53 ideas
| 19635 | Hegel produced modern optimism; he failed to grasp that consciousness never progresses [Hegel, by Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism. How could he have failed to see that consciousness changes only its forms and modalities, but never progresses. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by E.M. Cioran - A Short History of Decay 5 |
| 8215 | Hegel was the last philosopher of the Book [Hegel, by Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Hegel was the last philosopher of the Book. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Jacques Derrida - Positions p.64 | |
| A reaction: Reference to 'the Book' connects this to the great religions which rely on one holy text. The implication is that Hegel was proposing one big solution to all problems. It is doubtful if many philosophers before Hegel dreamt of that either. |
| 16011 | Hegel doesn't storm the heavens like the giants, but works his way up by syllogisms [Kierkegaard on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Hegel is a Johannes Climacus who does not storm the heavens, like the giants, by putting mountain upon mountain, but climbs aboard them by way of his syllogisms. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Sřren Kierkegaard - The Journals of Kierkegaard 2A | |
| A reaction: [Idea from SY] This appears to be an attempt at insulting Hegel for his timidity, but it seems to be describing the cautious approach which most modern philosophers take to be correct. [PG] |
| 5433 | For Hegel, things are incomplete, and contain external references in their own nature [Hegel, by Russell] |
| Full Idea: The basis of Hegel's system is that what is incomplete must not be self-subsistent, and needs the support of other things; whatever has relations to things outside itself must contain some reference to those outside things in its own nature. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Bertrand Russell - Problems of Philosophy Ch.14 | |
| A reaction: This leads to the idealist doctrine of 'internal relations'. It has some plausibility if you think about the physicist's definition of mass, which has to refer to forces etc. Presumably there is one essence for all of reality, instead of separate ones. |
| 6095 | The business of metaphysics is to describe the world [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It seems to me that the business of metaphysics is to describe the world. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §III) | |
| A reaction: At least he believed in metaphysics. Presumably he intends to describe the world in terms of its categories, rather than cataloguing every blade of grass. |
| 3301 | On the continent it is generally believed that metaphysics died with Hegel [Benardete,JA on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In continental Europe it is widely believed that the metaphysical game was played out in Hegel. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Intro |
| 19661 | Making sufficient reason an absolute devalues the principle of non-contradiction [Hegel, by Meillassoux] |
| Full Idea: Hegel saw that the absolutization of the principle of sufficient reason (which marked the culmination of the belief in the necessity of what is) required the devaluation of the principle of non-contradiction. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812], 3) by Quentin Meillassoux - After Finitude; the necessity of contingency 3 | |
| A reaction: I pass this on without understanding it, though a joint study of my collection of ideas on sufficient reason and non-contradiction might make it clear. [Let me know if you can explain it!] |
| 6106 | Reducing entities and premisses makes error less likely [Russell] |
| Full Idea: You diminish the risk of error with every diminution of entities and premisses. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VIII) | |
| A reaction: If there are actually lots of entities, you would increase error if you reduced them too much. Ockham's Razor seems more to do with the limited capacity of the human mind than with the simplicity or complexity of reality. See Idea 4456. |
| 20952 | Rather than in three stages, Hegel presented his dialectic as 'negation of the negation' [Hegel, by Bowie] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's 'dialectic' is often characterised in terms of the triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This is, however, not the way he presents it. The core of the dialectic is rather what Hegel terms the 'negation of the negation'. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Andrew Bowie - Introduction to German Philosophy | |
| A reaction: Interestingly, this connects it to debates about intuitionist logic, which denies that double-negation necessarily makes a positive. Presumably Marx emphasised the first reading. |
| 6090 | Facts make propositions true or false, and are expressed by whole sentences [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A fact is the kind of thing that makes a proposition true or false, …and it is the sort of thing that is expressed by a whole sentence, not by a single name like 'Socrates'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §I) | |
| A reaction: It is important to note a point here which I consider vital - that Russell keeps the idea of a fact quite distinct from the language in which it is expressed. Facts are a 'sort of thing', of the kind which are now referred to as 'truth-makers'. |
| 18348 | Not only atomic truths, but also general and negative truths, have truth-makers [Russell, by Rami] |
| Full Idea: In 1918 Russell held that beside atomic truths, also general and negative truths have truth-makers. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Adolph Rami - Introduction: Truth and Truth-Making note 04 |
| 6103 | Normally a class with only one member is a problem, because the class and the member are identical [Russell] |
| Full Idea: With the ordinary view of classes you would say that a class that has only one member was the same as that one member; that will land you in terrible difficulties, because in that case that one member is a member of that class, namely, itself. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VII) | |
