7 ideas
| 19588 | The highest aim of philosophy is to combine all philosophies into a unity [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: He attains the maximum of a philosopher who combines all philosophies into a single philosophy | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 31) | |
| A reaction: I have found the epigraph for my big book! Recently a few narrowly analytical philosophers have attempted big books about everything (Sider, Heil, Chalmers), and they get a huge round of applause from me. |
| 19598 | Philosophy relies on our whole system of learning, and can thus never be complete [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Now all learning is connected - thus philosophy will never be complete. Only in the complete system of all learning will philosophy be truly visible. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 39) | |
| A reaction: Philosophy is evidently the unifying subject, which reveals the point of all the other subjects. It matches my maxim that 'science is the servant of philosophy'. |
| 19586 | Philosophers feed on problems, hoping they are digestible, and spiced with paradox [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher lives on problems as the human being does on food. An insoluble problem is an indigestible food. What spice is to food, the paradoxical is to problems. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 09) | |
| A reaction: Novalis would presumably have disliked Hegel's dialectic, where the best food seems to be the indigestible. |
| 19587 | Philosophy aims to produce a priori an absolute and artistic world system [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy ...is the art of producing all our conceptions according to an absolute, artistic idea and of developing the thought of a world system a priori out of the depths of our spirit. | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 19) | |
| A reaction: A lovely statement of the dream of building world systems by pure thought - embodying perfectly the view of philosophy despised by logical positivists and modern logical metaphysicians. The Novalis view will never die! I like 'artistic'. |
| 19597 | Logic (the theory of relations) should be applied to mathematics [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Ought not logic, the theory of relations, be applied to mathematics? | |
| From: Novalis (Logological Fragments II [1798], 38) | |
| A reaction: Bolzano was 19 when his was written. I presume Novalis would have been excited by set theory (even though he was a hyper-romantic). |
| 13416 | Mathematics must be based on axioms, which are true because they are axioms, not vice versa [Tait, by Parsons,C] |
| Full Idea: The axiomatic conception of mathematics is the only viable one. ...But they are true because they are axioms, in contrast to the view advanced by Frege (to Hilbert) that to be a candidate for axiomhood a statement must be true. | |
| From: report of William W. Tait (Intro to 'Provenance of Pure Reason' [2005], p.4) by Charles Parsons - Review of Tait 'Provenance of Pure Reason' §2 | |
| A reaction: This looks like the classic twentieth century shift in the attitude to axioms. The Greek idea is that they must be self-evident truths, but the Tait-style view is that they are just the first steps in establishing a logical structure. I prefer the Greeks. |
| 5655 | Happiness is not satisfaction of desires, but fulfilment of values [Bradley, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: For Bradley, the happiness of the individual is not to be understood in terms of his desires and needs, but rather in terms of his values - which is to say, in terms of those of his desires which he incorporates into his self. | |
| From: report of F.H. Bradley (Ethical Studies [1876]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.16 | |
| A reaction: Good. Bentham will reduce the values to a further set of desires, so that a value is a complex (second-level?) desire. I prefer to think of values as judgements, but I like Scruton's phrase of 'incorporating into his self'. Kant take note (Idea 1452). |