Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'works', 'Time and Free Will' and 'Nietzsche's System'

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7 ideas

1. Philosophy / E. Nature of Metaphysics / 3. Metaphysical Systems

20349	Metaphysics aims at the essence of things, and a system to show how this explains other truths [Richardson]
	Full Idea: The core of metaphysics is an account of the 'essence' or 'being' of things. ...And metaphysics needs system, to show how these primary truths reach out into all the other truths, to help us see that, and how, they are true.
	From: John Richardson (Nietzsche's System [2002], Intro)
	A reaction: I like the phrase 'the essential nature' of things, because it doesn't invoke rather dodgy entities called 'essences', but everyone understands the idea of focusing on what is essential, and on things having a distinct 'nature'.

20351	Metaphysics needs systems, because analysis just obsesses over details [Richardson]
	Full Idea: Metaphysics makes system a virtue, contrary to the tendency of analysis, which breaks a problem into ever finer parts and then absorbs itself in these.
	From: John Richardson (Nietzsche's System [2002], Intro)
	A reaction: I disagree, because it seems to rule out analytic metaphysics. I prefer Bertrand Russell's view. Admittedly analysis oftens gets stuck in the bog, especially if it hopes for salvation in logic, only to discover its certainties endlessly receding.

20350	Metaphysics generalises the data, to get at the ontology [Richardson]
	Full Idea: The evidence lies at the periphery of the [metaphysical] system and runs in from there, through decreasingly specific accounts of the data, to the central ontology.
	From: John Richardson (Nietzsche's System [2002], Intro)
	A reaction: Philosophy is the study of high level generalisations, IMHO. Studying them means studying the reasons for asserting them. Richardson puts it very nicely.

17. Mind and Body / E. Mind as Physical / 5. Causal Argument

22100	Experienced time means no two mental moments are ever alike [Bergson]
	Full Idea: If duration [experienced time] is what we say, deep-seated psychic states are radically heterogeneous to each other, and it is impossible that any two of them should be quite alike, since they are two different moments in a life-story.
	From: Henri Bergson (Time and Free Will [1889], p.220), quoted by Pete A.Y. Gunter - Bergson p.174
	A reaction: This implies that we are intrinsically unpredictable, and there certainly can't be a regularity account of mental causation. The sense of time is said to make the self radically different from the rest of reality. Bergson later rejected dualism.

24. Political Theory / A. Basis of a State / 1. A People / a. Human distinctiveness

20356	Humans dominate because, unlike other animals, they have a synthesis of conflicting drives [Richardson]
	Full Idea: In contrast to the other animals, man has cultivated an abundance of contrary drives and impulses within himself: thanks to this synthesis, he is master of the earth.
	From: John Richardson (Nietzsche's System [2002], §966)
	A reaction: If this is true, it presents the fundamental challenge of politicial philosophy - to visual a successful social system for a creature which does not have a clear and focused nature. For Nietzsche, this 'synthesis' continually evolves.

26. Natural Theory / C. Causation / 7. Eliminating causation

20366	A mind that could see cause and effect as a continuum would deny cause and effect [Richardson]
	Full Idea: An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux, and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect.
	From: John Richardson (Nietzsche's System [2002], §112)
	A reaction: Maybe we do see it as a continuum? The racket swings and the ball is propelled, but the contact is a unity, not two separate events.

26. Natural Theory / D. Laws of Nature / 9. Counterfactual Claims

4398	An event causes another just if the second event would not have happened without the first [Lewis, by Psillos]
	Full Idea: Lewis gives an account of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals (roughly, an event c causes an event e iff if c had not happened then e would not have happened either).
	From: report of David Lewis (works [1973]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation Intro
	A reaction: This feels wrong to me. It is a version of Humean constant conjunction, but counterfactuals are too much a feature of our minds, and not sufficiently a feature of the world, to do this job. Tricky.