Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Theory of Knowledge (2nd edn)', 'Reply to Professor Marcus' and 'Intro to 'Philosophical Essays''

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5 ideas

1. Philosophy / C. History of Philosophy / 4. Later European Philosophy / b. Seventeenth century philosophy
2945 Most philosophers start with reality and then examine knowledge; Descartes put the study of knowledge first [Lehrer]
     Full Idea: Some philosophers (e.g Plato) begin with an account of reality, and then appended an account of how we can know it, ..but Descartes turned the tables, insisting that we must first decide what we can know.
     From: Keith Lehrer (Theory of Knowledge (2nd edn) [2000], I p.2)
1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 1. Philosophy
9786 Philosophers working like teams of scientists is absurd, yet isolation is hard [Cartwright,R]
     Full Idea: The notion that philosophy can be done cooperatively, in the manner of scientists or engineers engaged in a research project, seems to me absurd. And yet few philosophers can survive in isolation.
     From: Richard Cartwright (Intro to 'Philosophical Essays' [1987], xxi)
     A reaction: This why Nietzsche said that philosophers were 'rare plants'.
1. Philosophy / F. Analytic Philosophy / 4. Conceptual Analysis
2946 You cannot demand an analysis of a concept without knowing the purpose of the analysis [Lehrer]
     Full Idea: An analysis is always relative to some objective. It makes no sense to simply demand an analysis of goodness, knowledge, beauty or truth, without some indication of the purpose of the analysis.
     From: Keith Lehrer (Theory of Knowledge (2nd edn) [2000], I p.7)
     A reaction: Your dismantling of a car will go better if you know what a car is for, but you can still take it apart in ignorance.
2. Reason / A. Nature of Reason / 6. Coherence
9784 A false proposition isn't truer because it is part of a coherent system [Cartwright,R]
     Full Idea: You do not improve the truth value of a false proposition by calling attention to a coherent system of propositions of which it is one.
     From: Richard Cartwright (Intro to 'Philosophical Essays' [1987], xi)
     A reaction: We need to disentangle the truth-value from the justification here. If it is false, then we can safely assume that is false, but we are struggling to decide whether it is false, and we want all the evidence we can get. Falsehood tends towards incoherence.
5. Theory of Logic / G. Quantification / 4. Substitutional Quantification
10801 Either reference really matters, or we don't need to replace it with substitutions [Quine]
     Full Idea: When we reconstrue quantification in terms of substituted expressions rather than real values, we waive reference. ...but if reference matters, we cannot afford to waive it as a category; and if it does not, we do not need to.
     From: Willard Quine (Reply to Professor Marcus [1962], p.183)
     A reaction: An odd dilemma to pose. Presumably the substitution account is an attempt to explain how language actually works, without mentioning dubious direct ontological commitment in the quantifiers.