41 ideas
| 22087 | Philosophy fails to articulate the continual becoming of existence [Kierkegaard, by Carlisle] |
| Full Idea: Kierkegaard criticise philosophy for its inability to grasp and to articulate the movement, the continual becoming, that characterises existence. | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or: a fragment of life [1843]) by Clare Carlisle - Kierkegaard: a guide for the perplexed 2 | |
| A reaction: Heraclitus had a go, and Hegel's historicism focuses on dynamic thought, but this idea concerns the immediacy of individual life. |
| 15801 | Many philosophers aim to understand metaphysics by studying ourselves [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: Leibniz, Reid, Brentano and others have held that, by considering certain obvious facts about ourselves, we can arrive at an understanding of the general principles of metaphysics. The present book is intended to confirm that view. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], Intro 1) | |
| A reaction: I sympathise, but don't really agree. I see metaphysics as a process of filtering ourselves out of the picture, leaving an account of how things actually are. |
| 15802 | I use variables to show that each item remains the same entity throughout [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: My use of variables is not merely pedantic; it indicates that the various items on our list pertain to one and the same entity throughout. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], Intro 2) | |
| A reaction: I am one of those poor souls who finds modern analytic philosophy challenging simply because I think in terms of old fashioned words, instead of thinking like mathematicians and logicians. This is a nice defence of their approach. |
| 5651 | Traditional views of truth are tautologies, and truth is empty without a subject [Kierkegaard, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Kierkegaard developed the idea of 'truth as subjectivity'; the traditional conceptions of truth - correspondence or coherence - he regarded as equally empty, not because false, but because tautologous; truth ceases to be empty when related to a subject. | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or: a fragment of life [1843]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.13 | |
| A reaction: It strikes me that the correspondence theory of truth also involves a subject. If you become too obsessed with the subject, you lose the concept of truth. You need a concept of the non-subject too. Truth concerns the contents of thought. |
| 15832 | Events are states of affairs that occur at certain places and times [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: We will restrict events to those states of affairs which occur at certain places and times. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 4.6) | |
| A reaction: If I say 'the bomb may explode sometime', that doesn't seem to refer to an event. Philosophers like Chisholm bowl along, defining left, right and centre, and never seem to step back from their system and ask obvious critical questions. |
| 15829 | The mark of a state of affairs is that it is capable of being accepted [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: We will say that the mark of a state of affairs is the fact that it is capable of being accepted. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: I find this a quite bewildering proposal. It means that it is impossible for there to be a state of affairs which is beyond human conception, but why commit to that? |
| 15809 | A state of affairs pertains to a thing if it implies that it has some property [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: A state of affairs pertains to a thing if it implies the thing to have a certain property. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: For this to work, we must include extrinsic and relational properties, and properties which are derived from mere predication. I think this is bad metaphysics, and leads to endless confusions. |
| 15828 | I propose that events and propositions are two types of states of affairs [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: I will propose that events are said to constitute one type of states of affairs, and propositions another | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: I would much prefer to distinguish between the static and the dynamic, so we have a static or timeless state of affairs, and a dynamic event or process. Propositions I take to be neither. He really means 'facts', which subsume the whole lot. |
| 15830 | Some properties can never be had, like being a round square [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: There are properties which nothing can possibly have; an example is the property of being both round and square. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: This is a rather bizarre Meinongian claim. For a start it sounds like two properties not one. Is there a property of being both 'over here' and 'over there'? We might say the round-square property must exist, for God to fail to implement it (?) |
| 15827 | Some properties, such as 'being a widow', can be seen as 'rooted outside the time they are had' [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: Some properties may be said to be 'rooted outside the times at which they are had'. Examples are the property of being a widow and the property of being a future President. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: This is the sort of mess you when you treat the category in which an object belongs as if it was one of its properties. We categorise because of properties. |
| 15804 | If some dogs are brown, that entails the properties of 'being brown' and 'being canine' [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: The state of affairs which is some dogs being brown may be said to entail (make it necessarily so) the property of 'being brown', as well as the properties of 'being canine' and 'being both brown and canine'. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: And the property of 'being such that it is both brown and canine and brown or canine'. Etc. This is dangerous nonsense. Making all truths entail the existence of some property means we can no longer get to grips with real properties. |
