34 ideas
| 15038 | Structuralism systematically abstracted the event from sciences, and even from history [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: One can agree that structuralism formed the most systematic effort to evacuate the concept of the event, not only from ethnology but from a whole series of other sciences and in the extreme case from history. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Truth and Power (interview) [1976], p.115) | |
| A reaction: 'Abstract' might be a better word than 'evacuate'. In that sense, this at least seems to have it the right way round - that structure can be abstracted, but in no way can a structure be prior to its components (pace Ladyman, Shapiro etc). |
| 22024 | Fichte's subjectivity struggles to then give any account of objectivity [Pinkard on Fichte] |
| Full Idea: For Fichte 'subjectivity' came first, and he was then stuck with the (impossible) task of showing how 'objectivity' arose out of it. | |
| From: comment on Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 06 | |
| A reaction: The best available answer to this problem (for idealists) is, I think, Nietzsche's perspectives, in which multiple subjectivities are summed to produce a blurred picture which has a degree of consensus. Fichte later embraced other minds. |
| 15044 | 'Truth' is the procedures for controlling which statements are acceptable [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: 'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Truth and Power (interview) [1976], p.132) | |
| A reaction: Foucault is not absurdly relativist about this, but I don't think I agree, even in his terms. In a sexually prudish culture, blunt sexual truths are clearly true to everyone, but totally unacceptable. Society shudders when unacceptable truths are spoken. |
| 15042 | Truth doesn't arise from solitary freedom, but from societies with constraints [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: Truth isn't a reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Truth and Power (interview) [1976], p.131) | |
| A reaction: This obviously has a degree of truth in many areas of human belief, but I just don't buy it as an account of Newton's researches into optics, or Lavoisier's chemistry. Politics is more involved once big money is required. |
| 22017 | Normativity needs the possibility of negation, in affirmation and denial [Fichte, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: To adopt any kind of normative stance is to commit oneself necessarily to the possibility of negation. It involves doing something correctly or incorrectly, so there must exist the possibility of denying or affirming. | |
| From: report of Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 05 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the key idea for understanding Hegel's logic. Personally I think animals have a non-verbal experience of negation - when a partner dies, for example. |
| 22018 | Necessary truths derive from basic assertion and negation [Fichte, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Fichte thought that everything that involves necessary truths - even mathematics and logic - should be shown to follow from the more basic principles involved in assertion and negation. | |
| From: report of Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 05 | |
| A reaction: An interesting proposal, though I am struggling to see how it works. Fichte sees assertion and negation as foundational (Idea 22017), but I take them to be responses to the real world. |
| 15037 | Why does knowledge appear in sudden bursts, and not in a smooth continuous development? [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: How is it that at certain moments and in certain orders of knowledge, there are these sudden take-offs, these hastenings of evolution, these transformations which fail to correspond to the calm, continuist image that is normally accredited? | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Truth and Power (interview) [1976], p.114) | |
| A reaction: The answer is either in the excitement of a new motivation, which may concern power, or may concern pure understanding - or else it is just that one discovery brings a host of others along with (like discovering DNA). |
| 22064 | Fichte's logic is much too narrow, and doesn't deduce ethics, art, society or life [Schlegel,F on Fichte] |
| Full Idea: Only Fichte's principles are deduced in his book, that is, the logical ones, and not even these completely. And what about the practical, the moral and ethical ones. Society, learning, wit, art, and so on are also entitled to be deduced here. | |
| From: comment on Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794]) by Friedrich Schlegel - works Vol 18 p.34 | |
| A reaction: This is the beginnings of the romantic rebellion against a rather narrowly rationalist approach to philosophy. Schlegel also objects to the fact that Fichte only had one axiom (presumably the idea of the not-Self). |
| 22032 | Fichte's key claim was that the subjective-objective distinction must itself be subjective [Fichte, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Fichte's key claim was that the difference between the subjective and the objective points of view had to be itself a subjective distinction, something that the 'I' posits. | |
| From: report of Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 09 | |
