79 ideas
| 19073 | True philosophy aims at absolute unity, while our understanding sees only separation [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Everything deserving the name of philosophy has constantly been based on the consciousness of an absolute unity, where the understanding sees and accepts only separation. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §213) | |
| A reaction: Puzzled by the role of 'understanding' here. I tend to cite that as the highest aspiration of philosophy. Hegel seems to offer a higher understanding of unity, and a weaker analytic understanding, which is part of our limited psychology. |
| 15624 | Free thinking has no presuppositions [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Thinking that is free is without presuppositions. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §41 Add1) | |
| A reaction: Fat chance, I would have thought. Hegel's project was indeed to try to get right to the bottom of the presuppositions. My picture is always of holding one thing presupposed while you examine another, and then switching to other presuppositions. |
| 15631 | The ideal of reason is the unification of abstract identity (or 'concept') and being [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Abstract identity (which is what here is also called 'concept') and being are the two moments that reason seeks to unify; this unification is the Ideal of reason. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §49) | |
| A reaction: Not sure I understand this, but I connect it to Aristotle's approach to the problem of being, which was to abandon the head-on approach, and aim to understand the identities of particulars and kinds. |
| 15612 | Older metaphysics naively assumed that thought grasped things in themselves [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The older metaphysics has the naïve presupposition that thinking grasps what things are in-themselves, that things only are what they genuinely are when they are captured in thought. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §28 Add) | |
| A reaction: His 'older' metaphysics is prior to Kant's critique. The less naïve version is more aware of antinomies and dialectical conflicts within thought. |
| 21768 | Logic is metaphysics, the science of things grasped in thoughts [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Logic coincides with metaphysics, with the science of things grasped in thoughts. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §24), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 02 'Logic' | |
| A reaction: Not a very clear definition, given that thinking about a table appears to be a 'thing grasped in thought'. Presumably it refers to things which can only be grasped in thought, which seems to make it entirely a priori. |
| 21984 | We must break up the rigidity that our understanding has imposed [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The battle of reason is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], I §80Z p.115), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.7 | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a combination of Nietzsche and later Wittgenstein, and may be one of the ideas that launches 'continental' philosophy. Recent French thinkers talk continually of 'liberation'. |
| 22081 | Let thought follow its own course, and don't interfere [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Let thought follow its own course; and I think badly whenever I add something of my own. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §24 Add 2), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - Hegel p.100 | |
| A reaction: The idea that reason has a course of its own is a mega-assumption, which I would only accept after a lot of persuasion, which I doubt that Hegel can provide. The modern analytic idea of metaphysics as logic has a similar basis. |
| 15626 | Categories create objective experience, but are too conditioned by things to actually grasp them [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: It is the categories that elevate mere perception into objectivity, into experience; but these concepts ...are conditioned by the given material. ...Hence the understanding, or cognition through categories, cannot become cognizant of things-in-themselves. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §43-4) | |
| A reaction: As one often fears with Hegel, this sounds like a deep insight, but is less persuasive when translated into simpler English (if I've got it right!). Being 'conditioned by the material' strikes me as just what is needed for good categories. |
| 15616 | If truth is just non-contradiction, we must take care that our basic concepts aren't contradictory [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: If truth were nothing more than lack of contradiction, one would have to examine first of all, with regard to each concept, whether it does not on its own account, contain an inner contradiction. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §33 Rem) | |
| A reaction: This is a very nice thought, which modern analytic philosophers, steeped in logic, should think about. It is always presumed that a contradiction is between a proposition and its negation, not some inner feature. |
| 15615 | Older metaphysics became dogmatic, by assuming opposed assertions must be true and false [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The older metaphysics became dogmatism because, given the nature of finite determinations, it had to assume that of two opposed assertions (of the kind that those propositions were) one must be true and the other false. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §32) | |
| A reaction: While dialethism in logic looks very dubious to me, I have every sympathy with Hegel when it comes to the reasonings of ordinary language. There it is much harder to know whether you are addressing truly opposed assertions. |
