19 ideas
| 12772 | Philosophy is a value- and attitude-driven enterprise [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is a value- and attitude-driven enterprise; philosophy is in false consciousness when it sees itself otherwise. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: It is one thing to be permeated with values, and another to be value-driven. Truth, reason and logic are (I take it) granted a high value in philosophy, just as the offside rule is in football. I am trying to place reality in charge, not humanity. |
| 12771 | Is it likely that a successful, coherent, explanatory ontological hypothesis is true? [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: How likely is it that a truly successful, coherent, explanatory ontological hypothesis is true? | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: Van Fraassen announces "I reject metaphysic" (p.3), so we know where he stands. Anything becomes less certain as it moves to a higher level of generality. Should we abandon generalisation? There is much illumination in metaphysics. |
| 12773 | Analytic philosophy has an exceptional arsenal of critical tools [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: Analytical philosophy can rightly pride itself on having produced the greatest critical arsenal the world has ever known. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.6) | |
| A reaction: This is, of course, in the context of a scathing attack on the desire to use analytical methods to do speculative metaphysics. I say that if these are the best tools, then we should push forward with them to see how far we can get. |
| 12770 | We may end up with a huge theory of carefully constructed falsehoods [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: The specter that faces us is that we may end up having explained all that is dreamt of in our philosophies by intricately crafted postulates that are false. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: This is more persuasive that Idea 12769. People who cannot bear to live with a total absence of explanation (with Keats's 'negative capability') are most in danger from this threat. |
| 22227 | For Sartre there is only being for-itself, or being in-itself (which is beyond experience) [Sartre, by Daigle] |
| Full Idea: The two most fundamental modes of being in Sartre's ontology are being in-itself, and being for-itself. ...The in-itself lies beyond our experience of it. | |
| From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943]) by Christine Daigle - Jean-Paul Sartre 2.2 | |
| A reaction: This appears to be Kant's ding-an-sich, paired with Heidegger's Dasein. If those are the only options, then reality is either subjective or unknown, which seems to make Sartre an idealist, but he asserted that phenomena vindicate the in-itself. |
| 20743 | Appearances do not hide the essence; appearances are the essence [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: We reject the dualism of appearance and essence. The appearance does not hide the essence, it reveals it; it is the essence. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943], p.4-5), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 2 'Phenomenology' | |
| A reaction: This idea, expressed in the language of Hegel and Husserl, strikes me as the same as the analytic phenomenalism of Mill and Ayer. Hence I take it to be wrong. |
| 12769 | Inference to best explanation contains all sorts of hidden values [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: The very phrase 'inference to the best explanation' should wave a red flag for us. What is good, better, best? What values are slipped in here, under a common name, and where do they come from? | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: A point worth making, but overstated. If we are going to refuse to make judgements for fear that some wicked 'value' might creep in, our lives will be reduced to absurdity. |
| 12768 | We accept many scientific theories without endorsing them as true [Fraassen] |
| Full Idea: The choice among theories in science may be a choice to accept in some sense falling far short of endorsement as true. | |
| From: Bas C. van Fraassen (The Empirical Stance [2002], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: When put like this, it is hard to deny the force of Van Fraassen's reservations about science. Lots of people, including me, use scientific theories as working assumptions for life, with nothing like full confidence in their truth. |
| 6151 | Sartre says consciousness is just directedness towards external objects [Sartre, by Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: Sartre defends a view of consciousness as nothing but a directedness towards objects, insisting that these objects are transcendent with respect to that consciousness; hence Sartre is one of the first genuine externalists. | |
| From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943]) by Mark Rowlands - Externalism Ch.1 | |
| A reaction: An ancestor here is, I think, Schopenhauer (Idea 4166). The idea is attractive, as we are brought up with idea that we have a thing called 'consciousness', but if you removed its contents there would literally be nothing left. |
| 6164 | Sartre rejects mental content, and the idea that the mind has hidden inner features [Sartre, by Rowlands] |
| Full Idea: Sartre's attack on the idea that consciousness has contents is an attack on the idea that the mental possesses features that are hidden, inner and constituted or revealed by the individual's inwardly directed awareness. | |