| A reaction: This seems to lock us firmly into the idealist mental prison and throw away the key. |
| 22020 | We only see ourselves as self-conscious and rational in relation to other rationalities [Fichte] |
| Full Idea: A rational creature cannot posit itself as such a creature with self-consciousness without positing itself as an individual, as one among many rational creatures. | |
| From: Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794], p.8), quoted by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 05 n25 | |
| A reaction: [1796 book about his Wissenschaftlehre] This is the transcendental (Kantian) approach to other minds. Wittgenstein's private language argument is similar. Hegel was impressed by this idea (I think). |
| 22060 | The Self is the spontaneity, self-relatedness and unity needed for knowledge [Fichte, by Siep] |
| Full Idea: According to Fichte, spontaneity, self-relatedness, and unity are the basic traits of knowledge (which includes conscience). ...This principle of all knowledge is what he calls the 'I' or the Self. | |
| From: report of Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794]) by Ludwig Siep - Fichte p.58 | |
| A reaction: This is the idealist view. He gets 'spontaneity' from Kant, which is the mind's contribution to experience. Self-relatedness is the distinctive Fichte idea. Unity presumably means total coherence, which is typical of idealists. |
| 22066 | Novalis sought a much wider concept of the ego than Fichte's proposal [Novalis on Fichte] |
| Full Idea: Novalis aimed to create a theory of the ego with a much wider scope than Fichte's doctrine of knowledge had been able to establish. ....Without philosophy, imperfect poet - without poetry, imperfect thinker. | |
| From: comment on Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794]) by Novalis - Logological Fragments I vol.3 p.531 | |
| A reaction: [in his 'Fichte Studies] Since this is at the heart of early romanticism, I take the concept to embrace nature, as well as creative imagination. There is a general rebellion against the narrowness of Fichte. |
| 22016 | The self is not a 'thing', but what emerges from an assertion of normativity [Fichte, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Fichte said the self is not a natural 'thing' but is itself a normative status, and 'it' can obtain this status, so it seems, only by an act of attributing it to itself. ...He continually identified the 'I' with 'reason' itself. | |
| From: report of Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 05 | |
| A reaction: Pinkard says Fichte gradually qualified this claim. Fichte struggled to state his view in a way that avoided obvious paradoxes. 'My mind produces decisions, so there must be someone in charge of them'? Is this transcendental? |
| 22019 | Consciousness of an object always entails awareness of the self [Fichte] |
| Full Idea: I can be conscious of any object only on the condition that I am also conscious of myself, that is, of the conscious subject. This proposition is incontrovertible. | |
| From: Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794], p.112), quoted by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 05 | |
| A reaction: [from the 1797/8 version of Wissenschaftslehre] Russell might be cross to find that his idea on this was anticipated by Fichte. I still approve of the idea. |
| 4983 | There are no rules linking thought and behaviour, because endless other thoughts intervene [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: We know too much about thought and behaviour to trust exact and universal statements linking them. Beliefs and desires issue in behaviour only as modified and mediated by further beliefs and desires, attitudes and attendings, without limit. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970], p.217) | |
| A reaction: Now seen as a key objection to behaviourism, and rightly so. However, I am not sure about "without limit", which implies an implausible absolute metaphysical freedom. Davidson goes too far in denying any nomological link between thought and brain. |
| 3529 | Reduction is impossible because mind is holistic and brain isn't [Davidson, by Maslin] |
| Full Idea: Davidson rejects ontological reduction of mental to physical because propositional attitudes are holistic; there must be extensive coherence among someone's attitudes to treat them as a rational person, and this has no counterpart in physical theory. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970]) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 7.5 | |
| A reaction: I don't find this view persuasive. We treat the weather in simple terms, even though it is almost infinitely complex. Davidson has a Kantian overconfidence in our rationality. A coherence among the parts is needed to be a tree. |
| 2307 | Anomalous monism says nothing at all about the relationship between mental and physical [Davidson, by Kim] |
| Full Idea: Davidson's anomalous monism says no more about the relationship between the mental and the physical than the claim that all objects with a colour have a shape says about the relationship between colours and shapes. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970]) by Jaegwon Kim - Mind in a Physical World §1 p.005 | |