| 21767 | Dialectic is seen in popular proverbs like 'pride comes before a fall' [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In the domain of individual ethics, we find the consciousness of dialectic in those universally familiar proverbs 'pride goes before a fall' and 'too much wit outwits itself'. ...Joy relieves itself in tears, and melancholy can be revealed in a smile. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §81), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 02 'The Method' | |
| A reaction: 'Too clever by half' is the English version. Hegel's dialectic suggests that each concept somehow implies its opposite, rather than a mere mercurial drift from one extreme to the other. Most pride doesn't lead to a fall. |
| 15638 | Dialectic is the moving soul of scientific progression, the principle which binds science together [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The dialectical constitutes the moving soul of scientific progression, and it is the principle through which alone immanent coherence and necessity enter into the content of science. ..[Add 1] It is the principle of all motion, of all life. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §81) |
| 15639 | Socratic dialectic is subjective, but Plato made it freely scientific and objective [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: It is in the Platonic philosophy that dialectic first occurs in a form which is freely scientific, and hence also objective. With Socrates, dialectical thinking still has a predominantly subjective shape, consistent with his irony. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §81 Add1) | |
| A reaction: I don't understand how dialectic can be 'objective', given that it is a method rather than a belief. Plato certainly seems to elevate dialectic into something almost mystical, because of what is said to be within its power. |
| 19070 | Superficial truth is knowing how something is, which is consciousness of bare correctness [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Truth is at first taken to mean that I know how something is. This is truth, however, only in reference to consciousness; it is formal truth, bare correctness. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §213) | |
| A reaction: I would translate this idea as saying that bare correctness is conscious awareness of the truthmaker for some statement. Hegel then offers a 'deeper' account of the nature of truth. I would say awareness is quite separate from the concept of truth. |
| 5644 | In Hegel's logic it is concepts (rather than judgements or propositions) which are true or false [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The terms of Hegel's logic are not judgements or propositions, but rather concepts: and it is concepts, in this view, that are true or false. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.12 | |
| A reaction: Quite alien to normal studies of logic, but I can make sense of a correspondence theory of truth for concepts, which might be more interesting than normal propositional or predicate logic. Does the concept of, say, a 'natural law' correspond to anything? |
| 19072 | In the deeper sense of truth, to be untrue resembles being bad; badness is untrue to a thing's nature [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: When truth is viewed in the deeper sense, to be untrue means much the same as to be bad. A bad man is an untrue man, and man who does not behave as his notion or his vocation requires. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §213) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 19071 for the 'deeper sense'. This seems to confirm that Hegel's deeper concept of truth resembles authenticity. I guess it will be something fulfilling the essence of the thing. Doctors must be proper doctors. Gold must be true gold? |
| 19071 | The deeper sense of truth is a thing matching the idea of what it ought to be [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Truth in the deeper sense is the identity between objectivity and the notion. It is in this deeper sense of truth that we speak of a true state or work of art. These are true if they are as they ought to be (their reality corresponds to their notion). | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §213) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a correspondence theory, but not as we know it, Jim. He seems to have a value built into truth, which sounds to me like existentialist 'authenticity'. I like what he is saying, but I would analyse it into two or more components. |
| 21595 | Excluded middle is the maxim of definite understanding, but just produces contradictions [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The law of excluded middle is ...the maxim of the definite understanding, which would fain avoid contradiction, but in doing so falls into it. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], p.172), quoted by Timothy Williamson - Vagueness 1.5 | |
| A reaction: Not sure how this works, but he would say this, wouldn't he? |
| 15628 | The idea that contradiction is essential to rational understanding is a key modern idea [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The thought that the contradiction which is posited by the determinations of the understanding in what is rational is essential and necessary, has to be considered one of the most important and profound advances of the philosophy of modern times. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §48) | |
| A reaction: This is the aspect of Kant's philosophy which launched the whole career of Hegel. Hegel is the philosopher of the antinomies. Graham Priest is his current representative on earth. |
