11 ideas
| 21901 | 'Difference' refers to that which eludes capture [Deleuze, by May] |
| Full Idea: 'Difference' is a term which Deleuze uses to refer to that which eludes capture. | |
| From: report of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 3.03 | |
| A reaction: Presumably its ancestor is Kant's noumenon. This is one of his concepts used to 'palpate' our ossified conceptual scheme. |
| 14235 | Saying 'they can become a set' is a tautology, because reference to 'they' implies a collection [Cargile] |
| Full Idea: If the rule is asserted 'Given any well-determined objects, they can be collected into a set by an application of the 'set of' operation', then on the usual account of 'they' this is a tautology. Collection comes automatically with this form of reference. | |
| From: James Cargile (Paradoxes: Form and Predication [1979], p.115), quoted by Oliver,A/Smiley,T - What are Sets and What are they For? Intro | |
| A reaction: Is this a problem? Given they are well-determined (presumably implying countable) there just is a set of them. That's what set theory is, I thought. Of course, the iterative view talks of 'constructing' the sets, but the construction looks unstoppable. |
| 21902 | 'Being' is univocal, but its subject matter is actually 'difference' [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968], p.36), quoted by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 3.03 | |
| A reaction: This is an attempt to express the Heraclitean view of reality, as process, movement, multiplicity - something which always eludes our attempts to pin it down. |
| 21908 | Ontology can be continual creation, not to know being, but to probe the unknowable [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Ontology can be an ontology of difference ....where what is there is not the same old things but a process of continual creation, an ontology that does not seek to reduce being to the knowable, but widens thought to palpate the unknowable. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]), quoted by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 5.05 | |
| A reaction: I'm inclined to think that the first duty of ontology is to face up to the knowable. I'm not sure that probing the unknowable, with no success or prospect of it, is a good way to spend a life. Probing ('palpating') can sometimes discover things. |
| 21903 | Ontology does not tell what there is; it is just a strange adventure [Deleuze, by May] |
| Full Idea: In Deleuze's hands ontology is not a matter of telling us what there is, but of taking us on strange adventures. | |
| From: report of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 3.03 | |
| A reaction: Presumably you only indulge in the strange adventure because you have no idea how to specify what there is. This sounds like the essence of post-modernism, in which life is just a game. |
| 21904 | Being is a problem to be engaged, not solved, and needs a new mode of thinking [Deleuze, by May] |
| Full Idea: In Deleuze, Being is not a puzzle to be solved but a problem to be engaged. It is to be engaged by a thought that moves as comfortably among problems as it does among solutions, as fluidly among differences as it does among identities. | |
| From: report of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 4.01 | |
| A reaction: This sounds like what I've always known as 'negative capability' (thanks to Keats). Is philosophy just a hobby, like playing darts? It seems that the aim of the process is 'liberation', about which I would like to know more. |
| 6387 | A minimum requirement for a theory of meaning is that it include an account of truth [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Whatever else it embraces, a theory of meaning must include an account of truth - a statement of the conditions under which an arbitrary sentence of the language is true. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Reality without Reference [1977], p.132) | |
| A reaction: It is a moot point whether we can define meaning if we assume truth, or if we can define truth by assuming meaning. Tarski seems to presuppose meaning when he defines truth (Idea 2345). I like Davidson's taking of truth as basic. |
| 6391 | A theory of truth tells us how communication by language is possible [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: A theory of truth lets us answer the underlying question how communication by language is possible. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Reality without Reference [1977], p.137) | |
| A reaction: If, instead, you explain communication by understood intentions (á la Grice), you have to say more about what sort of intentions are meant. If you use reference, you still have more to say about the meaning of sentences. Davidson looks good. |
| 6388 | Is reference the key place where language and the world meet? [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: The essential question is whether reference is the, or at least one, place where there is direct contact between linguistic theory and events, actions, or objects described in nonlinguistic terms. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Reality without Reference [1977], p.134) | |
| A reaction: How do you 'describe objects in nonlinguistic terms'? The causal theory of reference (e.g. Idea 4957) is designed to plug language straight into the world via reference. It simplifies things nicely, but I don't quite believe it. |
| 6390 | With a holistic approach, we can give up reference in empirical theories of language [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: I defend a version of the holistic approach, and urge that we must give up the concept of reference as basic to an empirical theory of language. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Reality without Reference [1977], p.136) | |
| A reaction: He proposes to connect language to the world via the concept of truth, rather than of reference. It is a brilliant idea, and is the key issue in philosophy of language. I go back to animals, which seem to care about situations rather than things. |
| 6389 | To explain the reference of a name, you must explain its sentence-role, so reference can't be defined nonlinguistically [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: It is inconceivable that one should be able to explain the relationship between 'Kilimanjiro' and Kilimanjiro without first explaining the role of the word in sentences; hence there is no chance of explaining reference directly in nonlinguistic terms. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Reality without Reference [1977], p.135) | |
| A reaction: I point at the mountain, and a local says 'Kilimanjiro'? There is a 'gavagai'-type problem with that. The prior question might be 'what is it about this word that enables it to have a role in sentences?' Unlike whimpering or belching. |