| A reaction: The problem (I think) is that classes (sets) were defined by Frege as being identical with their members (their extension). With hindsight this may have been a mistake. The question is always 'why is that particular a member of that set?' |
| 6092 | In a logically perfect language, there will be just one word for every simple object [Russell] |
| Full Idea: In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §II) | |
| A reaction: In other words, there would be no universals, only names? All that matters is that a language can successfully refer (unambiguously) to anything it wishes to. There must be better ways than Russell's lexical explosion. |
| 6101 | Romulus does not occur in the proposition 'Romulus did not exist' [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Romulus does not occur in the proposition 'Romulus did not exist'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VI) | |
| A reaction: A very nice paradoxical assertion, which captures the problem of finding the logical form for negative existential statements. Presumably the proposition refers to the mythical founder of Rome, though. He is not, I suppose, rigidly designated. |
| 18801 | Classical negation is circular, if it relies on knowing negation-conditions from truth-conditions [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Explanations of classical negation assume that knowing what it is for the truth-condition of some statement to obtain, independently of recognising it to obtain, we thereby know what it is for it NOT to obtain; but this presupposes classical negation. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (The Logical Basis of Metaphysics [1991], p.299), quoted by Ian Rumfitt - The Boundary Stones of Thought 1.1 | |
| A reaction: [compressed wording] This is Dummett explaining why he prefers intuitionistic logic, with its doubts about double negation. |
| 21777 | Negation of negation doubles back into a self-relationship [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the 'negation of negation' is negation that, as it were, doubles back on itself and 'relates itself to itself'. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 6 'Space' | |
| A reaction: [ref VNP 1823 p.108] Glad we've cleared that one up. |
| 6102 | You can understand 'author of Waverley', but to understand 'Scott' you must know who it applies to [Russell] |
| Full Idea: If you understand English you would understand the phrase 'the author of Waverley' if you had not heard it before, whereas you would not understand the meaning of 'Scott', because to know the meaning of a name is to know who it is applied to. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VI) | |
| A reaction: Actually, you would find 'Waverley' a bit baffling too. Would you understand "he was the author of his own destruction"? You can understand "Homer was the author of this" without knowing quite who 'Homer' applies to. All very tricky. |
| 10423 | There are a set of criteria for pinning down a logically proper name [Russell, by Sainsbury] |
| Full Idea: A logically proper name must be semantically simple, have just one referent, be understood by the user, be scopeless, is not a definite description, and rigidly designates. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], 24th pg) by Mark Sainsbury - The Essence of Reference Intro | |
| A reaction: Famously, Russell's hopes of achieving this logically desirable end got narrower and narrower, and ended with 'this' or 'that'. Maybe pure language can't do the job. |
| 7744 | Treat description using quantifiers, and treat proper names as descriptions [Russell, by McCullogh] |
| Full Idea: Having proposed that descriptions should be treated in quantificational terms, Russell then went on to introduce the subsidiary injunction that proper names should be treated as descriptions. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Gregory McCullogh - The Game of the Name 2.18 | |
| A reaction: McCulloch says Russell 'has a lot to answer for' here. It became a hot topic with Kripke. Personally I find Lewis's notion of counterparts the most promising line of enquiry. |
| 10426 | A name has got to name something or it is not a name [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A name has got to name something or it is not a name. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], 66th pg), quoted by Mark Sainsbury - The Essence of Reference 18.2 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be stipulative, since most people would say that a list of potential names for a baby counted as names. It may be wrong. There are fictional names, or mistakes. |
| 6104 | Numbers are classes of classes, and hence fictions of fictions [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Numbers are classes of classes, and classes are logical fictions, so that numbers are, as it were, fictions at two removes, fictions of fictions. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VIII) | |
| A reaction: This summarises the findings of Russell and Whitehead's researches into logicism. Gödel may have proved that project impossible, but there is now debate about that. Personally I think of numbers as names of patterns. |
| 5645 | The dialectical opposition of being and nothing is resolved in passing to the concept of becoming [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The concept of being contains within itself it own negation - nothing - and the dialectical opposition between these two concepts is resolved only in the passage to a new concept, becoming, which contains the truth of the passage from nothing to being. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.12 | |
| A reaction: The idea that one concept 'contains' another, or that an opposition could be 'resolved' by a new concept, sounds doubtful to me. For most analytical philosophers, and for Aristotle, oppositions are contradictions, and cannot and should not be 'resolved'. |
| 5646 | Hegel gives an ontological proof of the existence of everything [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: It would not be unfair to say that Hegel's metaphysics consists of an ontological proof of the existence of everything. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.12 | |