| 15629 | Tenderness for the world solves the antinomies; contradiction is in our reason, not in the essence of the world [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The solution to the antinomies is as trivial as they are profound; it consists merely in a tenderness for the things of this world. The stain of contradiction ought not to be in the essence of what is in the world; it must belong only to thinking reason. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §48 Rem) | |
| A reaction: A rather Wittgensteinian remark. I love his 'tenderness for the things of this world'! I'm not clear why our thinking should be considered to be inescapably riddled with basic contradictions, as Hegel seems to imply. Just make more effort. |
| 15630 | Antinomies are not just in four objects, but in all objects, all representations, all objects and all ideas [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The main point that has to be made is that antinomy is found not only in Kant's four particular objects taken from cosmology, but rather in all objects of all kinds, in all representations, concepts and ideas. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §48 Rem) | |
| A reaction: I suppose Heraclitus and Empedocles, with their oppositional accounts of reality, are the ancestors of this worldview. I just don't feel that sudden flood of insight from this idea of Hegel that comes from some of the other great philsophical theories. |
| 15634 | Thought about particulars is done entirely through categories [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: As an activity of the particular, thinking has the categories as its only product and content. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §62) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be an interesting implication in this remark (taken in isolation!) that one can somehow transcend the categories when one begins to think about the universal. Are the universal and the categories not connected? |
| 22078 | Even simple propositions about sensations are filled with categories [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Categories, like 'being', or 'individuality', are already mingled into every proposition, even when it has a completely sensible content, such as "this leaf is green". | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §246 Add), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - Hegel p.95 | |
| A reaction: This is the source of the idea that observation is theory-laden (which tracks back to Kant). Not Duhem, who gets the credit among analytic philosophers. Quine obviously never read Hegel. But the idea is overrated. |
| 15682 | Even fairly simple animals make judgements based on categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: All organisms form categories: even mealworms have category-based preferences, and higher-order animals such as pigeons or octopi can display quite sophisticated categorical judgements. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
| A reaction: [She cites some 1980 research to support this] This comes as no surprise, as I take categorisation as almost definitive of what a mind is. My surmise is that some sort of 'labelling' system is at the heart of it (like Googlemail labels!). |
| 15691 | Children accept real stable categories, with nonobvious potential that gives causal explanations [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: By five children assume that a variety of categories have rich inductive potential, are stable over outward transformations, include crucial nonobvious properties, have innate potential, privilege causal features, can be explained causally, and are real. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: This is Gelman's helpful summary of the findings of research on childhood essentialising, and says the case for this phenomenon is 'compelling'. |
| 21981 | The one substance is formless without the mediation of dialectical concepts [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: As intuitively accepted by Spinoza without a previous mediation by dialectic, substance is as it were a dark shapeless abyss which engulfs all definite content as radically null, and produces from itself nothing that has a positive substance of its own. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], I §151Z p.215), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.6 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be an expression of idealism, since only what is conceptualised can exist. |
| 15700 | In India, upper-castes essentialize caste more than lower-castes do [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: The notion of caste in India is more essentialized among upper-caste than lower-caste individuals. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 08 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: In a book defending fairly innate essentialism in the human race, Gelman offers this point as a warning that large cultural ingredients can be involved. Racism is the classic difficulty with essentialism. |
| 15685 | Essentialism is either natural to us, or an accident of our culture, or a necessary result of language [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: The two views contrasting with essentialism naturally emerging in childhood are the claim that essentialism is a historical accident emerging from Western philosophy, and that essentialism is an inherent consequence of naming things. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Background') | |
| A reaction: Helpful. I take Idea 15682 to rule out the idea that it is just a feature of western culture. I can't conceive of early man surviving without essentialism. I don't think it rules out the naming view. Animals may do what emerges in us as full 'naming'. |
| 15684 | Children's concepts include nonobvious features, like internal parts, functions and causes [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Children incorporate a variety of nonobvious features into their concepts, including internal parts, functions, causes, and ontological distinctions. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
