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23392
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The Dao (Way) first means the road, and comes to mean the right way to live [Norden]
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Full Idea:
The 'Dao' (tr 'Way) has five meanings: 1) path or road, 2) mode of doing something, 3) account of how to do something, 4) the right way to live, and 5) the ultimate metaphysical entity responsible for nature, and how it should be.
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From:
Bryan van Norden (Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy [2011], 1.III)
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A reaction:
[compressed] So it is essentially metaphorical, just like the English 'way to do a thing'. Number 5 seems a rather large leap from the others, and most discussion seems to centre on number 4. The Chinese hoped for consensus on the Dao.
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23408
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The hermeneutic circle is either within the text, or between text and biased reader [Norden]
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Full Idea:
The first type of hermeneutic circle operates inside the text, studying relationships between sentences. …The second type is between the text and the reader, …who brings assumptions about what it means.
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From:
Bryan van Norden (Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy [2011], App A.I)
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A reaction:
The first kind is an essential aspect of reading well. Readers are biased, but I get very tired of those who do nothing but search for bias, and ignore the truth a text has to offer. If everything is bias, intellectual life is dead.
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10529
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If Hume's Principle can define numbers, we needn't worry about its truth [Fine,K]
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Full Idea:
Neo-Fregeans have thought that Hume's Principle, and the like, might be definitive of number and therefore not subject to the usual epistemological worries over its truth.
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From:
Kit Fine (Precis of 'Limits of Abstraction' [2005], p.310)
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A reaction:
This seems to be the underlying dream of logicism - that arithmetic is actually brought into existence by definitions, rather than by truths derived from elsewhere. But we must be able to count physical objects, as well as just counting numbers.
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10530
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Hume's Principle is either adequate for number but fails to define properly, or vice versa [Fine,K]
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Full Idea:
The fundamental difficulty facing the neo-Fregean is to either adopt the predicative reading of Hume's Principle, defining numbers, but inadequate, or the impredicative reading, which is adequate, but not really a definition.
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From:
Kit Fine (Precis of 'Limits of Abstraction' [2005], p.312)
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A reaction:
I'm not sure I understand this, but the general drift is the difficulty of building a system which has been brought into existence just by definition.
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10527
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An abstraction principle should not 'inflate', producing more abstractions than objects [Fine,K]
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Full Idea:
If an abstraction principle is going to be acceptable, then it should not 'inflate', i.e. it should not result in there being more abstracts than there are objects. By this mark Hume's Principle will be acceptable, but Frege's Law V will not.
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From:
Kit Fine (Precis of 'Limits of Abstraction' [2005], p.307)
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A reaction:
I take this to be motivated by my own intuition that abstract concepts had better be rooted in the world, or they are not worth the paper they are written on. The underlying idea this sort of abstraction is that it is 'shared' between objects.
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