8 ideas
| 7662 | Romanticism is the greatest change in the consciousness of the West [Berlin] |
| Full Idea: Romanticism seems to me the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred. | |
| From: Isaiah Berlin (The Roots of Romanticism [1965], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: Far be it from me to challenge Berlin on such things, but I think that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century (though acting more slowly and less dramatically than romanticism) may well be more significant in the long run. Ideas filter down. |
| 21570 | Numbers are just verbal conveniences, which can be analysed away [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Numbers are nothing but a verbal convenience, and disappear when the propositions that seem to contain them are fully written out. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Is Mathematics purely Linguistic? [1952], p.301) | |
| A reaction: This is the culmination of the process which began with his 1905 theory of definite descriptions. The intervening step was Wittgenstein's purely formal account of the logical connectives. |
| 13128 | 'Ultimate sortals' cannot explain ontological categories [Westerhoff on Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: 'Ultimate sortals' are said to be non-subordinated, disjoint from one another, and uniquely paired with each object. Because of this, the ultimate sortal cannot be a satisfactory explication of the notion of an ontological category. | |
| From: comment on David Wiggins (Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity [1971], p.75) by Jan Westerhoff - Ontological Categories §26 | |
| A reaction: My strong intuitions are that Wiggins is plain wrong, and Westerhoff gives the most promising reasons for my intuition. The simplest point is that objects can obviously belong to more than one category. |
| 7665 | Most Enlightenment thinkers believed that virtue consists ultimately in knowledge [Berlin] |
| Full Idea: What is common to most of the main thinker of the Enlightenment is the view that virtue consists ultimately in knowledge. | |
| From: Isaiah Berlin (The Roots of Romanticism [1965], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: I have always found this view (which seems to originate with Socrates) rather sympathetic. What is so frustrating about cheerful optimists who smoke cigarettes is not the weakness of will or strong desires, but their apparent failure of understanding. |
| 7676 | If we are essentially free wills, authenticity and sincerity are the highest virtues [Berlin] |
| Full Idea: Since (for romantics) we are wills, and we must be free, in the Kantian sense, controllable motives count more than consequences, and the greatest virtue of all is what existentialists call 'authenticity' and what romantics called 'sincerity'. | |
| From: Isaiah Berlin (The Roots of Romanticism [1965], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: The case of the sincere or authentic Nazi shows the problems with this. However, I agree that sincerity is a key virtue, perhaps the crucial preliminary to all the other virtues. It is hard to imagine a flow of other virtues from an insincere person. |
| 7664 | The Greeks have no notion of obligation or duty [Berlin] |
| Full Idea: There is an absence among the Greeks of a notion of obligation, and hence of duty, which is difficult to grasp for people who read the Greeks through spectacles partly affected by the jews. | |
| From: Isaiah Berlin (The Roots of Romanticism [1965], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This doesn't quite fit early section of 'Republic', in which morality is a mutual agreement not to do harm. Presumably the Greek word 'deon' refers to what needs to be done, rather than to anyone's obligation to do it(?). Contracts need duty? Cf. 4133 |
| 7677 | Central to existentialism is the romantic idea that there is nothing to lean on [Berlin] |
| Full Idea: The central sermon of existentialism is essentially a romantic one, namely, that there is in the world nothing to lean on. | |
| From: Isaiah Berlin (The Roots of Romanticism [1965], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: He tracks this back to Kant's view that our knowledge of the world arises out of our own minds. So what is there to lean on? Rational consistency? Natural human excellence? God? Pleasure? Anonymous duty? I like the second one. |
| 7663 | Judaism and Christianity views are based on paternal, family and tribal relations [Berlin] |
| Full Idea: The notion from which both Judaism and Christianity to a large degree sprang is the notion of family life, the relations of father and son, perhaps the relations of members of a tribe to one another. | |
| From: Isaiah Berlin (The Roots of Romanticism [1965], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: He compares this with Plato's mathematical view of reality. Key stories would be Abraham and Isaac, and Jesus being the 'son' of God, which both touch the killing of the child. Berlin means that the universe is explained this way. |