| A reaction: This remark sums up the general thesis of her book, which she supports with a wealth of first-hand evidence. It supports my view, that the desire and need for explanation is at the root of essentialist concepts. It's hard wired in us. |
| 15681 | Essentialism: real or representational? sortal, causal or ideal? real particulars, or placeholders? [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We map types of essentialism by asking is it in the world or in our representations, is it sortal or causal or ideal, and is it specific particulars or placeholders for the unknown? | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
| A reaction: I am struck by the way that this practising experimental psychologist gets to ask questions and make distinctions much more extensively than most armchair philosophers on the subject. She focuses on the representational, causal, placeholder view. |
| 15678 | Essentialism says categories have a true hidden nature which gives an object its identity [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism is the view that categories have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly but that gives an object its identity. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: I think the introduction of categories here is a misunderstanding. Does an uncategorisable thing therefore have no identity (even though it has properties)? If categories give objects their identity, what gives categories their identity? |
| 15683 | Sortals are needed for determining essence - the thing must be categorised first [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that sortals are likewise required for determining essence. One cannot answer the question 'What is the essence of this?' without supplying the sortal - of this 'what'. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
| A reaction: I remain baffled by this view. I take the category to be an inductive generalisation from other similar individuals. It can't get off the ground if you don't start with the individuals. Sortals are just a shorthand. |
| 15697 | Kind (unlike individual) essentialism assumes preexisting natural categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: With kind essentialism the person assumes that the world is divided up into preexisting natural categories. Individual essentialism seems not to require any such commitment to kind realism. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Essentialism') | |
| A reaction: This pinpoints my difficulty: how do we decide whether some category or attributed essence is part of a preexisting natural kind? Some natural kinds are self-evident, like water (roughly), but others need subtle teasing out. How is the teasing done? |
| 15637 | Essence is the essential self-positing unity of immediacy and mediation [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The entire second part of the 'Logic', the doctrine of Essence, deals with the essential self-positing unity of immediacy and mediation. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §65) | |
| A reaction: He is referring to his book 'Science of Logic'. I don't really understand this, but that essence 'posits' the unity of a thing catches my attention. |
| 15687 | Kinship is essence that comes in degrees, and age groups are essences that change over time [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Kinship is essentialized, but admits of degrees, ...and people can be essentialist even about categories they do not view as fixed over time, such as age groupings. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 03 'Summary') | |
| A reaction: Given my notion of essence are necessarily explanatory, I embrace both of these points. Being very athletic comes in degrees, and changes over times. |
| 15613 | Real cognition grasps a thing from within itself, and is not satisfied with mere predicates [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In genuine cognition ...an object determines itself from within itself, and does not acquire its predicates in an external way. If we proceed by way of predication, the spirit gets the feeling that the predicates cannot exhaust what they are attached to. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §28 Add) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be a glimpse of Hegel's notoriously difficult account of essence. Place this alongside Locke's distinction between Nominal and Real essences. Once we have the predicates, we want to grasp their source. |
| 15679 | Essentialism comes from the cognitive need to categorise [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism has its source in the cognitive requirement of categorization in certain domains - particularly as they affect the young learner. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Essentialist') | |
| A reaction: I think the phenomenon is better understood as part of the cognitive requirement to understand and explain. Categorisation is just one way to aid explanation. Children try to understand (essentially) a new animal without categorisation. |
| 15698 | We found no evidence that mothers teach essentialism to their children [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We found no evidence that mothers teach essentialism to their children. ...Mothers teach children about kinds, not about essences, and mothers help children identify which categories are richly structured. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 07 'Conclusions') | |
| A reaction: This is a psychologist who specialises in this topic. If you think essentialism is inculcated by a our culture, you will have to blame the fathers. |
