16 ideas
| 21970 | Philosophy attains its goal if one person feels perfect accord between their system and experience [Fichte] |
| Full Idea: If even a single person is completely convinced of his philosophy; ...if his free judgement in philosophising, and what life obtrudes upon him, are perfectly in accord; then in this person philosophy has completed its circuit and attained its goal. | |
| From: Johann Fichte (works [1798], I:512), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 06.4 | |
| A reaction: Interesting to hear a famous idealist offering accordance with real life as a criterion for philosophical success. But that is real life, but not as you and I may know it.... His criterion is very subjective. A bad philosopher might attain it? |
| 6912 | For Fichte there is no God outside the ego, and 'our religion is reason' [Fichte, by Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: For Fichte there is no God outside the ego, and 'our religion is reason'. | |
| From: report of Johann Fichte (works [1798]) by Ludwig Feuerbach - Principles of Philosophy of the Future §17 | |
| A reaction: Fichte was not an atheist, but this seems to be a supreme aphorism for summarising our image of the Englightenment. Personally I subscribe to the Enlightenment ideal (the best life is the rational life), despite doubts about 'pure' reason. |
| 9331 | How do we determine which of the sentences containing a term comprise its definition? [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: How are we to determine which of the sentences containing a term comprise its definition? | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §2) | |
| A reaction: Nice question. If I say 'philosophy is the love of wisdom' and 'philosophy bores me', why should one be part of its definition and the other not? What if I stipulated that the second one is part of my definition, and the first one isn't? |
| 21973 | Fichte believed in things-in-themselves [Fichte, by Moore,AW] |
| Full Idea: Fichte retained a broadly Kantian conception of how things are in themselves. | |
| From: report of Johann Fichte (works [1798]) by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.2 | |
| A reaction: The contrast is between those who believe in the thing-in-itself, while admitting that we can't know it, and those who deny such a thing. The debate returned 130 years later as verificationism in language. |
| 21914 | We can deduce experience from self-consciousness, without the thing-in-itself [Fichte] |
| Full Idea: We can abandon the thing-in-itself, and aim for 'a complete deduction of all experience from the possibility of self-consciousness'. | |
| From: Johann Fichte (works [1798], I p.425), quoted by Peter B. Lewis - Schopenhauer 3 | |
| A reaction: German Idealism now looks to me like a weird abberation in the history of philosophy, though no doubt it has (like every philosophical theory) some supporters out there somewhere. Schopenhauer called this 'raving nonsense'. |
| 20951 | The absolute I divides into consciousness, and a world which is not-I [Fichte, by Bowie] |
| Full Idea: Fichte's very influential idea is that the subject becomes divided against itself. The absolute I splits into an I (consciousness) and a not-I (the objective world) that are relative to each other. | |
| From: report of Johann Fichte (works [1798]) by Andrew Bowie - Introduction to German Philosophy 3 'Fichtean' | |
| A reaction: This is German Idealism in action. Is there a before and after the split here? I can't make much sense of this idea. It is said that babies spend a while deciding which bits are them and which aren't. There is more to the world than 'not-I'. |
| 21964 | Reason arises from freedom, so philosophy starts from the self, and not from the laws of nature [Fichte] |
| Full Idea: Not by any law of nature do we attain to reason; we achieve it by absolute freedom. ...In philosophy, therefore, we must necessarily start from the self. The materialists' project of deriving the appearance of reason from natural laws is impossible. | |
| From: Johann Fichte (works [1798], I:298), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics | |
| A reaction: I blame Descartes' Cogito for this misunderstanding. The underlying idea (in Kant, and probably earlier) is that pure reason needs pure free will. Modern thought usually sees reason as extremely impure. |
| 21968 | Abandon the thing-in-itself; things only exist in relation to our thinking [Fichte] |
| Full Idea: We must be rid of the thing-in-itself; for whatever we may think, we are that which thinks therein, and hence nothing could ever come to exist independently of us, for everything is necessarily related to our thinking. | |
| From: Johann Fichte (works [1798], I:501), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 06.3 | |
