44 ideas
| 19635 | Hegel produced modern optimism; he failed to grasp that consciousness never progresses [Hegel, by Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism. How could he have failed to see that consciousness changes only its forms and modalities, but never progresses. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by E.M. Cioran - A Short History of Decay 5 |
| 8215 | Hegel was the last philosopher of the Book [Hegel, by Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Hegel was the last philosopher of the Book. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Jacques Derrida - Positions p.64 | |
| A reaction: Reference to 'the Book' connects this to the great religions which rely on one holy text. The implication is that Hegel was proposing one big solution to all problems. It is doubtful if many philosophers before Hegel dreamt of that either. |
| 16011 | Hegel doesn't storm the heavens like the giants, but works his way up by syllogisms [Kierkegaard on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Hegel is a Johannes Climacus who does not storm the heavens, like the giants, by putting mountain upon mountain, but climbs aboard them by way of his syllogisms. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Søren Kierkegaard - The Journals of Kierkegaard 2A | |
| A reaction: [Idea from SY] This appears to be an attempt at insulting Hegel for his timidity, but it seems to be describing the cautious approach which most modern philosophers take to be correct. [PG] |
| 19275 | You cannot understand what exists without understanding possibility and necessity [Hale] |
| Full Idea: I defend the thesis that questions about what kinds of things there are cannot be properly understood or adequately answered without recourse to considerations about possibility and necessity. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Good. I would say that this is a growing realisation in contemporary philosophy. The issue is focused when we ask what are the limitations of Quine's approach to metaphysics. If you don't see possibilities around you, you are a fool. |
| 5433 | For Hegel, things are incomplete, and contain external references in their own nature [Hegel, by Russell] |
| Full Idea: The basis of Hegel's system is that what is incomplete must not be self-subsistent, and needs the support of other things; whatever has relations to things outside itself must contain some reference to those outside things in its own nature. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Bertrand Russell - Problems of Philosophy Ch.14 | |
| A reaction: This leads to the idealist doctrine of 'internal relations'. It has some plausibility if you think about the physicist's definition of mass, which has to refer to forces etc. Presumably there is one essence for all of reality, instead of separate ones. |
| 3301 | On the continent it is generally believed that metaphysics died with Hegel [Benardete,JA on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In continental Europe it is widely believed that the metaphysical game was played out in Hegel. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Intro |
| 19661 | Making sufficient reason an absolute devalues the principle of non-contradiction [Hegel, by Meillassoux] |
| Full Idea: Hegel saw that the absolutization of the principle of sufficient reason (which marked the culmination of the belief in the necessity of what is) required the devaluation of the principle of non-contradiction. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812], 3) by Quentin Meillassoux - After Finitude; the necessity of contingency 3 | |
| A reaction: I pass this on without understanding it, though a joint study of my collection of ideas on sufficient reason and non-contradiction might make it clear. [Let me know if you can explain it!] |
| 20952 | Rather than in three stages, Hegel presented his dialectic as 'negation of the negation' [Hegel, by Bowie] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's 'dialectic' is often characterised in terms of the triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This is, however, not the way he presents it. The core of the dialectic is rather what Hegel terms the 'negation of the negation'. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Andrew Bowie - Introduction to German Philosophy | |
| A reaction: Interestingly, this connects it to debates about intuitionist logic, which denies that double-negation necessarily makes a positive. Presumably Marx emphasised the first reading. |
| 19291 | A canonical defintion specifies the type of thing, and what distinguish this specimen [Hale] |
| Full Idea: One might think of a full dress, or canonical, definition as specifying what type of thing it is, and what distinguishes it from everything else within its type. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 06.4) | |
| A reaction: Good! At last someone embraces the Aristotelian ideas that definitions are a) quite extensive and detailed (unlike lexicography), and b) they aim to get right down to the individual. In that sense, an essence is captured by a definition. |
| 19297 | The two Barcan principles are easily proved in fairly basic modal logic [Hale] |
| Full Idea: If the Brouwersche principle, p ⊃ □◊p is adjoined to a standard quantified vesion of the weakest modal logic K, then one can prove both the Barcan principle, and its converse. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 09.2) | |
| A reaction: The Brouwersche principle (that p implies that p must be possible) sounds reasonable, but the Barcan principles strike me as false, so something has to give. They are theorems of S5. Hale proposes giving up classical logic. |
| 19301 | With a negative free logic, we can dispense with the Barcan formulae [Hale] |
| Full Idea: I reject both Barcan and Converse Barcan by adopting a negative free logic. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 11.3) | |
| A reaction: See section 9.2 of Hale's book, where he makes his case. I can't evaluate this bold move, though I don't like the Barcan Formulae. We can anticipate objections to Hale: are you prepared to embrace the unexpected consequences of your new logic? |
| 19296 | If second-order variables range over sets, those are just objects; properties and relations aren't sets [Hale] |
