Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Science and Method', 'teachings' and 'Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     specify just one area for these texts

---

4 ideas

6. Mathematics / A. Nature of Mathematics / 2. Geometry

10245	One geometry cannot be more true than another [Poincaré]
	Full Idea: One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.
	From: Henri Poincaré (Science and Method [1908], p.65), quoted by Stewart Shapiro - Philosophy of Mathematics
	A reaction: This is the culminating view after new geometries were developed by tinkering with Euclid's parallels postulate.

29. Religion / B. Monotheistic Religion / 4. Christianity / a. Christianity

21798	To universalise 'give everything to the poor' leads to absurdity [Hegel]
	Full Idea: If everyone gave everything to the poor, then soon there would be no more poor to give anything to, or no more persons who would have anything to give.
	From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion [1827], III: 152), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 10 'Faith'
	A reaction: Matthew 5:8, 19:21. Beautifully clear. [I always believed that I had thought of this idea - but not so]. If the logic is that it is better to be poor than to be rich, then the implication is that all excess wealth should be thrown into the sea.

29. Religion / C. Spiritual Disciplines / 3. Buddhism

7607	Nagarjuna and others pronounced the world of experience to be an illusion [Nagarjuna, by Armstrong,K]
	Full Idea: Many later Buddhists (after Nagarjuna, c.120 CE) developed a belief that everything we experience is an illusion: in the West we would call them idealists.
	From: report of Nagarjuna (teachings [c.120]) by Karen Armstrong - A History of God Ch.3
	A reaction: This is just one step beyond Plato (who at least hung onto the immediate world as an inferior reality), and is presumably intended to motivate meditators to break out of the misery of existence into a higher realm. Personally I am against it.

29. Religion / D. Religious Issues / 2. Immortality / a. Immortality

21797	Immortality does not come at a later time, but when pure knowing Spirit fully grasps the universal [Hegel]
	Full Idea: The immortality of the soul must not be imagined as though it first emerges into actuality at some later time; rather it is a present quality. ...As pure knowing or as thinking, Spirit has the universal for its object - this is eternity.
	From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion [1827], III: 208), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 10 'Death'
	A reaction: An unusual view of immortality, which challenges orthodoxy. The idea seems to be that 'pure knowing' is a grasping of the pure reason which embodies nature, which in turn is the nature of God. You enter eternity, rather than reside in it?