| A reaction: Indeed, I find the enthusiasm for property dualism etc. quite baffling, given that we are merely told that mind is 'an anomaly'. I take it to be old fashioned dualism in trendy clothes. |
| 5497 | Mind is outside science, because it is humanistic and partly normative [Davidson, by Lycan] |
| Full Idea: For Davidson, mental types are individuated by considerations that are nonscientific, distinctly humanistic, and part normative, so will not coincide with any types that are designated in scientific terms. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970]) by William Lycan - Introduction - Ontology p.8 | |
| A reaction: I just don't believe this, mainly because I don't accept that there is a category called 'nonscientific'. All we are saying is that a brain is a hugely complicated object, and we don't properly understand its operations, though we relate to it very well. |
| 4081 | Anomalous monism says causes are events, so the mental and physical are identical, without identical properties [Davidson, by Crane] |
| Full Idea: Davidson's anomalous monism says that events are causes, so we can identify mental and physical events without having to identify their properties. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970]) by Tim Crane - Elements of Mind 2.18 | |
| A reaction: As Fodor insists, a thing like a mountain has properties at different levels of description. We can have 'property dualism' and full-blown reductive identity. |
| 2321 | If rule-following and reason are 'anomalies', does that make reductionism impossible? [Davidson, by Kim] |
| Full Idea: Davidson takes mental anomalism (that the mind exhibits normativity and rationality), and in particular his claim that there are no laws connecting mental and physical properties, to undermine mind-body reductionism. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970]) by Jaegwon Kim - Mind in a Physical World §4 p.092 | |
| A reaction: A nice summary of the core idea of property dualism. Personally I expect the whole lot to be reducible, and to follow laws, but the sheer complexity of the brain permanently bars us from actually doing the reduction. |
| 3404 | Davidson claims that mental must be physical, to make mental causation possible [Davidson, by Kim] |
| Full Idea: Davidson's thesis is that if mental events of a particular kind cause physical events of a particular kind, and the two kinds are connected by a law, then they must both be physical kinds. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970]) by Jaegwon Kim - Philosophy of Mind p.137 | |
| A reaction: Davidson would pretty obviously be right. The whole problem here is the idea of a 'law'. You can only have strict law for simple entities, like particles and natural kinds. The brain is a mess, like weather or explosions. |
| 3405 | If mental causation is lawless, it is only possible if mental events have physical properties [Davidson, by Kim] |
| Full Idea: Since no laws exist connecting mental and physical properties, purely physical laws must do the causal work, which means mental events enter into causal relations only because they possess physical properties that figure in laws. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970]) by Jaegwon Kim - Philosophy of Mind p.138 | |
| A reaction: Surely no such laws exist 'yet'? I can see no plausible argument that psycho-physical laws are impossible. However, the conclusion of this remark seems right. Interaction requires some sort of equality. |
| 16041 | Supervenience of the mental means physical changes mental, and mental changes physical [Davidson] |
| Full Idea: The supervenience [of mental characteristics on the physical] might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or an object cannot differ mentally without altering physically. | |
| From: Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970], I) | |
| A reaction: This is the first occasion on which Davidson introduced his notion of supervenience. Supervenience is often taken to be one-way. The first implies physical causing mental; his second implies that mental causes physical. |
| 6620 | Davidson sees identity as between events, not states, since they are related in causation [Davidson, by Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Davidson's version of the identity theory is couched in terms of events rather than states, because he regards causation as a relation between events. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970]) by E.J. Lowe - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind Ch.2 n12 | |
| A reaction: I think it may be more to the point that the mind is a dynamic thing, and so it consists of events rather than states, and hence we want to know what those events are made up from. I think my chair is causing me to rest above the floor… |
| 3429 | Multiple realisability was worse news for physicalism than anomalous monism was [Davidson, by Kim] |
| Full Idea: Davidson's argument about psychophysical anomalism has not been embraced by everyone; multiple realisability of mental properties has had a much greater impact in undermining reductionism (and hence type physicalism). | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970]) by Jaegwon Kim - Philosophy of Mind p.218 | |
| A reaction: My view is that functional states are multiply realisable, but phenomenal states aren't. Fear functions in frogs much as it does in us, but being a frightened frog is nothing like being a frightened human. Their brains are different! |