| Full Idea: Contrary to what Quine supposes, it is neither necessary nor desirable to interpret bound higher-order variables as ranging over sets. Sets are a species of object. They should range over entities of a completely different type: properties and relations. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 08.2) | |
| A reaction: This helpfully clarifies something which was confusing me. If sets are objects, then 'second-order' logic just seems to be the same as first-order logic (rather than being 'set theory in disguise'). I quantify over properties, but deny their existence! |
| 19289 | Maybe conventionalism applies to meaning, but not to the truth of propositions expressed [Hale] |
| Full Idea: An old objection to conventionalism claims that it confuses sentences with propositions, confusing what makes sentences mean what they do with what makes them (as propositions) true. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 05.2) | |
| A reaction: The conventions would presumably apply to the sentences, but not to the propositions. Since I think that focusing on propositions solves a lot of misunderstandings in modern philosophy, I like the sound of this. |
| 21777 | Negation of negation doubles back into a self-relationship [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the 'negation of negation' is negation that, as it were, doubles back on itself and 'relates itself to itself'. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 6 'Space' | |
| A reaction: [ref VNP 1823 p.108] Glad we've cleared that one up. |
| 19298 | Unlike axiom proofs, natural deduction proofs needn't focus on logical truths and theorems [Hale] |
| Full Idea: In contrast with axiomatic systems, in natural deductions systems of logic neither the premises nor the conclusions of steps in a derivation need themselves be logical truths or theorems of logic. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 09.2 n7) | |
| A reaction: Not sure I get that. It can't be that everything in an axiomatic proof has to be a logical truth. How would you prove anything about the world that way? I'm obviously missing something. |
| 19295 | Add Hume's principle to logic, to get numbers; arithmetic truths rest on the nature of the numbers [Hale] |
| Full Idea: The existence of the natural numbers is not a matter of pure logic - it cannot be proved in pure logic. It can be proved in second-order logic plus Hume's principle. Truths of arithmetic are not logic - they depend on the nature of natural numbers. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 07.4) | |
| A reaction: Hume's principles needs entities which can be matched to one another, so a certain ontology is needed to get neo-logicism off the ground. |
| 5645 | The dialectical opposition of being and nothing is resolved in passing to the concept of becoming [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The concept of being contains within itself it own negation - nothing - and the dialectical opposition between these two concepts is resolved only in the passage to a new concept, becoming, which contains the truth of the passage from nothing to being. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.12 | |
| A reaction: The idea that one concept 'contains' another, or that an opposition could be 'resolved' by a new concept, sounds doubtful to me. For most analytical philosophers, and for Aristotle, oppositions are contradictions, and cannot and should not be 'resolved'. |
| 5646 | Hegel gives an ontological proof of the existence of everything [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: It would not be unfair to say that Hegel's metaphysics consists of an ontological proof of the existence of everything. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.12 | |
| A reaction: This is so gloriously far from David Hume that we must all find some appeal in it. The next question would be whether necessary existence has been proved. If so, given death, decay and entropy, what is it that has to exist? 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? |
| 19281 | Interesting supervenience must characterise the base quite differently from what supervenes on it [Hale] |
| Full Idea: Any intereresting supervenience thesis requires that the class of facts on which the allegedly supervening facts supervene be characterizable independently, without use or presupposition of the notions involved in stating the supervening facts. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 03.4.1) | |
| A reaction: There might be intermediate cases here, since having descriptions which are utterly unconnected (at any level) might be rather challenging. |
| 19278 | There is no gap between a fact that p, and it is true that p; so we only have the truth-condtions for p [Hale] |
| Full Idea: There is no clear gap between its being a fact that p and its being true that p, no obvious way to individuate the fact a true statement records other than via that statement's truth-conditions. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 03.2) | |
| A reaction: Typical of philosophers of language. The concept of a fact is of something mind-independent; the concept of a truth is of something mind-dependent. They can't therefore be the same thing (by the contrapositive of the indiscernability of identicals!). |
| 21755 | For Hegel, categories shift their form in the course of history [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the categories of thought are not fixed, eternal forms that remain unchanged throughout history, but are concepts that alter their meaning in history. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
| A reaction: This results from a critique of Kant's rather rigid view of categories. This idea is very influential, and certainly counts among Hegel's better ideas. |
| 21754 | Our concepts and categories disclose the world, because we are part of the world [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the structure of our concepts and categories is identical with, and thus discloses, the structure of the world itself, because we ourselves are born into and so share the character of the world we encounter. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
| A reaction: This is a reasonable speculation, but it makes more sense in the context of natural selection, and an empiricist theory of concepts. |