| 15810 | Maybe we can only individuate things by relating them to ourselves [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: It may well be that the only way we have, ultimately, of individuating anything is to relate it uniquely to ourselves. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: I'm guessing that Chisholm is thinking of 'ourselves' as meaning just himself, but I'm thinking this is plausible if he means the human community. I doubt whether there is much a philosopher can say on individuation that is revealing or precise. |
| 15805 | Being the tallest man is an 'individual concept', but not a haecceity [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: Being the tallest man and being President of the United States are 'individual concepts', but not haecceities. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: Chisholm introduces this term, to help him explain his haecceity more clearly. (His proposal on that adds a lot of fog to this area of metaphysics). |
| 15807 | A haecceity is a property had necessarily, and strictly confined to one entity [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: An individual essence or haecceity is a narrower type of individual concept. This is a property which is had necessarily, and which it is impossible for any other thing to have. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: [Apologies to Chisholm for leaving out the variables from his definition of haecceity. See Idea 15802] See also Idea 15805. The tallest man is unique, but someone else could become the tallest man. No one else could acquire 'being Socrates'. |
| 15814 | A peach is sweet and fuzzy, but it doesn't 'have' those qualities [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: Our idea of a peach is not an idea of something that 'has' those particular qualities, but the concrete thing that 'is' sweet and round and fuzzy. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.6) | |
| A reaction: This is the beginnings of his 'adverbial' account of properties, with which you have to sympathise. It tries to eliminate the possibility of some propertyless thing, to which properties can then be added, like sprinkling sugar on it. |
| 12852 | If x is ever part of y, then y is necessarily such that x is part of y at any time that y exists [Chisholm, by Simons] |
| Full Idea: Chisholm has an axiom: if x is a proper part of y, then necessarily if y exists then x is part of it. If x is ever part of y, they y is necessarily such that x is part of y at any time that y exists. | |
| From: report of Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], p.149) by Peter Simons - Parts 5.3 | |
| A reaction: This is Chisholm's notorious mereological essentialism, that all parts are necessary, and change of part means change of thing. However, it looks to me more like a proposal about what properties are necessary, not what are essential. |
| 15808 | A traditional individual essence includes all of a thing's necessary characteristics [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: According to the traditional account of individual essence, each thing has only one individual essence and it includes all the characteristics that the thing has necessarily. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: Chisholm is steeped in medieval theology, but I don't think this is quite what Aristotle meant. Everyone nowadays has to exclude the 'trivial' necessary properties, for a start. But why? I'm contemplating things which survive the loss of their essence. |
| 12851 | Intermittence is seen in a toy fort, which is dismantled then rebuilt with the same bricks [Chisholm, by Simons] |
| Full Idea: Chisholm poses the problem of intermittence with the case of a toy fort which is built from toy bricks, taken apart, and then reassembled with the same bricks in the same position. | |
| From: report of Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], p.90) by Peter Simons - Parts 5.3 | |
| A reaction: You could strengthen the case, or the problem, by using those very bricks to build a ship during the interval. Or building a fort with a different design. Most people would be happy to say that same object (token) has been rebuilt. |
| 15806 | The property of being identical with me is an individual concept [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: I wish to urge that the property of being identical with me is an individual concept. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: I can just about live with the claim (for formal purposes) that I am identical with myself, but I strongly resist my then having a 'property' consisting of 'being identical with myself' (or 'not being identical with somone else' etc.). |
| 15826 | There is 'loose' identity between things if their properties, or truths about them, might differ [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that there is a 'loose' sense of identity that is consistent with saying 'A has a property that B does not have', or 'some things are true of A but not of B'. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: He is trying to explicate Bishop Butler's famous distinction between 'strict and philosophical' and 'loose and popular' senses. We might want to claim that the genuine identity relation is the 'loose' one (pace the logicians and mathematicians). |
| 15819 | Do sense-data have structure, location, weight, and constituting matter? [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: Does a red sense-datum or appearance have a back side as well as a front? Where is it located? Does it have any weight? What is it made of? | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: A reductive physicalist like myself is not so troubled by questions like this, which smack of Descartes's non-spatial argument for dualism. |