| 15709 | Essentialism is useful for predictions, but it is not the actual structure of reality [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism is a reasoning heuristic that allows us to make fairly good predictions much of the time, but it should not be confused with the structure of reality. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Discussion') | |
| A reaction: She particularly cites biology as the area where it might be inaccurate. I'm beginning to think that the operations of induction are the place to look for an good understanding of essentialism. |
| 15696 | Peope favor historical paths over outward properties when determining what something is [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: People favor historical paths over outward properties when determining what something is. ...An object looking like a knife is less likely to be called 'a knife' if it is described as having been created by accident. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Essentialism') | |
| A reaction: I like this because it talks, suggestively, of 'historical paths' rather than of 'origin'. Thus we might judge a person's identity by their traumatic experience rather than by their birth. This doesn't challenge necessity of origin, but affects labels. |
| 15707 | There is intentional, mechanical, teleological, essentialist, vitalist and deontological understanding [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: The modes of understanding (or modes of construal) which have been proposed are intentional, mechanical, teleological, essentialist, vitalist (perhaps), and deontological. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Broadening') | |
| A reaction: She cites psychological research to support this, and calls it 'a relatively small number' of modes. Compare Aristotle's four modes of cause/explanation. |
| 15636 | The Cogito is at the very centre of the entire concern of modern philosophy [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The proposition 'Cogito Ergo Sum' stands at the very centre, so to speak, of the entire concern of modern philosophy. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §64 Rem) | |
| A reaction: I distinguish two approaches to philosophy: the Parmenidean (which starts from the nature of being), and the Cartesian (which starts from the fact of consciousness). This remark confirms that Hegel is firmly in the latter school. |
| 22300 | Existence is just a set of relationships [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Everything that exists stands in correlation, and this correlation is the veritable nature of existence. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], p.235 (1892)), quoted by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 23 'Abs' |
| 15609 | The sensible is distinguished from thought by being about singular things [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The distinction of the sensible from thought is to be located in that fact that the determination of the sensible is singularity. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §20 Rem) | |
| A reaction: Compare Idea 15608, where we find that thought concerns universals. What a very clear thinker Hegel was! |
| 15625 | Sense perception is secondary and dependent, while thought is independent and primitive [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: What can be perceived by the senses is really secondary and not self-standing, while thoughts, on the contrary, are what is genuinely independent and primitive. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §41 Add2) | |
| A reaction: Although this is post-Kant, it strikes me as a perfect slogan for rationalism. Personally I would say that such a dichotomy is becoming a historical relic, in the light of modern understanding of the brain. Experience and thought are inextricable. |
| 15619 | Empiricism made particular knowledge possible, and blocked wild claims [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Empiricism resulted from a need for concrete content, as opposed to abstract theories that cannot advance from universal generalizations to the particular, and for a firm hold against the possibility of proving any claim at all in the field. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §37) | |
| A reaction: That sounds about right, and makes you wonder why Hegel wasn't an empiricist. |
| 15620 | Empiricism contains the important idea that we should see knowledge for ourselves, and be part of it [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: We must recognise the important principle of freedom that lies in Empiricism; namely, that what ought to count in our human knowing, we ought to see for ourselves, and to know ourselves as present in it. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §38 Rem) | |
| A reaction: Like Idea 15619, this is an interesting and perceptive remark, from a philosopher who seems a long way from empiricism. I presume he will be thinking mainly of Hume, via Kant. Personally I prefer Locke. |
| 15622 | Empiricism unknowingly contains and uses a metaphysic, which underlies its categories [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Empiricism operates without knowing that it contains a metaphysics and is engaged in it, and that it is using categories and their connections in a totally uncritical and unconscious manner. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §38 Rem) | |
| A reaction: I doubt whether this is true of modern empiricists, who have been challenged so often from within their own ranks on so many things. I'm not even sure that it is true of Locke and Hume, apart from the way in which all philosophers are unaware of things. |
| 15621 | Empiricism of the finite denies the supersensible, and can only think with formal abstraction [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Inasmuch as Empiricism restricts itself to what is finite, the consistent carrying through of its programme denies the supersensible altogether, ..and it leaves thinking with abstraction only, [i.e.] with formal universality and identity. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §38 Rem) | |