| 22079 | Hegel said Kant's fixed categories actually vary with culture and era [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's disagreement with Kant is that categories are not unambiguously universal forms of human understanding, but are conceived in subtly different ways in different cultures and in different historical epochs. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - Hegel p.95 | |
| A reaction: This may be Hegel's most influential idea. Though he hoped that categories would contain truth, by arising untrammelled from reason, and thereby matching reality. His successors seem to have given up on that hope, and settled for relativism. |
| 19302 | If a chair could be made of slightly different material, that could lead to big changes [Hale] |
| Full Idea: How shall we prevent a sorites taking us to the conclusion that a chair might have originated in a completely disjoint lot of wood, or even in some other material altogether? | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 11.3.7) | |
| A reaction: This seems a good criticism of Kripke's implausible claim that his lectern is necessarily (or essentially) made of the piece of wood it is made of. Could his lectern have had a small piece of plastic inserted in it? |
| 19290 | Absolute necessities are necessarily necessary [Hale] |
| Full Idea: I argue that any absolute necessity is necessarily necessary. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 05.5.2) | |
| A reaction: This requires the principle of S4 modal logic, that necessity implies necessary necessity. He argues that S5 is the logical of absolute necessity. |
| 19286 | 'Absolute necessity' is when there is no restriction on the things which necessitate p [Hale] |
| Full Idea: The strength of the claim that p is 'absolutely necessary' derives from the fact that in its expression as a universally quantified counterfactual ('everything will necessitate p'), the quantifier ranges over all propositions whatever. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 04.1) | |
| A reaction: Other philosophers don't seem to use the term 'absolute necessity', but it seems a useful concept, in contrast to conditional or local necessities. You can't buy chocolate on the sun. |
| 19288 | Logical and metaphysical necessities differ in their vocabulary, and their underlying entities [Hale] |
| Full Idea: The difference between logical and metaphysical necessities lies, not in the range of possibilities for which they hold, but - at the linguistic level - in the kind of vocabulary essential to their expression, and the kinds of entities that explain them. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 04.5) | |
| A reaction: I don't think much of the idea that the difference is just linguistic, and I don't like the idea of 'entities' as grounding them. I see logical necessities as arising from natural deduction rules, and metaphysical ones coming from the nature of reality. |
| 19285 | Logical necessity is something which is true, no matter what else is the case [Hale] |
| Full Idea: We can identify the belief that the proposition that p is logically necessary, where p may be of any logical form, with the belief that, no matter what else was the case, it would be true that p. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 04.1) | |
| A reaction: I find this surprising. I take it that logical necessity must be the consequence of logic. That all squares have corners doesn't seem to be a matter of logic. But then he seems to expand logical necessity to include conceptual necessity. Why? |
| 19287 | Maybe each type of logic has its own necessity, gradually becoming broader [Hale] |
| Full Idea: We can distinguish between narrower and broader kinds of logical necessity. There are, for example, the logical necessities of propostional logic, those of first-order logic, and so on. Maybe they are necessities expressed using logical vocabulary. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 04.5) | |
| A reaction: Hale goes on to prefer a view that embraces conceptual necessities. I think in philosophy we should designate the necessities according to their sources. This might clarify a currently rather confused situation. First-order includes propositional logic. |
| 19282 | It seems that we cannot show that modal facts depend on non-modal facts [Hale] |
| Full Idea: I think we may conclude that there is no significant version of modal supervenience which both commands acceptance and implies that all modal facts depend asymmetrically on non-modal ones. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 03.4.3) | |
| A reaction: This is the conclusion of a sustained and careful discussion, recorded here for interest. I'm inclined to think that there are very few, if any, non-modal facts in the world, if those facts are accurately characterised. |
| 19276 | The big challenge for essentialist views of modality is things having necessary existence [Hale] |
| Full Idea: Whether the essentialist theory can account for all absolute necessities depends in part on whether the theory can explain the necessities of existence (of certain objects, properties and entities). | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Hale has a Fregean commitment to all sorts of abstract objects, and then finds difficulty in explaining them from his essentialist viewpoint. His book didn't convince me. I'm more of a nominalist, me, so I sleep better at nights. |
| 19293 | Essentialism doesn't explain necessity reductively; it explains all necessities in terms of a few basic natures [Hale] |
| Full Idea: The point of the essentialist theory is not to provide a reductive explanation of necessities. It is, rather, to locate a base class of necessities - those which directly reflect the natures of things - in terms of which the remainder may be explained. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 06.6) | |
| A reaction: My picture is of most of the necessities being directly explained by the natures of things, rather than a small core of natures generating all the derived ones. All the necessities of squares derive from the nature of the square. |
| 19294 | If necessity derives from essences, how do we explain the necessary existence of essences? [Hale] |
| Full Idea: If the essentialist theory of necessity is to be adequate, it must be able to explain how the existence of certain objects - such as the natural numbers - can itself be absolutely necessary. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 07.1) | |
