34 ideas
1542 | Diogenes of Apollonia was the last natural scientist [Diogenes of Apollonia, by Simplicius] |
Full Idea: Diogenes of Apollonia was more or less the last of those who made a study of natural science. | |
From: report of Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], A05) by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 9.25.1 | |
A reaction: He quotes Theophrastus |
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 Søren 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. |
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 |
7614 | Bracketing subtracts entailments about external reality from beliefs [Husserl, by Putnam] |
Full Idea: In effect, the device of bracketing subtracts entailments from the ordinary belief locution (the entailments that refer to what is external to the thinker's mind). | |
From: report of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations [1900]) by Hilary Putnam - Reason, Truth and History Ch.2 | |
A reaction: This seems to leave phenomenology as pure introspection, or as a phenomenalist description of sense-data. It is also a refusal to explain anything. That sounds quite appealing, like Keats's 'negative capability'. |
6893 | Phenomenology aims to describe experience directly, rather than by its origins or causes [Husserl, by Mautner] |
Full Idea: Phenomenology, in Husserl, is an attempt to describe our experience directly, as it is, separately from its origins and development, independently of the causal explanations that historians, sociologists or psychologists might give. | |
From: report of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations [1900]) by Thomas Mautner - Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy p.421 | |
A reaction: In this simple definition the concept sounds very like the modern popular use of the word 'deconstruction', though that is applied more commonly to cultural artifacts than to actual sense experience. |
15570 | Phenomenology is the science of essences - necessary universal structures for art, representation etc. [Husserl, by Polt] |
Full Idea: For Husserl, phenomenology must seek the essential aspects of phenomena - necessary, universal structures, such as the essence of art or the essence of representation. He sought a science of these essences. | |
From: report of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations [1900]) by Richard Polt - Heidegger: an introduction 2 'Dilthey' |
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!] |
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. |
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. |
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? |
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. |
489 | Each thing must be in some way unique [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
Full Idea: No one thing among things subject to change can possibly be exactly like any other thing, without becoming the same thing. | |
From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B05), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 153.8 | |
A reaction: This is said to be the first ever formulation of the principle of identity of indiscernible. |
483 | Start a thesis with something undisputable [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
Full Idea: In starting any thesis, it seems to me, one should put forward as one's point of departure something incontrovertible. | |
From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B01), quoted by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 09.57 |
21216 | Husserl says we have intellectual intuitions (of categories), as well as of the senses [Husserl, by Velarde-Mayol] |
Full Idea: The novelty of Husserl is to describe that we have intellectual intuitions, intuitions of categories as we have intuitions of sense objects. | |
From: report of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations [1900], II.VI.24) by Victor Velarde-Mayol - On Husserl 2.4.4 | |
A reaction: This is 'intuitions' in Kant's sense, of something like direct apprehensions. This idea is an axiom of phenomenology, because all mental life must be bracketed, and not just the sense experience part. |
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. |
1544 | Perception must be an internal matter, because we can fail to perceive when we are preoccupied [Diogenes of Apollonia, by Theophrastus] |
Full Idea: That it is the inner air that perceives, as being a fragment of the god, is shown by the fact that often when our minds are preoccupied with other matters we fail to see or hear. | |
From: report of Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], A19) by Theophrastus - On the Senses 42 |
24042 | The older Diogenes said the soul is air, made of the smallest particles [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
Full Idea: Diogenes [of Apollonia] took the soul to be air, thnking that of all things air is composed of the smallest particles and is a starting point. | |
From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], DK 64), quoted by Aristotle - De Anima 405a21 | |
A reaction: This suggests that Diogenes of Apollonia was an atomist, if the soul is made of particles. See also Met 984a5, which says Anaxagoras had the same view. |
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. |
5995 | Diogenes of Apollonia offered the first teleological account of cosmology [Diogenes of Apollonia, by Robinson,TM] |
Full Idea: Credit for the first clear assertion of teleological explanation in cosmology goes to Diogenes of Apollonia, for whom air is the divine and intelligent ground of the real and disposes things in the best possible way. | |
From: report of Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE]) by T.M. Robinson - Classical Cosmology (frags) | |
A reaction: The first teleological explanation seems to be based on a conscious mind. There also emerges the possibility of some sort of non-conscious teleology, closer to the laws of physics than to God. |
488 | Air is divine, because it is in and around everything, and arranges everything [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
Full Idea: Air in itself seems to me to be God and to reach everywhere and to arrange everything and to be in everything. | |
From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B05), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 152.22- | |
A reaction: So water and fire and air have been offered as the ultimate explanans, though no one seems to offer earth, which is too grubby and miserable (and was denied a Form by Plato). 'Air is God' could ground a nice modern religious sect. |
484 | Everything is ultimately a variation of one underlying thing [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
Full Idea: It seems to me that all existing things are created by the alteration of the same thing, and are the same thing. | |
From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B02), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 151.31- |
486 | Plants and animals can only come into existence if something fixes their species [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
Full Idea: No plant could grow out of the earth, and no animal or any other thing could come into being, unless it were so compounded as to be the same. | |
From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B02), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 151.31- |
485 | Things must retain their essential nature during change, or mixing would be impossible [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
Full Idea: If any existing thing were different in its own essential nature, and were not the same thing which was transformed in many ways and changed, in no way could things mix with one another. | |
From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B02), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 151.31- |
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. |
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? |