| A reaction: This is so gloriously far from David Hume that we must all find some appeal in it. The next question would be whether necessary existence has been proved. If so, given death, decay and entropy, what is it that has to exist? 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? |
| 21708 | Russell's new logical atomist was of particulars, universals and facts (not platonic propositions) [Russell, by Linsky,B] |
| Full Idea: Russell's new logical atomist ontology was of particulars, universals and facts, replacing the ontology of 'platonic atomism' consisting just of propositions. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Bernard Linsky - Russell's Metaphysical Logic 1 | |
| A reaction: Linsky cites Peter Hylton as saying that the earlier view was never replaced. The earlier view required propositions to be 'unified'. I surmise that the formula 'Fa' combines a universal and a particular, to form an atomic fact. [...but Idea 6111!] |
| 19051 | Russell's atomic facts are actually compounds, and his true logical atoms are sense data [Russell, by Quine] |
| Full Idea: In 1918 Russell does not admit facts as fundamental; atomic facts are atomic as facts go, but they are compound objects. The atoms of Russell's logical atomism are not atomic facts but sense data. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Willard Quine - Russell's Ontological Development p.83 | |
| A reaction: By about 1921 Russell had totally given up sense-data, because he had been reading behaviourist psychology. |
| 6089 | Logical atomism aims at logical atoms as the last residue of analysis [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I call my doctrine logical atomism because, as the last residue of analysis, I wish to arrive at logical atoms and not physical atoms; some of them will be particulars, and others will be predicates and relations and so on. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §I) | |
| A reaction: However we judge it, logical atomism is a vital landmark in the history of 'analytical' philosophy, because it lays out the ideal for our assessment. It is fashionable to denigrate analysis, but I think it is simply the nearest to wisdom we will ever get. |
| 6100 | Once you have enumerated all the atomic facts, there is a further fact that those are all the facts [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When you have enumerated all the atomic facts in the world, it is a further fact about the world that those are all the atomic facts there are about the world. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §V) | |
| A reaction: There is obviously a potential regress of facts about facts here. This looks like one of the reasons why the original logical atomism had a short shelf-life. Personally I see this as an argument in favour of rationalism, in the way Bonjour argues for it. |
| 6105 | Logical atoms aims to get down to ultimate simples, with their own unique reality [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Logical atomism is the view that you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built, and that those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VIII) | |
| A reaction: This dream is to empiricists what the Absolute is to rationalists - a bit silly, but an embodiment of the motivating dream. |
| 21709 | You can't name all the facts, so they are not real, but are what propositions assert [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Facts are the sort of things that are asserted or denied by propositions, and are not properly entities at all in the same sense in which their constituents are. That is shown by the fact that you cannot name them. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], p.235), quoted by Bernard Linsky - Russell's Metaphysical Logic 2.2 | |
| A reaction: [ref to Papers vol.8] It is customary to specify a proposition by its capacity for T and F. So is a fact just 'a truth'? This contains the Fregean idea that things are only real if they can be picked out. I think of facts as independent of minds. |
| 18376 | Russell asserts atomic, existential, negative and general facts [Russell, by Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Russell argues for atomic facts, and also for existential facts, negative facts and general facts. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by David M. Armstrong - Truth and Truthmakers 05.1 | |
| A reaction: Armstrong says he overdoes it. I would even add disjunctive facts, which Russell rejects. 'Rain or snow will ruin the cricket match'. Rain can make that true, but it is a disjunctive fact about the match. |
| 5465 | Modern trope theory tries, like logical atomism, to reduce things to elementary states [Russell, by Ellis] |
| Full Idea: Russell and Wittgenstein sought to reduce everything to singular facts or states of affairs, and Armstrong and Keith Campbell have more recently advocated ontologies of tropes or elementary states of affairs. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Brian Ellis - The Philosophy of Nature: new essentialism Ch.3 n 11 | |
| A reaction: A very interesting historical link. Logical atomism strikes me as a key landmark in the history of philosophy, and not an eccentric cul-de-sac. It is always worth trying to get your ontology down to minimal small units, to see what happens. |
| 6060 | 'Existence' means that a propositional function is sometimes true [Russell] |
| Full Idea: When you take any propositional function and assert of it that it is possible, that it is sometimes true, that gives you the fundamental meaning of 'existence'. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]), quoted by Colin McGinn - Logical Properties Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: Functions depend on variables, so this leads to Quine's slogan "to be is to be the value of a variable". Assertions of non-existence are an obvious problem, but Russell thought of all that. All of this makes existence too dependent on language. |
| 21755 | For Hegel, categories shift their form in the course of history [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the categories of thought are not fixed, eternal forms that remain unchanged throughout history, but are concepts that alter their meaning in history. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