| From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943]) by Mark Rowlands - Externalism Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: This is part of the move towards 'externalism' about the mind. The notion of 'content' implies a container. It seems slightly ridiculous, though, to try to say that the mind just 'is the world'. How is reasoning possible, and the relation of ideas? |
| 7074 | Man is a useless passion [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Man is a useless passion. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943], IV.2.III) | |
| A reaction: Memorable and neat. Since all of existence is ultimately 'useless', that part of it is not a revelation. The notion that we are essentially a 'passion' chimes nicely with David Hume's view, against the enlightenment rational view, and against Aristotle. |
| 6687 | Man is the desire to be God [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Man fundamentally is the desire to be God. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943], p.556?), quoted by Gordon Graham - Eight Theories of Ethics Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: It is better to see man (as seen all the way through the European tradition) as caught between the self-images of being an angel and being a 'quintessence of dust' (Hamlet). |
| 22228 | Sartre's freedom is not for whimsical action, but taking responsibility for our own values [Sartre, by Daigle] |
| Full Idea: Readers often confuse Sartre's notion of freedom with the freedom of acting whimsically ....but since there is no God, we must create our own values. Freedom is not merely a licence to act whimsically.; it entails responsibility. | |
| From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943]) by Christine Daigle - Jean-Paul Sartre 2.3 | |
| A reaction: The idea that we create our values comes from Nietzsche. Did Sartre want everyone to behave like an übermensch? How can you form a society from individuals who create private values, even if they (somehow) take responsibility for them? |
| 22233 | Love is the demand to be loved [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Love is the demand to be loved. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943], p.488), quoted by Christine Daigle - Jean-Paul Sartre 2.5 | |
| A reaction: Is that all love is? Hard to imagine someone loving another person without hoping that the other person will reciprocate. You need high self-esteem to 'demand' it. Low self-esteem merely hopes for it. He says the other person may feel the same. |
| 20755 | Fear concerns the world, but 'anguish' comes from confronting my self [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Anguish is distinguished from fear in that fear is fear of being in the world whereas anguish is anguish before myself. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943], p.65), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 5 'Radical' | |
| A reaction: I'm guessing that the anguish comes from the horror of the infinite choices available to me. Once you've made major life choices with full commitment (such as marriage), does that mean that existentialism becomes irrelevant? |
| 20760 | Sincerity is not authenticity, because it only commits to one particular identity [Sartre, by Aho] |
| Full Idea: Being sincere [in Sartre] has nothing to do with authenticity because, in committing ourselves to a particular identity, we strip away the possibility of transcendence by reducing ourselves to a thing. | |
| From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943]) by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 6 'Bad' | |
| A reaction: I take this to mean that sincerity says genuinely what role you are playing (such as a waiter), but authenticity is recognition that you don't have to play that role. I think. |
| 22231 | We flee from the anguish of freedom by seeing ourselves objectively, as determined [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: We are always ready to take refuge in a belief in determinism if this freedom weighs upon us or if we need an excuse. Thus we flee from anguish by attempting to apprehend ourselves from without as an Other or a thing. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness [1943], p.82), quoted by Christine Daigle - Jean-Paul Sartre 2.4 | |
| A reaction: I would have thought we blame social pressures, or biological pressures, rather than metaphysical determinism, but it amounts to the same thing. If we are not free then probably nothing else is. |
| 13304 | Learned men gain more in one day than others do in a lifetime [Posidonius] |
| Full Idea: In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes. | |
| From: Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]), quoted by Seneca the Younger - Letters from a Stoic 078 | |
| A reaction: These remarks endorsing the infinite superiority of the educated to the uneducated seem to have been popular in late antiquity. It tends to be the religions which discourage great learning, especially in their emphasis on a single book. |
| 20820 | Time is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed [Posidonius, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: Posidonius defined time thus: it is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed and slowness. | |
| From: report of Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.08.42 | |
| A reaction: Hm. Can we define motion or speed without alluding to time? Looks like we have to define them as a conjoined pair, which means we cannot fully understand either of them. |