| 22061 | Judgement is distinguishing concepts, and seeing their relations [Fichte, by Siep] |
| Full Idea: For Fichte, to judge means to distinguish concepts from one another and to place them in relationship to one another. | |
| From: report of Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794]) by Ludwig Siep - Fichte p.59 | |
| A reaction: This idea of Fichte's seems to be the key one for Hegel, and hence (I presume) it is the lynchpin of German Idealism. It seems to describe mathematical knowledge quite well. I don't think it fits judging whether there is a snake in the grass. |
| 22023 | Fichte's idea of spontaneity implied that nothing counts unless we give it status [Fichte, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Fichte placed emphasis on human spontaneity, on nothing 'counting' for us unless we somehow bestowed some kind of status on it. | |
| From: report of Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 06 | |
| A reaction: This idea evidentally arises from Kant's account of thought. Pinkard says this idea inspired the early Romantics. I would have thought the drive to exist (Spinoza's conatus) would make things count whether we liked it or not. |
| 15043 | Every society has a politics of truth, concerning its values, functions, prestige and mechanisms [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: Each society has its regime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth - the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms for distinguishing; the means of sanctioning it; the values in its acquisition; the status of its keepers. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Truth and Power (interview) [1976], p.131) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This idea is appropriately filed under 'society' rather than under 'truth'. Foucault knows there is a genuine truth beneath the complex social story. |
| 15040 | Marxists denounced power as class domination, but never analysed its mechanics [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: Power in Western capitalism was denounced by the Marxists as class domination; but the mechanics of power in themselves were never analysed. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Truth and Power (interview) [1976], p.117) | |
| A reaction: This seems to pinpoint Foucault's distinctive contribution to political thought, and it makes him one of the most interesting thinkers in the area. It is a good approach to history, but also to the role of power as a background to conventional thought. |
| 15041 | Power doesn't just repress, but entices us with pleasure, artefacts, knowledge and discourse [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: If power was only repressive, would we obey it? What makes power accepted is the fact …that it also traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Truth and Power (interview) [1976], p.120) | |
| A reaction: Once you present 'power' this way, it permeates so deeply into human activity that it is in danger of becoming a mere triviality of social analysis. Is every conversation that ever took place actually a power struggle? |
| 15039 | History lacks 'meaning', but it can be analysed in terms of its struggles [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: History has no 'meaning', but it is not absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be susceptible of analysis down to the smallest detail - but this in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Truth and Power (interview) [1976], p.116) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be an essentially Marxist view, in which one teases out the dialectical processes of any period. I can't think of a better way to approach history. The alternative is to only recount one side of the struggle, which must be bad history. |
| 22065 | Fichte reduces nature to a lifeless immobility [Schlegel,F on Fichte] |
| Full Idea: Fichte reduces the non-Ego or nature to a state of constant calm, standstill, immobility, lack of all change, movement and life, that is death. | |
| From: comment on Johann Fichte (The Science of Knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) [1st ed] [1794]) by Friedrich Schlegel - works vol 12 p.190 | |
| A reaction: The point is that Fichte's nature is a merely logical or conceptual deduction from the spontaneous reason of the self, so it can't have the lively diversity we find in nature. |
| 3524 | Causation is either between events, or between descriptions of events [Davidson, by Maslin] |
| Full Idea: According to Davidson analyses of causality proceed at two different levels: at the lower level it holds between events regardless of how they are described; higher level explanations hold between descriptions of events, which pick out properties. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970]) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 7.4 |
| 3526 | Whether an event is a causal explanation depends on how it is described [Davidson, by Maslin] |
| Full Idea: Davidson says causal explanations hold between descriptions of events and not between the events themselves, so the possibility of events as explanations depends on how they are described (e.g. a wind collapsing a bridge). | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970]) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 7.4 |