9 ideas
| 6259 | Why can't a wise man doubt everything? [Montaigne] |
| Full Idea: Why cannot a wise man dare to doubt anything and everything? | |
| From: Michel de Montaigne (Apology for Raymond Sebond [1580], p.0562) | |
| A reaction: This question seems to be the start of the Enlightenment Project, of attempting to prove everything. MacIntyre warns of the dangers of this in ethical theory. The story of modern philosophy is the discovery of its impossibility. E.g. Davidson on truth. |
| 6263 | No wisdom could make us comfortably walk a wide beam if it was high in the air [Montaigne] |
| Full Idea: Take a beam wide enough to walk along: suspend it between two towers: there is no philosophical wisdom, however firm, which could make us walk along it just as we would if we were on the ground. | |
| From: Michel de Montaigne (Apology for Raymond Sebond [1580], p.0672) | |
| A reaction: This proposes great scepticism about the practical application of philosophical wisdom, but if we talk in terms of the wise assessment of risk in any undertaking, our caution on the raised beam makes perfectly good sense. |
| 9291 | The dating, in 1614, of the Hermetic writings as post-Christian is the end of the Renaissance [Yates] |
| Full Idea: The dating by Isaac Casaubon in 1614 of the Hermetic writings as not the work of a very ancient Egyptian priest but written in post-Christian times, is a watershed separating the Renaissance world from the modern world. | |
| From: Frances A. Yates (Giordano Bruno and Hermetic Tradition [1964], Ch.21) | |
| A reaction: I tend to place the end of the Renaissance with the arrival of the telescope in 1610, so the two dates coincide. Simply, magic was replaced by science. Religion ran alongside, gasping for breath. Mathematics was freed from numerology. |
| 9288 | The magic of Asclepius enters Renaissance thought mixed into Ficino's neo-platonism [Yates] |
| Full Idea: The magic of Asclepius, reinterpreted through Plotinus, enters with Ficino's De Vita into the neo-platonic philosophy of the Renaissance, and, moreover, into Ficino's Christian Platonism. | |
| From: Frances A. Yates (Giordano Bruno and Hermetic Tradition [1964], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: Asclepius is the source of 'Hermetic' philosophy. This move seems to be what gives the Renaissance period its rather quirky and distinctive character. Montaigne was not a typical figure. Most of them wanted to become gods and control the stars! |
| 6258 | Virtue is the distinctive mark of truth, and its greatest product [Montaigne] |
| Full Idea: The distinctive mark of the Truth we hold ought to be virtue, which is the most exacting mark of Truth, the closest one to heaven and the most worthy thing that Truth produces. | |
| From: Michel de Montaigne (Apology for Raymond Sebond [1580], p.0493) | |
| A reaction: A long way from Tarski and minimalist theories of truth! But not so far from pragmatism. Personally I think Montaigne is making an important claim, which virtue theorists should be attempting to incorporate into their theory. Aristotle would sympathise. |
| 6262 | We lack some sense or other, and hence objects may have hidden features [Montaigne] |
| Full Idea: We may all lack some sense or other; because of that defect, most of the features of objects may be concealed from us. | |
| From: Michel de Montaigne (Apology for Raymond Sebond [1580], p.0666) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as simple, straightforward common sense, and right. I cannot make sense of the claim that reality really is just the way it appears. We do not have a built-in neutrino detector, for example. |
| 6260 | Sceptics say there is truth, but no means of making or testing lasting judgements [Montaigne] |
| Full Idea: Pyrrhonians say that truth and falsehood exist; within us we have means of looking for them, but not of making any lasting judgements: we have no touchstone. | |
| From: Michel de Montaigne (Apology for Raymond Sebond [1580], p.0564) | |
| A reaction: This states the key difference between sceptics and relativists. The latter are more extreme as they say there is no such thing as truth. The former concede truth, and their scepticism is about the abilities of human beings. I am an anti-relativist. |
| 6261 | The soul is in the brain, as shown by head injuries [Montaigne] |
| Full Idea: The seat of the powers of the soul is in the brain, as is clearly shown by the fact that wounds and accidents affecting the head immediately harm the faculties of the soul. | |
| From: Michel de Montaigne (Apology for Raymond Sebond [1580], p.0614) | |
| A reaction: At last someone has finally got the facts clear. It seems surprising that the Greeks never clearly grasped this piece of irrefutable evidence - even those Greeks who speculated that the brain was the key. Here we have a fixed fact of philosophy of mind. |
| 22489 | 'Good' is an attributive adjective like 'large', not predicative like 'red' [Geach, by Foot] |
| Full Idea: Geach puts 'good' in the class of attributive adjectives, such as 'large' and 'small', contrasting such adjectives with 'predicative' adjectives such as 'red'. | |
| From: report of Peter Geach (Good and Evil [1956]) by Philippa Foot - Natural Goodness Intro | |
| A reaction: [In Analysis 17, and 'Theories of Ethics' ed Foot] Thus any object can simply be red, but something can only be large or small 'for a rat' or 'for a car'. Hence nothing is just good, but always a good so-and-so. This is Aristotelian, and Foot loves it. |