| A reaction: Some statements of idealism are understandable, or even quite plausible, but this one sounds ridiculous. The idea that if human beings die out then reality ceases to exist is absurd humanistic vanity. |
| 9333 | A priori belief is not necessarily a priori justification, or a priori knowledge [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: It is one thing to believe something a priori and another for this belief to be epistemically justified. The latter is required for a priori knowledge. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §8) | |
| A reaction: Personally I would agree with this, because I don't think anything should count as knowledge if it doesn't have supporting reasons, but fans of a priori knowledge presumably think that certain basic facts are just known. They are a priori justified. |
| 9342 | Understanding needs a priori commitment [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: Understanding is itself based on a priori commitment. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §12) | |
| A reaction: This sounds plausible, but needs more justification than Horwich offers. This is the sort of New Rationalist idea I associate with Bonjour. The crucial feature of the New lot is, I take it, their fallibilism. All understanding is provisional. |
| 9332 | Meaning is generated by a priori commitment to truth, not the other way around [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: Our a priori commitment to certain sentences is not really explained by our knowledge of a word's meaning. It is the other way around. We accept a priori that the sentences are true, and thereby provide it with meaning. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §8) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a lovely trump card, but how on earth do you decide that a sentence is true if you don't know what it means? Personally I would take it that we are committed to the truth of a proposition, before we have a sentence for it. |
| 9341 | Meanings and concepts cannot give a priori knowledge, because they may be unacceptable [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: A priori knowledge of logic and mathematics cannot derive from meanings or concepts, because someone may possess such concepts, and yet disagree with us about them. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §12) | |
| A reaction: A good argument. The thing to focus on is not whether such ideas are a priori, but whether they are knowledge. I think we should employ the word 'intuition' for a priori candidates for knowledge, and demand further justification for actual knowledge. |
| 9334 | If we stipulate the meaning of 'number' to make Hume's Principle true, we first need Hume's Principle [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: If we stipulate the meaning of 'the number of x's' so that it makes Hume's Principle true, we must accept Hume's Principle. But a precondition for this stipulation is that Hume's Principle be accepted a priori. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §9) | |
| A reaction: Yet another modern Quinean argument that all attempts at defining things are circular. I am beginning to think that the only a priori knowledge we have is of when a group of ideas is coherent. Calling it 'intuition' might be more accurate. |
| 9339 | A priori knowledge (e.g. classical logic) may derive from the innate structure of our minds [Horwich] |
| Full Idea: One potential source of a priori knowledge is the innate structure of our minds. We might, for example, have an a priori commitment to classical logic. | |
| From: Paul Horwich (Stipulation, Meaning and Apriority [2000], §11) | |
| A reaction: Horwich points out that to be knowledge it must also say that we ought to believe it. I'm wondering whether if we divided the whole territory of the a priori up into intuitions and then coherent justifications, the whole problem would go away. |
| 21965 | Spinoza could not actually believe his determinism, because living requires free will [Fichte] |
| Full Idea: Spinoza could only think his philosophy, not believe it, for it stood in immediate contradiction to his necessary conviction in daily life, whereby he was bound to regard himself as free and independent. | |
| From: Johann Fichte (works [1798], I:513), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 06.2 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be invoking Kant's idea that we must presuppose free will, rather than an assertion that we actually have it. |
| 22511 | Some reasonings are stronger than we are [Philolaus] |
| Full Idea: Some reasonings are stronger than we are. | |
| From: Philolaus (fragments/reports [c.425 BCE]), quoted by Aristotle - Eudemian Ethics 1225a33 | |
| A reaction: This endorses the Aristotle view of akrasia (as opposed to the Socratic view). This isolated remark seems to imply that we are more clearly embodiments of will than of reason. |