattainable, and that strikes me as a bit silly. |
| 15611 | I develop philosophical science from the simplest appearance of immediate consciousness [Hegel, by Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In my 'Phenomenology of Spirit' the procedure adopted was to begin from the first and simplest appearance of the spirit, from immediate consciousness, and to develop the dialectic right up to the standpoint of philosophical science. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Georg W.F.Hegel - Logic (Encyclopedia I) §25 Rem | |
| A reaction: I take metaphysics to be either Parmenidean (starting from Being) or Cartesian (starting from mind), and this (surprisingly, given his lengthy talk of Being) shows Hegel to be a quintessentially Cartesian philosopher. Aristotle is the great Parmenidean. |
| 8934 | Being is Thought [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Being is Thought. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 54) | |
| A reaction: You won't find a more succinct slogan for idealism than that. Speaking as what Tim Williamson (referring to himself) calls a 'rottweiler realist', I can't quite get the hang of Hegel's claim. What does he think thought is, if it isn't about the world? |
| 8928 | The Absolute is not supposed to be comprehended, but felt and intuited [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The Absolute is not supposed to be comprehended, it is to be felt and intuited. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 06) | |
| A reaction: Hegel was a rather romantic philosopher. Where does the 'supposed' come from? If the Absolute is only felt and intuited, can the resulting apprehensions be reported to others? Is this, in fact, mysticism? |
| 21774 | Genuine idealism is seeing the ideal structure of the world [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: Genuine (as opposed to subjective) idealism, for Hegel, is the point of view that knows the world to have a rational, and therefore 'ideal', structure. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 04 'The Unhappy' | |
| A reaction: Compare Leibniz, whose monad theory is said to be a sort of idealism, because it places ideas at the heart of reality. Is Plato also this sort of 'genuine' idealism? Do we need different terms for 'genuine' and 'subjective' idealism? And 'transcendental'? |
| 8929 | In the Absolute everything is the same [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In the Absolute everything is the same. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 16) | |
| A reaction: This is indistinguishable from the great spherical reality of Parmenides. It is not unreasonable to enquire about the epistemology of this claim. Is Hegel a seer, or can we all intuit this insight into reality? |
| 21773 | Experience is immediacy, unity, forces, self-awareness, reason, culture, absolute being [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: Experience moves from 1) immediacy, to 2) united objects with properties, 3) its forces and laws, 4) self-consciousness in the process, 5) seeing a rational realm, 6) seeing a cultural realm, 7) seeing the absolute being of consciousness. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 03 'From certainty' | |
| A reaction: [My summary of Houlgate's summary of the key sequence of ideas in The Phenomenology of Spirit]. I stare at it with bewilderment, but cannot decide whether or not Hegel is pursuing a worthwhile project. [also Houlgate p.77 and 102] |
| 22033 | Hegel tried to avoid Kant's dualism of neutral intuitions and imposed concepts [Hegel, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Hegel tried to avoid the untenable Kantian dualism between concepts and intuitions, and the Kantian mechanism of the 'imposition' of concepts on sensibility entailed by that dualism (with intuition having neutral content). | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 09 | |
| A reaction: [Pinker is describing the opening of Phenomenology] In modern discussions this concerns the idea of The Given, which is wholly uninterpreted raw experience. Sellars and MacDowell. Kant seems to split an agent into two (Master/Slave). |
| 21771 | Consciousness derives its criterion of knowledge from direct knowledge of its own being [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In what consciousness affirms from within itself as being-in-itself or the True we have the standard which consciousness itself sets up by which to measure what it knows. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], p.053), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 03 'The Method' | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a very close relation of Descartes' 'clear and distinct conceptions'. This certainly places Hegel in the Rationalist camp. |
| 20741 | Consciousness is shaped dialectically, by opposing forces and concepts [Hegel, by Aho] |
| Full Idea: In 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' Hegel offers a panoptic account of Western consciousness as a dialectical process shaped by opposing principles - such as subject/object, freedom/determinism, temporal/eternal, and particular/universal. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 2 'Subjective' | |
| A reaction: A helpful pointer, for us poor analytic philosophers, who stare in bewilderment at Hegel's stuff, despite its apparent importance. At moment it is the politics that strikes me as most interesting in Hegel. This is cultured consciousness, pre-Marx. |
| 21770 | Consciousness is both of objects, and of itself [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], p.052), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 03 'The Method' | |
| A reaction: Hume challenges whether there is any knowledge of consciousness purely in itself. Schopenhauer flatly disagreed (Idea 4166) - but then he would, wouldn't he? |
| 5647 | Hegel claims knowledge of self presupposes desire, and hence objects [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Hegel seems to argue that the immediate knowledge of self (the Cartesian premise) presupposes the activity that constitutes the self, and this presupposes desire, and hence the knowledge of objects. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.12 | |
| A reaction: This hardly amounts to an argument, but I find it quite sympathetic as a claim. It fits comfortably with modern externalist accounts of thought. While solipsism seems a logical possibility, it hardly amounts to a coherent account of mental life. |