| A reaction: I'm not clear how a denial of empiricism allows you (with intellectual integrity) to embrace 'the supersensible'. The set theoretic account of higher levels of infinity looks like a nice test case. |
| 15632 | The Humean view stops us thinking about perception, and finding universals and necessities in it [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The Humean standpoint proclaims the thinking of our perceptions to be inadmissible; i.e. the eliciting of the universal and necessary out of those perceptions. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §50) | |
| A reaction: Obviously Hume permits 'relations of ideas', but presumably the point is that his approach only legitimates a rather passive abstraction from experience, rather than an active application of a priori concepts to it. A fair criticism. See Bonjour. |
| 15703 | Memories often conform to a theory, rather than being neutral [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Memory is notorious for conforming to theory (rather than memory being a neutral source of information). | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 09 'Theory') | |
| A reaction: This observation by a psychologist is music to sceptics about objectivity. Memory is so fundamental to our basic epistemology that it could even be the nature of thought itself. |
| 15623 | Humean scepticism, unlike ancient Greek scepticism, accepts the truth of experience as basic [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Humean scepticism should be very carefully distinguished from Greek scepticism. In Humean scepticism, the truth of the empirical, the truth of feeling and intuition is taken as basic. ..Greek scepticism turned itself against the sensible. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §39 Rem) | |
| A reaction: This seems right, and Hume himself was quite contemptuous of the sort of scepticism found in the ideas of Sextus Empiricus. |
| 15708 | Inductive success is rewarded with more induction [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Inductive success is rewarded with more induction. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Broadening') | |
| A reaction: I love this one. Neat, accurate, and central to how we understand the world. I take inductive success to be stored as labels, concepts, categories, words and general truths, which are then our resource for further attempts. |
| 15694 | Children overestimate the power of a single example [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We suggest that children overestimate the power of a single example. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'The role') | |
| A reaction: This conclusion arises from extensive psychological research. 'My grandma smoked, and she lived to be 97' - adults do this too. Wittgenstein says assuming other minds because of your own is induction from one example! |
| 15695 | Children make errors in induction by focusing too much on categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Because of their narrow focus, children's sensitivity to categories as the basis of induction is a reasoning bias that, though useful much of the time, results in systematic errors. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'The role') | |
| A reaction: This is the bad sense of 'essentialism' which worries its opponents. Presumably, though, my favoured scientific essentialism will be 'scientific', and avoid this problem. The relation between categories and induction needs to be clear. |
| 15692 | People tend to be satisfied with shallow explanations [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: People tend to be satisfied with rather shallow explanations. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Is essentialism') | |
| A reaction: She cites some psychological research to support this. Pretty obvious really. I take the so-called 'scientific method' to be nothing more than ceasing to be satisfied with such shallowness. |
| 15617 | In abstraction, beyond finitude, freedom and necessity must exist together [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Considered as abstractly confronting one another, freedom and necessity pertain to finitude only and are valid only on its soil. A freedom with no necessity in it, and a mere necessity without freedom, are determinations that are abstract and thus untrue. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §35 Add) | |
| A reaction: This is, presumably, the Hegelian dialectical nature of things, that contradictories are bound together. We must struggle hard to undestand a freedom bound by necessity, and a necessity which contains freedom. (Good luck). |
| 15608 | The act of thinking is the bringing forth of universals [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Thinking as an activity is the active universal, and indeed the self-actuating universal, since the act, or what is brought forth, is precisely the universal. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §20) | |
| A reaction: One should contemplate animal thought in the light of this remark. Thought requires the recognition of types of things, and resemblances, and repetitions, and patterns. Language consists almost entirely of universals. |
| 15680 | Folk essentialism rests on belief in natural kinds, in hidden properties, and on words indicating structures [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: The three components of essentialism as a folk belief are the idea that certain categories are natural kinds, the idea that some unobservable property causes the way things are, and the idea that words reflect real structures. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') |
