36 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 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 |
| 7740 | There exists a realm, beyond objects and ideas, of non-spatio-temporal thoughts [Frege, by Weiner] |
| Full Idea: There is, in addition to the external world of physical objects and the internal world of ideas, a third realm of non-spatio-temporal objective objects, among which are thoughts. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Joan Weiner - Frege Ch.7 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be Platonism, and, in particular, to give a Platonic existent status to propositions. Personally I believe in propositions, but as glimpses of how our brains actually work, not as mystical objects. |
| 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. |
| 19466 | The word 'true' seems to be unique and indefinable [Frege] |
| Full Idea: It seems likely that the content of the word 'true' is sui generis and indefinable | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.327 (60)) | |
| A reaction: This is the view I associate with Davidson, though fans of Axiomatic Truth give up defining it, and just describe how it behaves. Defining it is very elusive, but I don't accept that nothing can be said about the contents of the concept of truth. |
| 19465 | There cannot be complete correspondence, because ideas and reality are quite different [Frege] |
| Full Idea: It is essential that the reality shall be distinct from the idea. But then there can be no complete correspondence, no complete truth. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.327 (60)) | |
| A reaction: He thinks that logic can give a perfect account of truth, or at least the extension of truth, where ordinary language will always fail. I wonder what he would have thought of Tarski's theory? |
| 19468 | The property of truth in 'It is true that I smell violets' adds nothing to 'I smell violets' [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The sentence 'I smell the scent of violets' has just the same content as 'It is true that I smell the scent of violets'. So it seems that nothing is added to the thought by my ascribing to it the property of truth. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.328 (61)) | |
| A reaction: This idea predates Ramsey's similar proposal, for which, oddly, Ramsey always seems to get the credit. To a logician they may have identical content, but pragmatically they are likely to differ in context. 'True' certainly doesn't add to the thought. |
| 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. |
| 19470 | Thoughts in the 'third realm' cannot be sensed, and do not need an owner to exist [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Thoughts are neither things in the external world nor ideas. A third realm must be recognised. Anything in this realm has it in common with ideas that it cannot be perceived by the senses, and does not need an owner to belong with his consciousness. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.337(69)) | |
| A reaction: This important idea is the creed for modern platonists. We don't have to accept Forms, or any particular content, but there is a mode of existence which is distinct from both mental and physical, and is the residence of 'abstracta'. I deny it! |
| 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? |
| 19471 | A fact is a thought that is true [Frege] |
| Full Idea: A fact is a thought that is true. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.342(74)) | |
| A reaction: It strikes me as pretty obvious that facts are not thoughts, because they concern the contents of thoughts. You can't discuss facts without the notion of what a thought is 'about'. If I think about my garden, the relevant fact is aspects of my garden. |
| 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. |
| 9877 | Late Frege saw his non-actual objective objects as exclusively thoughts and senses [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Earlier, Frege divided objects into subjective, actual objective, and non-actual objective; in the 'Grundgesetze' he emphasised logical objects; but in 'The Thought' the non-actual objects become exclusively thoughts and their constituent senses. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.18 | |
| A reaction: Sounds to me like Frege was finally waking up and taking a dose of common sense. The Equator is the standard example of a non-actual objective object. |
| 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. |
| 19469 | We grasp thoughts (thinking), decide they are true (judgement), and manifest the judgement (assertion) [Frege] |
| Full Idea: We distinguish the grasp of a thought, which is 'thinking', from the acknowledgement of the truth of a thought, which is the act of 'judgement', from the manifestation of this judgement, which is an 'assertion'. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.329 (62)) |
| 8162 | Thoughts have their own realm of reality - 'sense' (as opposed to the realm of 'reference') [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: For Frege, thoughts belong to a special realm of reality, which he called the 'realm of sense' and distinguished from the 'realm of reference'. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Michael Dummett - Thought and Reality 1 | |
| A reaction: A thought is, for Frege, a proposition. There is a halfway Platonism possible here, where the 'realm' for such things exists, but within that realm the objects might be conventional, or some such. Real possible worlds containing fictions! |
| 9818 | A thought is distinguished from other things by a capacity to be true or false [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: On Frege's view, what distinguishes thoughts from everything else is that they may meaningfully be called 'true' and 'false'. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: A lot of thinking is imagistic, and while the image may or may not truly picture the world, we tend to think that the truth or otherwise of daydreaming is simply irrelevant. Does Frege take all thought to be propositional? |
| 16379 | Thoughts about myself are understood one way to me, and another when communicated [Frege] |
| Full Idea: When Dr Lauben thinks he has been wounded, ..only Dr Lauben can grasp thoughts determined in this way. But he cannot communicate a thought which only he can grasp. To say 'I have been wounded' he must use 'I' in a sense graspable by others. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]), quoted by François Recanati - Mental Files 16.1 | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems to be the first, and very influential, attempt to explain the unusual and revealing semantics of indexicals. It seems to be the ultimate source of 2-D semantics, by introducing two modes of meaning for one term. |
| 7752 | Only the utterer's primary intention is relevant to the meaning [Grice] |
| Full Idea: Only what I may call the primary intention of an utterer is relevant to the (non-natural) meaning of an utterance. | |
| From: H. Paul Grice (Meaning [1957], p.47) | |
| A reaction: This sounds okay for simple statements, but gets really tricky with complex statements, such as very ironic remarks delivered to an audience of diverse people. |
| 7751 | Meaning needs an intention to induce a belief, and a recognition that this is the speaker's intention [Grice] |
| Full Idea: For a statement to have (non-naturally) meant something, not merely must it have been 'uttered' with the intention of inducing a certain belief, but also the utterer must have intended an 'audience' to recognise the intention behind the utterance. | |
| From: H. Paul Grice (Meaning [1957], p.43) | |
| A reaction: This is Grice's famous and distinctive theory of meaning. I am struck by the problem of a password, which seems to have a quite different intention from its literal meaning. Also a speaker with two different audiences and opposite intentions. |
| 7753 | We judge linguistic intentions rather as we judge non-linguistic intentions, so they are alike [Grice] |
| Full Idea: To show that the criteria for judging linguistic intentions are very like the criteria for judging non-linguistic intentions is to show that linguistic intentions are very like non-linguistic intentions. | |
| From: H. Paul Grice (Meaning [1957], p.48) | |
| A reaction: This hint at the end of his paper is one of the key attractions of Grice's view. It offers an account of language that fits it into the world of animal communication and evolution. It never seems to quite capture the way meaning goes beyond intentions. |
| 19467 | A 'thought' is something for which the question of truth can arise; thoughts are senses of sentences [Frege] |
| Full Idea: I call a 'thought' something for which the question of truth can arise at all. ...So I can say: thoughts are senses of sentences, without wishing to assert that the sense of every sentence is a thought. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.327-8 (61)) | |
| A reaction: This builds on his distinction between sense and reference. The reference of every truth sentence is just 'the true', and the sense is the proposition. The concept of a proposition seems indispensable to logic, I would say. |
| 19472 | A sentence is only a thought if it is complete, and has a time-specification [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Only a sentence with the time-specification filled out, a sentence complete in every respect, expresses a thought. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.343(76)) | |
| A reaction: I take the 'every respect' to include the avoidance of ambiguity, and some sort of perspicacious reference for the terms. I wish philosophers would focus on the thoughts in their subject, and not nit-pick about the sentences. Does he mean 'utterances'? |
| 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. |
| 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? |