24 ideas
| 1606 | You have to be a Platonist to debate about reality, so every philosopher is a Platonist [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Everyone who enters into a debate about reality automatically becomes a Platonist. Since such debates are the essence of philosophy, every philosopher is a Platonist. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.199) | |
| A reaction: This is correct |
| 1595 | Philosophy aims to satisfy the chief human desire - the articulation of beauty itself [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy, the attempt to articulate the vision of beauty itself, is the attempt to satisfy the highest human desire. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.120) | |
| A reaction: A million miles away from modern philosophy, but still an ideal to be taken seriously. |
| 1572 | In the seventeenth century the only acceptable form of logos was technical knowledge [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: In the seventeenth century only a certain type of logos was deemed legitimate, namely that identified with technical knowledge (or 'techné'). | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], Intro. 15) |
| 1603 | Logos is not unconditionally good, but good if there is another person willing to engage with it [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Logos is not unconditionally good, but good contingent on there being some other person (out there) who is willing to talk with logos, to approach it even as an opponent. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.175) |
| 1573 | The hallmark of a person with logos is that they give reasons why one opinion is superior to another [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: What is supposed to identify the person of logos from the one without is the commitment to giving reasons explaining why one opinion is superior to another. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], Intro. 17) |
| 1593 | Human desire has an ordered structure, with logos at the pinnacle [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Human desire has an ordered structure, with logos at the pinnacle. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.109) |
| 1571 | 'Logos' ranges from thought/reasoning, to words, to rational structures outside thought [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Logos can mean i) a thought or reasoning, ii) the word which expresses a thought, iii) a rational structure outside human thought. These meanings give 'logos' an extraordinary range. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], Intro. 12) |
| 1592 | Logos cannot refute the relativist, and so must admit that it too is a matter of desire (for truth and agreement) [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Logos cannot refute the radical, consistent and self-conscious relativist. Therefore it must admit that, like the relativist, it itself is essentially a matter of desire. It wants to say what is right and wrong, true and false, and for others to agree. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.108) |
| 1598 | We prefer reason or poetry according to whether basics are intelligible or not [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Is the arché (basis) intelligible, or is it chaos? Upon this question hinges all, for answering it determines whether poetry or logos is the form of human speech that best does justice to the world. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.139) |
| 1584 | Modern science, by aiming for clarity about the external world, has abandoned rationality in the human world [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: The modern scientific world view, with all its hope for clarity and precision, has a flipside, …which is its abandonment of rationality in the world of human significance. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.74) |
| 1591 | Unfortunately for reason, argument can't be used to establish the value of argument [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Unfortunately for the logos there is no argument that can, without begging the question, establish the goodness of argumentation. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.106) |
| 1599 | Attempts to suspend all presuppositions are hopeless, because a common ground must be agreed for the process [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: To debate about suspending all our presuppositions requires a common ground which, upon being established, immediately renders the debate superfluous. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.144) |
| 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? |
| 1605 | Reality can be viewed neutrally, or as an object of desire [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: There are two extremes: the Aristotelian views reality simply as reality, and the sophist or poet views reality only as an object of desire. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.199) | |
| A reaction: Not sure about the second one. Does this express an actual desire, or just a hope? Could there be a mind for which its reality was only an aspiration? |
| 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. |
| 8790 | The 'doctrine of the given' is correct; some beliefs or statements are self-justifying [Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: In my opinion, the 'doctrine of the given' is correct in saying that there are some beliefs or statements which are 'self-justifying' and that among such beliefs are statements some of which concern appearances or 'ways of being appeared to'. | |
| From: Roderick Chisholm (The Myth of the Given [1964], §12) | |
| A reaction: To boldly assert that they are 'self-justifying' invites a landslide of criticisms, pointing at a regress. It might be better to say they are self-evident, or intuitively known, or primitive, or true by the natural light of reason. |
| 1577 | Relativism is a disease which destroys the possibility of rational debate [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Relativism is disease, is pollution, for it negates the efficacy of logos. It destroys the possibility of a complete rational debate of fundamental questions. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.41) |
| 1578 | If relativism is the correct account of human values, then rhetoric is more important than reasoning [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: If relativism offers an accurate description of human values, then rhetoric replaces logos as the most fundamental human activity. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.47) | |
| A reaction: Or putting it another way, logos (reason) becomes meaningless. I suppose, though, that a relativist can conduct conditional reasoning (but must belief in some rules of reason). |
| 1596 | Reasoning aims not at the understanding of objects, but at the desire to give beautiful speeches [Roochnik] |
| Full Idea: Logos originates not in a cognitive capacity for the apprehension of objects, but in the desire to give birth to beautiful speeches. | |
| From: David Roochnik (The Tragedy of Reason [1990], p.124) | |
| A reaction: It is hard for us to grasp this, but it might be quite life-enhancing if we could return to that old way of thought. |