| 15816 | 'I feel depressed' is more like 'he runs slowly' than like 'he has a red book' [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: The sentences 'I feel depressed' and 'I feel exuberant' are related in the way in which 'He runs slowly' and 'He runs swiftly' are related, and not in the way in which 'He has a red book' and 'He has a brown book' are related. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: Ducasse 1942 and Chisholm 1957 seem to be the sources of the adverbial theory. I gather Chisholm gave it up late in his career. The adverbial theory seems sort of right, but it doesn't illuminate what is happening. |
| 15817 | If we can say a man senses 'redly', why not also 'rectangularly'? [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: If we say a man 'senses redly', may we also say that he 'senses rhomboidally' or 'senses rectangularly'? There is no reason why not. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: This is Chisholm replying to one of the best known objections to the adverbial theory. Can we sense 'wobblyrhomboidallywithpinkdots-ly'? Can we perceive 'landscapely'? The problem is bigger than he thinks. |
| 15818 | So called 'sense-data' are best seen as 'modifications' of the person experiencing them [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: We may summarise my way of looking at appearing by saying that so-called appearances or sense-data are 'affections' or 'modifications' of the person who is said to experience them. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: Hm. That seems to transfer the ontological problem of the redness of the tomato from the tomato to the perceiver, but leave the basic difficulty untouched. I think we need to pull apart the intrinsic and subjective ingredients here. |
| 15831 | Explanations have states of affairs as their objects [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that states of affairs constitute the objects of the theory of explanation. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: It is good to ask what the constituents of a theory of explanation might be. He has an all-embracing notion of state of affairs, whereas I would say that events and processes are separate. See Idea 15828. |
| 15811 | I am picked out uniquely by my individual essence, which is 'being identical with myself' [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: What picks me out uniquely, without relating me to some other being? It can only be the property of 'being me' or 'being identical with myself', which can only be an individual essence or haecceity, a property I cannot fail to have. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: Only a philosopher (and a modern analytic one at that) would imagine that this was some crucial insight into how we know our own identities. |
| 15815 | Sartre says the ego is 'opaque'; I prefer to say that it is 'transparent' [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: Sartre says the ego is 'opaque'; I would think it better to say that the ego is 'transparent'. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: Insofar as we evidently have a self, I would say it is neither. It is directly experienced, through willing, motivation, and mental focus. |
| 15813 | People use 'I' to refer to themselves, with the meaning of their own individual essence [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: Each person uses the first person pronoun to refer to himself, and in such a way that its reference (Bedeutung) is to himself and its intention (Sinn) is his own individual essence. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: I think this is exactly right, and may be the basis of the way we essentialise in our understanding of the rest of reality. I have a strong notion of what is essential in me and what is not. |
| 15803 | Bad theories of the self see it as abstract, or as a bundle, or as a process [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: Some very strange theories of the self suggest it is an abstract object, such as a class, or a property, or a function. Some theories imply that I am a collection, or a bundle, or a structure, or an event, or a process (or even a verb!). | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], Intro 4) | |
| A reaction: I certainly reject the abstract lot, but the second lot doesn't sound so silly to me, especially 'structure' and 'process'. I don't buy the idea that the Self is an indivisible monad. It is a central aspect of brain process - the prioritiser of thought. |
| 15821 | Determinism claims that every event has a sufficient causal pre-condition [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: Determinism is the proposition that, for every event that occurs, there occurs a sufficient causal condition of that event. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: You need an ontology of events to put it precisely this way. Doesn't it also work the other way: that there is an event for every sufficient causal condition? The beginning and the end of reality pose problems. |
| 15824 | There are mere omissions (through ignorance, perhaps), and people can 'commit an omission' [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: If a man does not respond to a greeting, if he was unaware that he was addressed then his failure to respond may be a mere omission. But if he intended to snub the man, then he could be said to have 'committed the omission'. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 2.6) | |
| A reaction: Chisholm has an extensive knowledge of Catholic theology. These neat divisions are subject to vagueness and a continuum of cases in real life. |
| 22090 | For me time stands still, and I with it [Kierkegaard, by Carlisle] |
| Full Idea: Time flows, life is a stream, people say, and so on. I do not notice it. Time stands still, and I with it. | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or: a fragment of life [1843], I:26) by Clare Carlisle - Kierkegaard: a guide for the perplexed 3 | |
