19 ideas
| 16000 | Fixed ideas should be tackled aggressively [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: Fixed ideas are like a cramp in your foot: the best remedy is to stomp on them. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (The Journals of Kierkegaard [1850], JP-III, 635) | |
| A reaction: Sound philosophical advice at any time. [SY] Does this apply in seminars, as well as in private meditation? [PG] |
| 16012 | Philosophy can't be unbiased if it ignores language, as that is no more independent than individuals are [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: If the claim of philosophers to be unbiased were all it pretends to be, it would have to take account of language and its significance...Language is partly given and partly develops freely. As individuals cannot be truly independent, so too with language. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (The Journals of Kierkegaard [1850], 1840.07.18) | |
| A reaction: A surprisingly prophetic entry from Kierkegaard anticipating the linguistic turn. [SY] |
| 19528 | Knowledge is prior to believing, just as doing is prior to trying to do [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Knowing corresponds to doing, believing to trying. Just as trying is naturally understood in relation to doing, so believing is naturally understood in relation to knowing. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.4) | |
| A reaction: An interesting analogy. You might infer that there can be no concept of 'belief' without the concept of 'knowledge', but we could say that it is 'truth' which is indispensible, and leave out knowledge entirely. Belief is to truth as trying is to doing? |
| 19527 | We don't acquire evidence and then derive some knowledge, because evidence IS knowledge [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: When we acquire new evidence in perception, we do not first acquire unknown evidence and then somehow base knowledge on it later. Rather, acquiring new is evidence IS acquiring new knowledge. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.4) | |
| A reaction: This makes his point much better than Idea 19526 does. |
| 19529 | Belief explains justification, and knowledge explains belief, so knowledge explains justification [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: If justification is the fundamental epistemic norm of belief, and a belief ought to constitute knowledge, then justification should be understood in terms of knowledge too. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.5) | |
| A reaction: If we are looking for the primitive norm which motivates the whole epistemic game, then I am thinking that truth might well play that role better than knowledge. TW would have to reply that it is the 'grasped truth', rather than the 'theoretical truth'. |
| 19536 | Knowledge-first says your total evidence IS your knowledge [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Knowledge-first equate one's total evidence with one's total knowledge. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.8) | |
| A reaction: Couldn't lots of evidence which merely had a high probability be combined together to give a state we would call 'knowledge'? Many dubious witnesses confirm the truth, as long as they are independent, and agree. |
| 19530 | A neutral state of experience, between error and knowledge, is not basic; the successful state is basic [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: A neutral state covering both perceiving and misperceiving (or remembering and misrembering) is not somehow more basic than perceiving, for what unifies the case of each neutral state is their relation to the successful state. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.5-6) | |
| A reaction: An alternative is Disjunctivism, which denies the existence of a single neutral state, so that there is nothing to unite the two states, and they don't have a dependence relation. Why can't there be a prior family of appearances, some of them successful? |
| 19531 | Internalism about mind is an obsolete view, and knowledge-first epistemology develops externalism [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: A postulated underlying layer of narrow mental states is a myth, whose plausibility derives from a comfortingly familiar but obsolescent philosophy of mind. Knowledge-first epistemology is a further step in the development of externalism. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: Williamson is a real bruiser, isn't he? I don't take internalism about mind to be obsolescent at all, but now I feel so inferior for clinging to such an 'obsolescent' belief. ...But then I cling to Aristotle, who is (no doubt) an obsolete philosopher. |
| 19526 | Surely I am acquainted with physical objects, not with appearances? [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: When I ask myself what I am acquainted with, the physical objects in front of me are far more natural candidates than their appearances. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.3) | |
| A reaction: Not very impressive. The word 'acquainted' means the content of the experience, not the phenomena. Do I 'experience' the objects, or the appearances? The answer there is less obvious. If you apply it to colours, it is even less obvious. |
| 19534 | How does inferentialism distinguish the patterns of inference that are essential to meaning? [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Inferentialism faces the grave problem of separating patterns of inference that are to count as essential to the meaning of an expression from those that will count as accidental (a form of the analytic/synthetic distinction). | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a rather persuasive objection to inferentialism, though I don't personally take that as a huge objection to all internalist semantics. |
| 19535 | Internalist inferentialism has trouble explaining how meaning and reference relate [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The internalist version of inferentialist semantics has particular difficulty in establishing an adequate relation between meaning and reference. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: I would have thought that this was a big problem for referentialist semantics too, though evidently Williamson doesn't think so. If he is saying that the meaning is in the external world, dream on. |
| 19533 | Inferentialist semantics relies on internal inference relations, not on external references [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: On internalist inferential (or conceptual role) semantics, the inferential relations of an expression do not depend on what, if anything, it refers to, ...rather, the meaning is something like its place in a web of inferential relations. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: Williamson says the competition is between externalist truth-conditional referential semantics (which he favours), and this internalist inferential semantics. He is, like, an expert, of course, but I doubt whether that is the only internalist option. |
| 19532 | Truth-conditional referential semantics is externalist, referring to worldly items [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Truth-conditional referential semantics is an externalist programme. In a context of utterance the atomic expressions of a language refer to worldly items, from which the truth-conditions of sentences are compositionally determined. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: I just don't see how a physical object can be part of the contents of a sentence. 'Dragons fly' is atomic, and meaningful, but its reference fails. 'The cat is asleep' is just words - it doesn't contain a live animal. |
| 16003 | If people marry just because they are lonely, that is self-love, not love [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: People despair about being lonely and therefore get married. But is this love? I should say it is self-love. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (The Journals of Kierkegaard [1850], JP-III, 40-41) | |
| A reaction: If you decide to marry someone because you don't want to be an old maid/bachelor in your elder years, try to actually love the person you're marrying. Not just for money or sex. [SY] |
| 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'). |
| 21910 | Our destiny is the highest pitch of world-weariness [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: Our destiny in this life is to be brought to the highest pitch of world-weariness. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (The Journals of Kierkegaard [1850], 1855.09.25), quoted by Alastair Hannay - Kierkegaard 10 | |
| A reaction: The beginning of his last entry. Hardly a great general truth, but interesting. Should we aspire to exhaust life? |
| 16001 | Life may be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backwards. But then it forgets the other side - that it must be lived forwards. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (The Journals of Kierkegaard [1850], JP-III, 635) | |
| A reaction: Some of the best philosophers dwell too much on philosophy, history and the past, while forgetting to actually live and enjoy their lives. [SY] |
| 16008 | The best way to be a Christian is without 'Christianity' [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: One best becomes a Christian - without 'Christianity'. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (The Journals of Kierkegaard [1850], JP-1:214) | |
| A reaction: A very healthy attitude for followers of Jesus, given today's television evangelists, religious fundamentalist and zealots. [SY] |
| 20735 | We need to see that Christianity cannot be understood [Kierkegaard] |
| Full Idea: The problem is not to understand Christianity, but to understand that it cannot be understood. | |
| From: Søren Kierkegaard (The Journals of Kierkegaard [1850], p.146), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 1 'Roots' | |
| A reaction: This seems to cut us intellectually adrift. We could say the same of supporting Real Madrid. There has to be some magnetism which holds our attention, and there must be something to say about that. |