| 5648 | For Hegel knowledge of self presupposes objects, and also a public and moral social world [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Hegel tries to show that knowledge of self as subject presupposes not just knowledge of objects, but knowledge of a public social world, in which there is moral order and civic trust. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.12 | |
| A reaction: This is not far off Wittgenstein's private language argument. It is also Popper's 'World Three', of society and language. Human reality is incomprehensible without some recognition of the culture in which we immerse, like fish in water. |
| 23694 | All criterions of practical rationality derive from goodness of will [Foot] |
| Full Idea: I want to say, baldly, that there is no criterion for practical rationality that is not derived from that of goodness of will. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 1) | |
| A reaction: Where does that put the successful and clever criminal? Presumably they are broadly irrational, but narrowly rational - but that is not very clear distinction. She says Kant's concept of the good will is too pure, and unrelated to human good. |
| 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? |
| 23686 | Moral reason is not just neutral, because morality is part of the standard of rationality [Foot, by Hacker-Wright] |
| Full Idea: In her late period she again reverses her thoughts on moral rationalism; …rather than a neutral rationality which fulfils desires, she argues that morality ought to be thought of as part of the standard of rationality itself. | |
| From: report of Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001]) by John Hacker-Wright - Philippa Foot's Moral Thought Intro | |
| A reaction: This comes much closer to the Greek and Aristotelian concept of logos. They saw morality as inseparable from our judgements about how the world is. All 'sensible' thinking will involve what is good for humanity. |
| 23693 | Practical rationality must weigh both what is morally and what is non-morally required [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Different considerations are on a par, in that judgement about what is required by practical rationality must take account of their interaction: of the weight of the ones we call non-moral as well as those we call moral. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 1) | |
| A reaction: Her final settled view of rationalism in morality, it seems. The point is that moral considerations are not paramount, because she sees possible justifications for ignoring moral rules (like 'don't lie') in certain practical situations. |
| 23687 | Moral virtues arise from human nature, as part of what makes us good human beings [Foot, by Hacker-Wright] |
| Full Idea: In her later work she offers a view of the relationship of morality to human nature, arguing that the moral virtues are part of what makes us good as human beings. | |
| From: report of Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001]) by John Hacker-Wright - Philippa Foot's Moral Thought Intro | |
| A reaction: In this phase she talks explicitly of the Aristotelian idea that successful function is the grounding of what is good for any living being, including humans. |
| 22492 | Virtues are as necessary to humans as stings are to bees [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Virtues play a necessary part in the life of human beings as do stings in the life of a bee. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 2) | |
| A reaction: This presumably rests on the Aristotelian idea that humans are essentially social (as opposed to solitary humans who choose to be social, perhaps in a contractual way, as Plato implies). |
| 22493 | Sterility is a human defect, but the choice to be childless is not [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Lack of capacity to reproduce is a defect in a human being. But choice of childlessness and even celibacy is not thereby shown to be defective choice, because human good is not the same as plant or animal good. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 3) | |
| A reaction: Is failure to reproduce a defect in an animal? If goodness and virtue derive from function, it is hard to see how deliberate childlessness could be a human good, even if it is not a defect. Choosing to terminate a hereditary defect seems good. |
| 22491 | Moral evaluations are not separate from facts, but concern particular facts about functioning [Foot] |
| Full Idea: A moral evaluation does not stand over against the statement of a matter of fact, but rather has to do with facts about a particular subject matter, as do evaluations of such things as sight and hearing in animals. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 1) | |
| A reaction: She avoids the word 'function', and only deals with living creatures, but she uses a 'good knife' as an example, and this Aristotelian view clearly applies to any machine which has a function. |
| 22497 | Deep happiness usually comes from the basic things in life [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Possible objects of deep happiness seem to be things that are basic in human life, such as home, and family, and work, and friendship. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 6) | |
| A reaction: I've not encountered discussion of 'deep' happiness before. I heard of an old man in tears because he had just seen a Purple Emperor butterfly for the first time. She makes it sound very conservative. How about mountaineering achievements? |
| 22498 | Happiness is enjoying the pursuit and attainment of right ends [Foot] |
| Full Idea: In my terminology 'happiness' is understood as the enjoyment of good things, meaning the enjoyment in attaining, and in pursuing, right ends. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 6) | |
| A reaction: A modified version of Aristotle's view, which she contrasts with McDowell's identification of happiness with the life of virtue. They all seem to have an optimistic hope that the pleasure in being a bit wicked is false happiness. |
| 23695 | Good actions can never be justified by the good they brings to their agent [Foot] |
| Full Idea: There is no good case for assessing the goodness of human action by reference only to good that each person brings to himself. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 1) | |
| A reaction: She observes that even non-human animals often act for non-selfish reasons. The significance of this is its rejection of her much earlier view that virtues are justified by the good they bring their possessor. |
| 22499 | We all know that just pretending to be someone's friend is not the good life [Foot] |