| 21986 | Hegel's system has a vast number of basic concepts [Hegel, by Moore,AW] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel the full system of concepts ...contains many more than Kant's twelve. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], I §60Z) by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.7 | |
| A reaction: This offers some sort of conceptual scheme, but not the structured one that Kant proposes. The sequence of dialectical mediation imposes some sort of shape on the concepts. |
| 15607 | We don't think with concepts - we think the concepts [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: There is a saying that, when we have grasped a concept, we still do not know what to think with it. But there is nothing to be thought with a concept save the concept itself. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §03 Rem) | |
| A reaction: Analytic philosophers should read Hegel on concepts, because he approaches the matter so very differently, and seems to be the root of the continental approach to such things. He seems to me to talk more sense than Frege on the subject. |
| 15610 | Active thought about objects produces the universal, which is what is true and essential of it [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: When thinking is taken as active with regard to ob-jects, as the thinking-over of something, then the universal - as the product of the activity - contains the value of the matter, what is essential, inner, true. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §21) | |
| A reaction: I prefer to talk of 'general terms' rather than 'universals'. If 'tiger' is coined for the first one, but must be applicable to subsequent tigers, it has to generalise what they all have in common. Locke's 'nominal' essence, I would say. |
| 15686 | Labels may indicate categories which embody an essence [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Labels may signal categories that are believed to embody an essence. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 02 'Privileged') | |
| A reaction: This is quoted by her, as a summary of a substantial body of research which she endorses. I cite it because it pinpoints my own view. I take 'labels' to be basic to minds, as organisers of thought, and this ties essences to labels. Satisfying picture. |
| 15690 | Causal properties are seen as more central to category concepts [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Properties that enter into causally meaningful links are better remembered and are treated as more central to the category than properties that are not causally meaningful. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 05 'Causation2') | |
| A reaction: This is a summary of considerable psychological research. This account not only sounds plausible, but would fit better withy why we form concepts and categories in the first place. We are trying to relate to the causations of nature. |
| 15688 | Categories are characterized by distance from a prototype [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: On prototype views, categories are characterized by distance from a prototype. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 05 'Causation') | |
| A reaction: Gelman observes that this view makes no reference to any causal features of things. This cuts them off from using underlying essences in the process of categorisation and concept-formation. How do you spot a prototype, with no category? |
| 15689 | Theory-based concepts use rich models to show which similarities really matter [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Theory-based approaches to categories are a response to the limitations of mere similarities holding the category together, and require knowledge-rich explanatory models to say which features are more central to a concept. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 05 'Causation1') | |
| A reaction: I see a promising account in linking theory theory to essentialism. For a physical object (or even for a process) infer a structure, and then identify what is most important in that structure. That gives you your stable, agreed concept. |
| 15699 | Prelinguistic infants acquire and use many categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Language does not appear to be necessary for forming categories, since prelinguistic infants acquire many categories, and even use categories to form inferences about unknown properties. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 08 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: She cites lots of research in support of this claim. The idea may come as a surprise to some people, but not to me. I take it that categorisation is what a brain is for, including animal brains. |
| 21097 | Modern monarchies are (like republics) rule by law, rather than by men [Hume] |
| Full Idea: In modern times monarchical government seems to have made the greatest advances towards perfection. It may now be affirmed of civilized monarchies, what was formerly said in praise of republics alone, that they are a government of laws, not of men. | |
| From: David Hume (Of Civil Liberty [1750], p.54) | |
| A reaction: Dreams of simple 'government by law' disappeared with the rise of modern media, which can be controlled by wealth. |
| 15693 | One sample of gold is enough, but one tree doesn't give the height of trees [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We can confidently determine the chemical composition of gold from just a single sample, but we cannot determine the height of trees from just a single tree. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'The role') | |
| A reaction: The tricky word here is 'confidently'. If you meet one Latvian who is nice, do you assume they are all nice? At what point do you decide gold etc. really are natural kinds, where one sample tells all? Evolution of species... |