| A reaction: This results from a critique of Kant's rather rigid view of categories. This idea is very influential, and certainly counts among Hegel's better ideas. |
| 21754 | Our concepts and categories disclose the world, because we are part of the world [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the structure of our concepts and categories is identical with, and thus discloses, the structure of the world itself, because we ourselves are born into and so share the character of the world we encounter. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
| A reaction: This is a reasonable speculation, but it makes more sense in the context of natural selection, and an empiricist theory of concepts. |
| 22079 | Hegel said Kant's fixed categories actually vary with culture and era [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's disagreement with Kant is that categories are not unambiguously universal forms of human understanding, but are conceived in subtly different ways in different cultures and in different historical epochs. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - Hegel p.95 | |
| A reaction: This may be Hegel's most influential idea. Though he hoped that categories would contain truth, by arising untrammelled from reason, and thereby matching reality. His successors seem to have given up on that hope, and settled for relativism. |
| 6099 | Modal terms are properties of propositional functions, not of propositions [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Traditional philosophy discusses 'necessary', 'possible' and 'impossible' as properties of propositions, whereas in fact they are properties of propositional functions; propositions are only true or false. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §V) | |
| A reaction: I am unclear how a truth could be known to be necessary if it is full of variables. 'x is human' seems to have no modality, but 'Socrates is human' could well be necessary. I like McGinn's rather adverbial account of modality. |
| 9225 | Hegel reputedly claimed to know a priori that there are five planets [Hegel, by Field,H] |
| Full Idea: Hegel is reputed to have claimed to have deduced on a priori grounds that the number of planets is exactly five. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Hartry Field - Recent Debates on the A Priori 1 | |
| A reaction: Even if this is a wicked travesty of Hegel, it will do nicely to represent the extremes of claims to a priori synthetic knowledge. Field doesn't offer any evidence. I would love it to be true. |
| 6098 | Perception goes straight to the fact, and not through the proposition [Russell] |
| Full Idea: I am inclined to think that perception, as opposed to belief, does go straight to the fact and not through the proposition. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §IV.4) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be a question of an intermediate stage, which is the formulation of concepts. Is full 'perception' (backed by attention and intellect) laden with concepts, which point to facts? Where are the facts in sensation without recognition? |
| 6097 | The theory of error seems to need the existence of the non-existent [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It is very difficult to deal with the theory of error without assuming the existence of the non-existent. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §IV.3) | |
| A reaction: This problem really bothered Russell (and Plato). I suspect that it was a self-inflicted problem because at this point Russell had ceased to believe in propositions. If we accept propositions as intentional objects, they can be as silly as you like. |
| 9022 | Russell uses 'propositional function' to refer to both predicates and to attributes [Quine on Russell] |
| Full Idea: Russell used the phrase 'propositional function' (adapted from Frege) to refer sometimes to predicates and sometimes to attributes. | |
| From: comment on Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Willard Quine - Philosophy of Logic Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: He calls Russell 'confused' on this, and he would indeed be guilty of what now looks like a classic confusion, between the properties and the predicates that express them. Only a verificationist would hold such a daft view. |
| 6091 | Propositions don't name facts, because each fact corresponds to a proposition and its negation [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It is obvious that a proposition is not the name for a fact, from the mere circumstance that there are two propositions corresponding to each fact, one the negation of the other. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §I) | |
| A reaction: Russell attributes this point to Wittgenstein. Evidently you must add that the proposition is true before it will name a fact - which is bad news for the redundancy view of truth. Couldn't lots of propositions correspond to one fact? |
| 21702 | In 1918 still believes in nonlinguistic analogues of sentences, but he now calls them 'facts' [Russell, by Quine] |
| Full Idea: In 1918 Russell insists that the world does contain nonlinguistic things that are akin to sentences and are asserted by them; he merely does not call them propositions. He calls them facts. | |
| From: report of Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]) by Willard Quine - Russell's Ontological Development p.81 | |
| A reaction: Clarification! I have always been bewildered by the early Russell view of propositions as actual ingredients of the world. If we say that sentences assert facts, that makes more sense. Russell never believed in the mental entities I call 'propositions'. |
| 6094 | An inventory of the world does not need to include propositions [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It is quite clear that propositions are not what you might call 'real'; if you were making an inventory of the world, propositions would not come in. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §III) | |