| A reaction: This is from the spokesman for the aesthetic option in life, which is largely pleasure-seeking. No real choices ever occur. |
| 9305 | The plebeians bore others; only the nobility bore themselves [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: Those who bore others are the plebeians, the crowd, the endless train of humanity in general; those who bore themselves are the chosen ones, the nobility. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or: a fragment of life [1843], Pt.1), quoted by Lars Svendsen - A Philosophy of Boredom Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: [p.288 in Princeton Edn] Stunningly elitist, but ask where boredom is most overtly found. "Boring" was once a very fashionable word among the English upper classes. Education and wealth seem to intensify boredom. |
| 5650 | Reason is just abstractions, so our essence needs a subjective 'leap of faith' [Kierkegaard, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: For Kierkegaard, reason, which produces only abstractions, negates our individual essence; this essence is subjectivity, and subjectivity exists only in the 'leap of faith', whereby the individual casts in his lot with eternity. | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or: a fragment of life [1843]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.13 | |
| A reaction: Interesting, but this strikes me as a confusion of reason and logic. A logical life would indeed be a sort of death, and need faith as an escape, but a broad view of the rational life includes emotion, imagination and laughter. Blind faith is disaster. |
| 22095 | There are aesthetic, ethical and religious subjectivity [Kierkegaard, by Carlisle] |
| Full Idea: Kierkegaard distinguishes three main types of subjectivity: aesthetic, ethical and religious. But are these types of people, or different phases of one person's life? | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or: a fragment of life [1843]) by Clare Carlisle - Kierkegaard: a guide for the perplexed 4 | |
| A reaction: His picture of the religious mode holds no appeal for me. I also can't accept that the aesthetic and the moral are somewho distinct. People may discover they have slipped into one of these modes, but no one chooses them, do they? |
| 20747 | What matters is not right choice, but energy, earnestness and pathos in the choosing [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: In making a choice, it is not so much a question of choosing the right way as of the energy, the earnestness, and the pathos with which one chooses. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or: a fragment of life [1843], p.106), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 2 'Phenomenology' | |
| A reaction: I'm struggling to identify with the experience he is describing. I can't imagine a more quintessentially existentialist remark than this. Reference to 'energy' in choosing strikes me as very romantic. Is 'the way not taken' crucial (in 'pathos')? |
| 22091 | Kierkegaard prioritises the inward individual, rather than community [Kierkegaard, by Carlisle] |
| Full Idea: Whereas Hegel argues that individuals find fulfilment through participation in their community, Kierkegaard prioritises the inwardness of each person, which is shared only with God. | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or: a fragment of life [1843]) by Clare Carlisle - Kierkegaard: a guide for the perplexed 3 | |
| A reaction: Sounds like the protestant religion opposing the catholic religion (although Hegel was a protestant). Individual v community is the great debate of the last two centuries in Europe. |
| 15822 | The concept of physical necessity is basic to both causation, and to the concept of nature [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: It is generally agreed, I think, that the concept of physical necessity, or a law of nature, is fundamental to the theory of causation and, more generally, to the concept of nature. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems intuitively right, but we might be able to formulate a concept of nature that had a bit less necessity in it, especially if we read a few books on quantum theory first. |
| 15823 | Some propose a distinct 'agent causation', as well as 'event causation' [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: Sometimes a distinction is made between 'event causation' and 'agent causation' and it has been suggested that there is an unbridgeable gap between the two. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: Nope, don't buy that. I connect it with Davidson's 'anomalous monism', that tries to combine one substance with separate laws of action. The metaphysical price for such a theory is too high to pay. |
| 15820 | A 'law of nature' is just something which is physically necessary [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: When we say something is 'physically necessary' we can replace it with 'law of nature'. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (Person and Object [1976], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: [plucked out of context even more than usual!] This is illuminating about what contemporary philosophers (such as Armstrong) seem to mean by a law of nature. It is not some grand equation, but a small local necessary connection. |
| 22088 | Faith is like a dancer's leap, going up to God, but also back to earth [Kierkegaard, by Carlisle] |
| Full Idea: Kierkegaard doesn't use the phrase 'leap of faith'. His metaphor of a dancer's leap expresses the way faith goes 'up' towards God, but also comes back down to earth, and is a way of living in the world. | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or: a fragment of life [1843]) by Clare Carlisle - Kierkegaard: a guide for the perplexed 2 | |
| A reaction: This entirely contradicts what I was taught about this idea many years ago. Memes turn into Chinese whispers. |