| 15701 | Nouns seem to invoke stable kinds more than predicates do [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Children judged personal characteristics as more stable when they were referred to by a noun ('She is a carrot eater') than by a verbal predicate ('She eats carrots whenever she can') | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 08 'Naming') | |
| A reaction: This fits with my feeling that 'labels' are the basis of how the mind works. The noun invokes a genuine category of thing, where a predicate attaches to some preselected category ('she'). Gelman says names encourage inductions. |
| 15614 | Old metaphysics tried to grasp eternal truths through causal events, which is impossible [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: When finite things are grasped according to the determinations of cause and effect they are known in their finitude. But objects of reason cannot be determined through such finite predicates, and the attempt to do this was the defect of older metaphysics. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §28 Add) | |
| A reaction: This sounds the launching point for a grand philosophical system which makes scientifically inclined philosophers feel very nervous indeed. I think I prefer the old (pre-Kantian) metaphysics. |
| 15705 | Essentialism encourages us to think about the world scientifically [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism encourages a 'scientific' mindset in thinking about the natural world, a belief that intensive study of a natural domain will yield ever more underlying properties. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Maybe scientists must be committed to essences, the way mathematicians must be committed to numbers? This idea spendidly opposes the doubts expressed by Popper. |
| 15702 | Essentialism doesn't mean we know the essences [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism does not entail that people know what the essence is. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 09 'Theory') | |
| A reaction: This is a fundamental and (I would say) fairly obvious point, but it needs to be made to the more passionate opponents of essentialism. |
| 15704 | Essentialism starts from richly structured categories, leading to a search for underlying properties [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: If my speculations are correct, then essentialism starts out strictly as a belief that many categories are richly structured kinds, then additionally becomes a search for underlying inherent properties. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 10 'Figuring') | |
| A reaction: This is her summary of extensive essentialist research among children. She favours the priority of kinds and categories. We actually change taxonomies on the basis of revisions in our accounts of essence. Science negotiates. |
| 15706 | A major objection to real essences is the essentialising of social categories like race, caste and occupation [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: One major argument against the view that essences are real is the rampant essentializing of categories that are socially constructed (such as race, caste and occupation). | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Is essentialism') | |
| A reaction: You can't argue with that. It raises the question of whether the approach of scientific essentialism has any value in the social, rather than physical, sciences. We jokingly essentialise groups of people such as referees or Oxonians. |
| 15635 | The older conception of God was emptied of human features, to make it worthy of the Infinite [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In earlier times, every type of so-called anthropomorphic representation was banished from God as finite, and hence unworthy of the Infinite; and as a result he had already grown into something remarkably empty. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §62 Rem) | |
| A reaction: Hegel favoured Christianity, because of its human aspect. His description fits Islam, where indeed the concept of God seems so drain of particularity that there is little in it to doubt, which might explain the durability of that religion. |
| 21980 | God is the absolute thing, and also the absolute person [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: It is true that God ...is the absolute thing: he is however no less the absolute person. That he is the absolute person however is a point which the philosophy of Spinoza never reached. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], I §151Z p.214), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.6 | |
| A reaction: Moore says Hegel was a Spinozist, in his commitment to a single substance, but his idea of God is very different, presumably because consciousness and concepts are so important to Hegel. Hegel needs a Lockean abstract notion of 'person' here. |
| 15618 | If God is the abstract of Supremely Real Essence, then God is a mere Beyond, and unknowable [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: When the concept of God is apprehended merely as that of the abstract of Supremely Real Essence, then God becomes for us a mere Beyond, and there can be no further talk of the cognition of God. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §36 Add) |
| 15633 | We establish unification of the Ideal by the ontological proof, deriving being from abstraction of thinking [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: One unification through which the Ideal is to be established starts from the abstraction of thinking and goes on to the determination for which being alone remains; this is the ontological proof that God is there. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §51) | |
| A reaction: It should come as no surprise that a philosopher who so passionately endorses pure thinking, in opposition to empiricism, should end up endorsing the highly implausible ontological argument for God's existence. Jacquette gets existence from reason. |