| A reaction: I am not clear why this is "quite clear". Propositions might even turn up in our ontology as physical objects (brain states). He says beliefs are real, but if you can't have a belief without a proposition, and they aren't real, you are in trouble. |
| 6096 | I no longer believe in propositions, especially concerning falsehoods [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Time was when I thought there were propositions, but it does not seem to me very plausible to say that in addition to facts there are also these curious shadowy things going about as 'That today is Wednesday' when in fact it is Tuesday. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §IV.2) | |
| A reaction: You need to give some account of someone who thinks 'Today is Wednesday' when it is Tuesday. We can hardly avoid talking about something like an 'intentional object', which can be expressed in a sentence. Are there not possible (formulable) propositions? |
| 21712 | I know longer believe in shadowy things like 'that today is Wednesday' when it is actually Tuesday [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Time was when I thought there were propositions, but it does not seem to me very plausible to say that in addition to facts there are also these curious shadowy things going about such 'That today is Wednesday' when it is in fact Tuesday. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], p.197), quoted by Bernard Linsky - Russell's Metaphysical Logic 3.1 | |
| A reaction: [Ref to Papers v8] I take Russell to have abandoned his propositions because his conception of them was mistaken. Presumably my thinking 'Today is Wednesay' conjures up a false proposition, which had not previously existed. |
| 6093 | The names in a logically perfect language would be private, and could not be shared [Russell] |
| Full Idea: A logically perfect language, if it could be constructed, would be, as regards its vocabulary, very largely private to one speaker; that is, all the names in it would be private to that speaker and could not enter into the language of another speaker. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §II) | |
| A reaction: Wittgenstein obviously thought there was something not quite right about this… See Idea 4147, for example. I presume Russell's thought is that you would have no means of explaining the 'meanings' of the names in the language. |
| 21758 | Humans have no fixed identity, but produce and reveal their shifting identity in history [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the absolute truth of humanity is that human beings have no fixed, given identity, but rather determine and produce their own identity and their world in history, and that they gradually come to the recognition of this fact in history. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
| A reaction: This quintessentially existentialist idea, most obvious in Sartre, seems to have originated with this view of Hegel's. |
| 20414 | Hegel's Absolute Spirit is the union of human rational activity at a moment, and whatever that sustains [Hegel, by Eldridge] |
| Full Idea: We may take Hegel's Absolute Spirit to be the union of collective, human rational activity at a historical moment with its proper object, the forms of social and individual life that the rational activity is devoted to understanding and sustaining. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Richard Eldridge - G.W.F. Hegel (aesthetics) 1 | |
| A reaction: From this formulation it sounds as if the whole human race might have momentary union, but presumably it is more local 'peoples' that can exhibit this. |
| 3909 | Society isn’t founded on a contract, since contracts presuppose a society [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, society cannot be founded on a contract, since contracts have no reality until society is in place. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Roger Scruton - Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey 28.2 | |
| A reaction: Interesting, and reminiscent of the private language argument, but contracts surely start as deals between individuals (on a desert island?). |
| 4347 | When man wills the natural, it is no longer natural [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: When man wills the natural, it is no longer natural. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]), quoted by Rosalind Hursthouse - On Virtue Ethics Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: Sounds good, though I'm not sure what it means. The application of the word 'natural' seems a bit arbitrary to me. No objective joint exists between the natural and unnatural. The default position has to be that everything is natural. |
| 4188 | Hegel's entire philosophy is nothing but a monstrous amplification of the ontological proof [Schopenhauer on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's entire philosophy is nothing but a monstrous amplification of the ontological proof. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Arthur Schopenhauer - Abstract of 'The Fourfold Root' Ch.II | |
| A reaction: All massive a priori metaphysics is summed up in this argument, which is right at the core of philosophy. |
| 6119 | You can discuss 'God exists', so 'God' is a description, not a name [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The fact that you can discuss the proposition 'God exists' is a proof that 'God', as used in that proposition, is a description and not a name. If 'God' were a name, no question as to its existence could arise. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918], §VI) | |
| A reaction: Presumably 'a being than which none greater can be conceived' (Anselm's definition) is self-evidently a description, and doesn't claim to be a name. Aquinas caps each argument with a triumphant naming of the being he has proved. |
| 6686 | Hegel said he was offering an encyclopaedic rationalisation of Christianity [Hegel, by Graham] |
| Full Idea: Hegel claimed that his philosophy was nothing less than an encyclopaedic rationalisation of the Christian religion. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Gordon Graham - Eight Theories of Ethics Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: Why did he pick Christianity to rationalise? How can you reason properly if you start with a dogma? |