| Full Idea: We know perfectly well that it is not true that the best life would consist in successfully pretending friendship: having friends to serve one but without being a real friend oneself. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 7) | |
| A reaction: For some skallywags the achieving of something for nothing seems to be very much the good life, but not many of them want to exploit people who are seen to be their friends. |
| 22495 | Someone is a good person because of their rational will, not their body or memory [Foot] |
| Full Idea: To speak of a good person is to speak of an individual not in respect of his body, or of faculties such as sight and memory, but as concerns his rational will (his 'will as controllable by reason'). | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 5) | |
| A reaction: She more or less agrees with Kant that the only truly good moral thing is a good will, though she has plenty of other criticisms of his views. |
| 8930 | The in-itself must become for-itself, which requires self-consciousness [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The in-itself has to express itself outwardly and become for itself, and this means simply that it has to posit self-consciousness as one with itself. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 26) | |
| A reaction: This famous distinction seems to be at the core of idealism, but also to be the germ of existentialism (prior to Kierkegaard), which builds on this view of what it means to exist as an individual. Self-consciousness in nature is inevitable? |
| 22502 | Refraining from murder is not made good by authenticity or self-fulfilment [Foot] |
| Full Idea: If a stranger should come on us when we are sleeping he will not think it all right to kill us. …In human life as it is, this kind of action is not made good by authenticity or self-fulfilment in the one who does it. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness [2001], 7) | |
| A reaction: A rare swipe from Foot at existentialism, which she hardly ever mentions. I find it hard to see these existential virtues as in any way moral. It means nothing to other citizens whether one of their number is 'authentic'. |
| 22034 | Modern life needs individuality, but must recognise that human agency is social [Hegel, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Hegel argued that the modern world necessarily had to make space for individuals and their inviolable conscience, while not becoming so individualistic that it failed to acknowledge the deep sociality of human agency. ...Subjectivity became a right. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 09 | |
| A reaction: [at the end of the chapter on the history of Geist in the Phenomenology] Conservatives, revolutionaries and communitarians all claim Hegel as their own. The sociality is a matter of mutual law-giving, as in the Master/Slave. |
| 8936 | Human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 69) | |
| A reaction: A lovely slogan, that makes Hegel the father of the communitarian movement. The politics of Hegel can, of course, be sinister, so one must proceed with care, and study history to see where it can all go wrong. |
| 21987 | History is the progress of the consciousness of freedom [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The History of the World is none other than than the progress of the consciousness of freedom. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]), quoted by Peter Singer - Marx 2 | |
| A reaction: [no ref given] Presumably there is an evolutionary view implicit in this. Presumably also later generations are hereby superior to previous generations. Since no one still has this view of history, does that invalidate Hegel? |
| 8931 | The movement of pure essences constitutes the nature of scientific method [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The movement of pure essences constitutes the nature of scientific method in general. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 34) | |
| A reaction: This would appear to be precisely the idea of scientific essentialism - if he is saying that science seeks to understand the movement (or power) of essences as they occur in nature. |
| 8933 | Science confronts the inner necessities of objects [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Scientific cognition demands surrender to the life of the object, or, what amounts to the same thing, confronting and expressing its inner necessity. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], Pref 53) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a much better account of what science tries to do than all the modern talk about laws and theories. |
| 21775 | The God of revealed religion can only be understood through pure speculative knowledge [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: God is attainable in pure speculative knowledge alone and is only in that knowledge, and is only that knowledge itself, for He is Spirit; and this speculative knowledge is the knowledge of revealed religion. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], p.461), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 04 'Absolute' | |
| A reaction: If you were hoping to find out why Hegel believed in God, I fear this is the best evidence available. He is evidently opposed to natural theology. Hegel's language makes it very hard to grasp how we sees the nature of God. |
| 6917 | God is the essence of thought, abstracted from the thinker [Hegel, by Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: In Hegel the essence of God is actually nothing other than the essence of thought, or thought abstracted from the ego, that is, from the one who thinks. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Ludwig Feuerbach - Principles of Philosophy of the Future §23 | |
| A reaction: Presumably Descartes' Cogito is the origin for this train of thought. This is Feuerbach's reading of Hegel, but the former was keen on the idea of God as idealised humanity. |
| 6915 | Hegel made the last attempt to restore Christianity, which philosophy had destroyed [Hegel, by Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: The Hegelian philosophy is the last magnificent attempt to restore Christianity, which was lost and wrecked, through philosophy, and to restore Christianity (as usual in the modern era) by identifying it with the negation of Christianity. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]) by Ludwig Feuerbach - Principles of Philosophy of the Future §21 | |
| A reaction: What is meant by the 'negation' of Christianity needs some untangling, but I suspect that a lot of 'continental' philosophy 1750-1950 is to do with Christianity, unlike British empiricism, which is intrinsically atheistic. |