| A reaction: Hale and his neo-logicist pals think that numbers are 'objects', and they necessarily exist, so he obviously has a problem. I don't see any alternative for essentialists to treating the existing (and possible) natures as brute facts. |
| 19279 | What are these worlds, that being true in all of them makes something necessary? [Hale] |
| Full Idea: We need an explanation of what worlds are that makes clear why being true at all of them should be necessary and sufficient for being necessary (and true at one of them suffices for being possible). | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 03.3.2) | |
| A reaction: Hale is introducing combinatorial accounts of worlds, as one possible answer to this. Hale observes that all the worlds might be identical to our world. It is always assumed that the worlds are hugely varied. But maybe worlds are constrained. |
| 19299 | Possible worlds make every proposition true or false, which endorses classical logic [Hale] |
| Full Idea: The standard conception of worlds incorporates the assumption of bivalence - every proposition is either true or false. But it is infelicitous to build into one's basic semantic machinery a principle endorsing classical logic against its rivals. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 10.3) | |
| A reaction: No wonder Dummett (with his intuitionist logic) immediately spurned possible worlds. This objection must be central to many recent thinkers who have begun to doubt possible worlds. I heard Kit Fine say 'always kick possible worlds where you can'. |
| 9225 | Hegel reputedly claimed to know a priori that there are five planets [Hegel, by Field,H] |
| Full Idea: Hegel is reputed to have claimed to have deduced on a priori grounds that the number of planets is exactly five. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Hartry Field - Recent Debates on the A Priori 1 | |
| A reaction: Even if this is a wicked travesty of Hegel, it will do nicely to represent the extremes of claims to a priori synthetic knowledge. Field doesn't offer any evidence. I would love it to be true. |
| 19300 | The molecules may explain the water, but they are not what 'water' means [Hale] |
| Full Idea: What it is to be (pure) water is to be explained in terms of being composed of H2O molecules, but this is not what the word 'water' means. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 11.2) | |
| A reaction: Hale says when the real and verbal definitions match, we can know the essence a priori. If they come apart, presumably we need a posteriori research. Interesting. It is certainly dubious to say a stuff-word means its chemical composition. |
| 7903 | The six perfections are giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom [Nagarjuna] |
| Full Idea: The six perfections are of giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom. | |
| From: Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnaparamitashastra [c.120], 88) | |
| A reaction: What is 'morality', if giving is not part of it? I like patience and vigour being two of the virtues, which immediately implies an Aristotelian mean (which is always what is 'appropriate'). |
| 21758 | Humans have no fixed identity, but produce and reveal their shifting identity in history [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the absolute truth of humanity is that human beings have no fixed, given identity, but rather determine and produce their own identity and their world in history, and that they gradually come to the recognition of this fact in history. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
| A reaction: This quintessentially existentialist idea, most obvious in Sartre, seems to have originated with this view of Hegel's. |
| 20414 | Hegel's Absolute Spirit is the union of human rational activity at a moment, and whatever that sustains [Hegel, by Eldridge] |
| Full Idea: We may take Hegel's Absolute Spirit to be the union of collective, human rational activity at a historical moment with its proper object, the forms of social and individual life that the rational activity is devoted to understanding and sustaining. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Richard Eldridge - G.W.F. Hegel (aesthetics) 1 | |
| A reaction: From this formulation it sounds as if the whole human race might have momentary union, but presumably it is more local 'peoples' that can exhibit this. |
| 3909 | Society isn’t founded on a contract, since contracts presuppose a society [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, society cannot be founded on a contract, since contracts have no reality until society is in place. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Roger Scruton - Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey 28.2 | |
| A reaction: Interesting, and reminiscent of the private language argument, but contracts surely start as deals between individuals (on a desert island?). |
| 4347 | When man wills the natural, it is no longer natural [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: When man wills the natural, it is no longer natural. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]), quoted by Rosalind Hursthouse - On Virtue Ethics Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: Sounds good, though I'm not sure what it means. The application of the word 'natural' seems a bit arbitrary to me. No objective joint exists between the natural and unnatural. The default position has to be that everything is natural. |
| 4188 | Hegel's entire philosophy is nothing but a monstrous amplification of the ontological proof [Schopenhauer on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's entire philosophy is nothing but a monstrous amplification of the ontological proof. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Arthur Schopenhauer - Abstract of 'The Fourfold Root' Ch.II | |
| A reaction: All massive a priori metaphysics is summed up in this argument, which is right at the core of philosophy. |
| 6686 | Hegel said he was offering an encyclopaedic rationalisation of Christianity [Hegel, by Graham] |
| Full Idea: Hegel claimed that his philosophy was nothing less than an encyclopaedic rationalisation of the Christian religion. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Gordon Graham - Eight Theories of Ethics Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: Why did he pick Christianity to rationalise? How can you reason properly if you start with a dogma? |